Conversion Rate Experts

“The CRE team made it their business to understand ours… The results spoke for themselves,” says Journey Health & Lifestyle

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The following is from our huge library of client successes—why not discover how we can help grow your business?

The best CRO strategies don’t come from guessing what to test. They come from deeply understanding visitors—especially the ones who don’t convert.

That’s exactly what Janice Jacobs, VP of Marketing & Ecommerce of Journey Health & Lifestyle valued about working with CRE:

“The CRE team made it their business to understand ours—immersing themselves in our customer journey before ever touching a single test.

“That curiosity built a foundation which led to smart, strategic experiments across our full funnel, from landing pages to checkout.

The results spoke for themselves.”

Journey Health is a health and mobility brand designed to help older adults stay active, independent, and comfortable in everyday life.

Their range of power chairs, scooters, upright walkers, rollators, and daily living products are built for ease of use, portability, and dependable support, helping customers move confidently at home, outdoors, and on the go.

One way we build that understanding is through Method Marketing, where we become the customer ourselves.

After the method marketing was complete, we donated it to a local organization that provides mobility products for seniors in need.

That may sound unusually hands-on, and it is, but when you experience the journey as a real customer, you spot things that are hard to see otherwise—moments of uncertainty, hidden friction, missing reassurance, and questions that need answering before someone feels ready to buy.

Your non-converting visitors already know why they aren’t buying

When we work together, our goal is to uncover those reasons. To answer…

Why did they hesitate?
What were they uncertain about?
What did they expect to see but couldn’t find?
What were they comparing you against?
What almost persuaded them, but not quite?
Those questions are where the biggest wins often hide.

And that’s what we can help you answer too!

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Copywriting Friday: If I bought a car

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Copywriting Friday highlights the tools and techniques of persuasive content. Some of the examples may seem dated, but the principles are timeless (and critical for conversion rate optimization). Enjoy.

Every successful ad has to overcome the same fundamental challenge. The person doing the talking is usually the same person who wants your money.

Getting past that barrier is a key job of any message that seeks to persuade. Ads that convince us that a purchase is best for both parties win. Those that don’t, fail.

Our Copywriting Friday articles are full of techniques that copywriters use to break through the barrier, but today we are looking at something a little different. An ad that attempts to remove the suspicion at the source.

The signed advertisement

In 1913, an ad ran for a brand-new car called the Reo the Fifth. It cost $1,095 (or $35,000 if adjusted to today’s prices). It was the “Farewell Car” of one of America’s most famous automotive engineers, R.E. Olds, a person who had spent 25 years figuring out how to build quality cars.

The headline is five words:

“If I Bought a Car.”

And the byline reads:

“By R.E. Olds, Designer.”

If you were truly in the ad’s target market—someone looking to spend over one thousand dollars on a new car—would you skip a personal message like this from an industry titan?

Here’s the full ad from one of our reference books of classic copywriting.

The ad wasn’t just successful in its time, it has been studied by copywriters ever since.

In this article, we’ll pick out four specific techniques, and show how you can use them in your own marketing. As you might expect for an ad that’s 113 years old, it uses “men” in the generic sense to mean buyers and customers. We’ve kept the original quotes intact rather than rewrite them, but don’t let the archaic language distract you. There’s a lot to learn here.

Start your engines: four techniques you can use today

1. Put the maker in the buyer’s seat

The ad’s premise is reinforced right there in the first paragraph:

Olds isn’t telling you what you should want. He’s telling you what he would want—and he happens to be the country’s most experienced person on the subject. The buyer and the maker are on the same side of the table, looking at the same list of requirements.

Most ads work the other way. The seller stands across from the buyer and tries to talk them into a transaction. The buyer’s defenses are up by default. As we’ve written in our guide to earning your customers’ trust, the most persuasive position is the one where you’ve quietly moved around to the buyer’s side.

As we’ve seen, the ad’s headline and byline perform this maneuver with great economy. By the time you’ve reached the first body paragraph, the question in your head isn’t “What’s this guy trying to sell me?” It’s “What does he know that I don’t?”

A modern parallel: You see the same move today when a founder or engineer explains the product themselves. When James Dyson appears to tell you what still frustrates him about cleaning (and how he’s fixed it), he’s doing exactly what Olds did—standing next to you, not across from you. “This is what I want for myself”… he’s saying… “and for you.”

James Dyson launches the Dyson PencilVac.

The same instinct powers the best about-us pages on websites, or the makers who take us through their trade-offs in minute detail.

After obsessively reviewing hundreds of backpacks on his Nomads Nation YouTube channel, Aaron Radcliffe documented the journey behind designing his own.

How could you use this? The maker (or trusted expert) who is on the buyer’s side is one of the most recognizable formats online, for good reason. It works.

You don’t need to be a famous founder to use this technique—you need to be (or have) a credible voice who’s able to put themselves in a real buyer’s shoes. After that, the framing is simple: “Here’s what I’d want, look for, or avoid if I were the one buying.”

As long as you can do this honestly, it can be a powerful way to create videos, product pages, and emails that resonate with audiences. And if part of that is explaining where and why your product made trade-offs, so much the better.

2. Build credibility by admitting what you could have skimped on

As you read the ad, you may notice something unusual. Olds keeps telling you, in dollars, what each decision cost him. Here are just three examples from a pattern that the ad repeats over and over:

In these cases, and the others, Olds is explaining why he chose to spend money that he didn’t “need” to spend.

As we discussed in our article about competing with giants, this technique is what copywriters call a damaging admission. In essence, it involves openly volunteering something that, on the face of it, hurts your sale. Done badly, it just hurts. Done well, it does the most valuable thing any piece of copy can do: it makes everything else you say more believable.

The mechanism in the Reo the Fifth ad is subtle. By repeatedly volunteering what he could have done to make more money on each car, Olds reframes the whole ad. You stop hearing it as “buy my car” and start hearing it as “let me show you my work.” When someone openly admits what could count against them, you’re more likely to believe them on the points that don’t.

Notice the second move in that opening line: “But you might lose three times that by the lack.” He doesn’t just admit the cost, he immediately reframes it as the reader’s savings. The structure is: here’s what I could have skimped on; here’s why you’d regret it if I had.

How could you use this? Where are you under-claiming because you’re afraid to mention what your standards cost you? What would happen if your next case study or product page made the trade-offs explicit—what you could have done cheaper, and what the customer would lose if you had? The damaging admission is one of the most underused techniques in B2B copywriting, partly because it requires a real story. If you have one, tell it.

3. Flood the reader with specifics

Once you start counting the numbers in this ad, you can’t stop. In the Durability section alone:

But it’s not just numbers—it’s all kinds of specific details. While reading this ad, we learn of three different kinds of steel, the exact size of the brake drums, and why Olds chooses a 45-horsepower drivetrain to power a 35-horsepower car. And much more.

The cumulative effect is slightly overwhelming, and that’s the point. A general claim like “we use quality parts” might well trigger a reader’s “you-would-say-that” defense. A specific claim (“11 of them Timken; 4 at High Duty”) doesn’t, because the reader has nothing to argue with. The specificity is the proof.

As copywriting great Gary Bencivenga puts it: “Never make your claim bigger than your proof." It’s a principle we’ve made the centerpiece of an entire guide to proof and a separate Copywriting Friday on a similar theme. The test is brutally simple: could a competitor truthfully write the same sentence? If the answer is yes, consider rewriting it.

Here’s a great example, from Winkbeds:

We put our beds in an independent testing facility and do 80,000 punishing compression repetitions, simulating over 20 years of sleeping to ensure long term durability.

How could you use this? Pick a single page of your website. Highlight every claim. For each one, ask: Could anyone in our industry truthfully write this exact sentence? Replace every “yes” with a number, a name, a process, or a brand.

4. Close on trust, not on price

The final section of the ad is titled “Men’s Faith In Me.” The dated framing aside, the structure of the close is worth studying carefully:

This is what good founder-story copy actually looks like. It’s a value statement, delivered at the moment of decision, by the one person whose word matters most—the person who’d be personally embarrassed if the product fell short.

Notice that there’s no “buy now” at the end of the ad. There’s barely even a price—the $1,095 sits quietly in the photo caption. What there is, instead, is a founder’s implicit promise: I have spent 25 years earning your trust, and I would rather earn less per car than risk losing it.

Trust in business may be in shorter supply these days, but we can still recognize it when it happens. Whether it’s Patagonia’s Don’t Buy This Jacket ad, Darn Tough’s lifetime guarantee, or Zappos’ year-long returns—each one closes on the same idea: we’d rather keep your trust than win this one sale.

How could you use this? A trust close like the one in the Reo the Fifth ad works best when the brand already has a history of keeping their promises, but subtler variations are often easier to ship and test:

Put the promise where the price usually shouts. A one-line guarantee directly under the buy button often does the work of a whole closing paragraph. (In general, guarantees are a powerful way to build trust.)
Talk the wrong buyer out of it. A line like “If you only need X, save your money—the basic plan is plenty” reads as honesty and lifts the qualified buyers you really want.
The easy return. Amazon is one of the most data-driven (and successful) companies on the planet. Have you noticed how prominent their returns policy is? It’s not buried in a FAQ somewhere—it’s usually right there, close to the price.

A closing thought (as we drive our Reo into the sunset)

If you strip away the date and the typography, the persuasive engine of this ad still runs today:

Put the maker in the buyer’s seat.
Volunteer what your standards cost you.
Flood the reader in specifics no competitor could honestly copy.
Then close not on price, but on the promise that the person whose name is on the door cares more about the world’s good opinion than a few extra dollars.

As Olds himself put it:

“I would never buy a car which the makers skimped, and I never shall try to sell one.”

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Win Report: How button microcopy increased sales by 29%

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

In the next two minutes, we’ll show you how adding a few words of reassurance inside the primary call-to-action button increased sales by 29%.

Can you see how small the change is?

Our client is an online academy that sells specialist, skill-building courses to a global audience of enthusiasts and hobbyists. Their thing is taking complex, technical subjects and turning them into plain-English training that anyone can follow.

Research: Have you really solved the problem?

If there’s one strategy that we’ve emphasized time and time again in these reports, it’s the value of providing reassurance at critical moments in a sales funnel. But just how sensitive is the placement of that reassurance?

Our research showed that the client’s prospects had fairly typical concerns about purchasing the online courses. These included:

Is it worth the money—and can I afford it?
Will it be pitched at my level, or too advanced for someone like me?
What if I change my mind?
Will I lose access if the company disappears?

The course pages worked hard to address these kinds of concerns on every product page. For example, they provided the following bullets very close to the “Enroll Now” CTA.

Course access for life.
60-day money-back guarantee.

Considering the close proximity of these bullets, most reasonable people might have marked these concerns as handled, and moved on. But then again, we’ve made millions for clients by doubling down on “solved” problems…

What would happen if we moved the reassurance even closer to the Enroll Now button (and the visitor’s moment of truth)?

The original page (or control)

Here’s a mockup of the original page, with the primary call-to-action top right.

The original: “Enroll Now” is the main CTA.

And this zoomed-in view makes it easy to see how close the reassurance already was to the main CTA.

The tested pages (or variations)

For the test, we pitted two variations against the original. Both of them added microcopy to the button itself.

Variation 1: Value reminder.

Variation 2: Risk reversal.

The microcopy tested the two types of reassurance that the pages were already using… just a few pixels away:

Variation 1: Value reminder: “Instant access. Lifetime updates.”—reinforcing what the buyer gets when they commit.
Variation 2: Risk reversal: “60-day money-back guarantee”—taking the risk off the table entirely.

The value reminder spoke to what buyers would gain; the guarantee removed what they were afraid to lose. The rest of the page, including course content, price, and existing reassurance bullets, stayed exactly the same.

Result: Variation 2 increased sales by 29%

During the test we observed conversion rate increases with both variations. The value reminder (variation 1) added 10% to the site’s sales. This alone would be a significant improvement for any business.

But risk reversal won outright. Variation 2 increased the client’s sales by 29%. A money-back guarantee was likely powerful here because it addressed several of the prospects’ concerns all at once. (Is it worth it? Is it right for my level? What if I change my mind?)

What’s striking though—even to us hardened experts—is just how much difference this small change (of positioning) actually made. How many product pages out there have the right reassurance, but the wrong proximity?

As we’ve written before, the closer reassurance lands to the moment of truth, the bigger its impact.

What’s next

We added the test to our Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of our client’s business. In fact, the next test we ran on the microcopy raised the client’s sales by another 46%… maybe we’ll cover that in a future Win Report.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

Thanks to our client for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Tips and tools: Our new favorite podcast, the software that shaped the world, and a test that stumps AI

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Here are some great resources we have recently shared with one another

(We don’t profit from recommending things. We just love sharing things we think you’ll appreciate. You can see our other Tips and Tools articles here.)

Our new favorite business podcast

We’ve been getting hooked on Acquired—the business podcast whose tagline is “Every company has a story.”

Of course, we’re biased in favor of people who do real research, so we love that the two hosts go deep into the origins and strategies of every business they cover. Standout episodes include TSMC, Costco, and IKEA.

The most important software you never think about

In Seeing like a spreadsheet, David Oks traces how the humble electronic spreadsheet quietly rewired the way we all do business. Before it, financial modeling meant rooms of clerks and a week’s wait; after it, anyone could ask “what if?” and get an answer in seconds.

The essay’s argument is that every tool encodes a way of seeing the world, and the spreadsheet taught a whole economy to picture itself in rows and columns. Reading this long-term view seems especially relevant now, as we are living through another revolution in software.

Should you walk or drive to the car wash?

We heard about this AI test a while ago, but are still seeing incorrect and inconsistent answers when we try it out on different models. We include it here as a reminder that AIs can and do make mistakes.

Try this simple test on the smartest AI you know:

“I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?”

The catch, of course, is that the car has to come too.

This “car wash test” has been making the rounds, and back in February, Opper put this exact question to 53 leading AI models ten times each. Only five got it right on all ten tries. The average human scored 71.5%—still not great—but enough to beat 48 of the 53 machines.

And speaking of AI’s impact…

In case you missed it, we recently published an article about the impact of AI on organic traffic, and how businesses can recover lost growth.

The article covers:

The five fingerprints of an AI-driven traffic drop.
Why “get more traffic” is the wrong response.
How CRO can recover growth without recovering lost traffic.
Why CRO may also improve your chances of being recommended by AI systems in the first place.

Not surprisingly, it’s one of the most popular pieces we’ve written this year. Read it here.

Coffee break? Can you survive 100 jumps?

Sadly, we haven’t… yet.

For your next coffee break: 100 Jumps is exactly what it sounds like. Make it through one hundred jumps in a row. That’s the whole game. It’s far harder than it looks, and a neat reminder that “simple” and “easy” are not the same.

Anyway, back to it. Anddddddd… jump!

If so, let us know. We could include it in a future article.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Win Report: How a homepage redesign won by 25%

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

In the next three minutes, we’ll show you how a homepage redesign for an online store beat the control by 25%.

Green Building Supply have been selling non-toxic, eco-friendly building materials since 1991, and personally testing every product they stock. Many of their customers have multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS); others simply want to know what’s actually in the materials they’re putting into their homes.

Research: Two clear threads

Green Building Supply’s customers aren’t casual comparison shoppers. Many arrive because something in their home has already made them sick, and they’re looking for materials that won’t make it worse. They want a paint that won’t trigger their MCS, or flooring that won’t shed volatile organic compounds (VOCs) into a child’s bedroom. Here are two typical requests from website visitors:

“Some of my new furniture was off-gassing so bad I had to keep my clothes in the closet to prevent contamination. I was looking at the sealants to help mitigate this.”

“I need eco-friendly and safer chemical products… I also value the environmental concerns of making better choices for our earth.”

Shoppers like this have often learned the hard way that the safety labels on standard products may not mean much for people with conditions like MCS. The fact that something is legal to sell does not make it appropriate for everyone or eco-friendly… and the difference between those two things is Green Building Supply’s target market.

On the face of it, the company’s message of safety and personal testing should really resonate with their audience, but as a second strand of our research showed, many visitors were put off the site before they had a chance to get the message.

When our research team recruited qualified participants to evaluate Green Building Supply’s website alongside two close competitors, it ranked last in terms of users’ willingness to explore further.

In fact, the testers were specific about why they didn’t want to stay on the site. Their objections included:

The homepage looks cluttered and outdated.
Navigation feels complex and overwhelming.
Lack of clear categories for different types of products.

Even those who did get the message found the site overwhelming:

“The video and all the information make this legitimate. It’s just so difficult to navigate that it doesn’t necessarily matter.”

How could we make the key message more visible and give visitors the confidence to navigate deeper into the site?

The original page (or control)

Here’s (the top) of the original homepage:

The control.

The tested page (or variation)

For the variation, we made multiple changes to highlight the key message and guide visitors deeper into the site:

The variation.

Each of our changes targeted one or more of the objections above:

New headline: “Most building materials are perfectly legal… That’s not the same as safe.” This echoed and reinforced the conversation hanging inside visitors’ heads, framing the company and showing that it was on their side.
New copy: “We’ve spent 35 years personally testing every product…” highlighted the brand’s long track record and hands-on product expertise.
New CTA buttons: “Shop Non-Toxic Flooring” and “How We Test Products” highlight both the action (browse) and the differentiator (testing).
Four USPs within a trust bar directly under the hero: Every product is tested, same-day shipping, real expert advice, safe for MCS sufferers.
Category navigation: A row of visual tiles for each flooring type plus paints, kitchens, and home goods, so visitors could click straight through to what they came for.

Result: +25% conversions for this test

During the test, we observed a 25% increase in transactions with visitors who were shown the variation.

By placing the core message front and center, we were able to reflect visitor concerns and highlight the testing USP. Visitors who were attracted by this message weren’t overwhelmed with options. Instead, a clear product category grid guided them deeper into the website, increasing their likelihood of exploring and buying.

What’s next

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of Green Building Supply’s business and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits — quickly and efficiently — check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

Thanks to Green Building Supply for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Win Report: How resolving pricing page doubt increased conversions by 8%

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

In the next two minutes, we’ll show you how adding a benefit-driven headline and a single testimonial to a pricing page increased conversions by 8%.

Our client operates a chain of entertainment venues, where customers come to try a unique physical activity. It’s the kind of bucket-list experience that people love to talk about, and remember for years.

Research: A lack of balance

The pricing page often represents a moment of truth in a sales journey. When confronted by the real cost of a product or experience, website visitors balance that against the benefits and make their final decision.

During our user testing for this client, over half of the participants stalled at the pricing page. Despite plenty of genuinely persuasive content elsewhere on the site, the page contained nothing but a row of pricing tiles.

Excluding other content is a common weakness in poorly converting pricing pages, but why?

In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman describes a principle he calls What You See Is All There Is. In essence, the fast and intuitive part of our brains can only work with whatever is right in front of them. A page showing only prices forces a price-only judgment.

By contrast, when we asked existing customers what finally persuaded them the answer was clear. Other people.

“I researched online and read reviews, and asked people who had been.”

“A family friend recommended trying it.”

In fact, reviews and recommendations were by far the biggest deciding factor for our client’s customers.

As we’ve written about elsewhere, social proof is a powerful form of persuasion, particularly for unusual activities like our client’s—it just wasn’t on the pricing page.

What would happen if we fixed that?

The original page (or control)

The original jumped straight from the booking funnel into pricing tiles, with no copy above the fold to frame the offer or reassure first-time visitors.

The tested page (or variation)

Here’s the page we tested, which included two simple additions above the pricing tiles:

We added a single block of “sales copy inside the funnel” at the top of the page:

An aspirational headline: A benefit-led headline anchored in a number too big to ignore, and invited prospects to join a community of millions who’d already tried (and loved) the experience.
A real testimonial with a face: A customer quote, attributed to a named person with a date and a photo, sitting just under the headline.
Third-party credibility: A Google five-star rating, displayed prominently. Borrowed trust tends to outperform self-claimed trust—and a logo prospects already recognize does a lot of the work for you.

Result: Conversions increased by 8%

During the test, we observed an 8% increase in conversions.

The result confirmed the value of a pattern we’ve seen time and time again. When you provide reassurance at a moment of truth, conversions increase. In this case, our client had no shortage of persuasive content, it just wasn’t present in a critical part of the funnel.

What’s next

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of our client’s business and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently— check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

Thanks to our client for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Copywriting Friday: A Mac walks into a room

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Apple’s Get a Mac campaign ran 66 ads over four years and doubled Apple’s market share. Here are three techniques from it that you can apply to your own marketing.

In September 2005, Apple CEO Steve Jobs handed the company’s ad agency the briefest of briefs. He wanted “a powerful ad campaign” to drive home the fact that the new Intel-driven Macs were beating Windows PCs at their own game.

The answer they eventually arrived at produced one of the most studied advertising campaigns of the last twenty years. Sixty-six TV ads, all 30 seconds long, all on a plain white background, all opening with the same eight words: “Hello, I’m a Mac. And I’m a PC.”

The ads may be low resolution, but their insights-per-pixel are off the scale.

Warning: you can easily lose 30 minutes of your life to this video, which contains all 66 ads.

The setup may seem simple, but Campaign magazine’s oral history of Get a Mac (free account required) reveals that the idea almost broke the team that created it. According to creative director Jason Sperling, his reactions in the weekly Marcom meetings were typically short: “That’s stupid. That is so inane. Who the hell cares about that?” By month seven, Jobs was threatening to fire the agency.

The breakthrough came when two associates, Barton Corley and Scott Trattner, simplified the brief in conversation.

Corley: “Let’s make it really simple. A Mac walks into the room right now. What does he say?”

Trattner: “Hello, I’m a Mac. And there could be a guy who says, ‘I’m a PC,’ and they talk about being computers.”

If you read our article on The hard way and the Apple way, you may find this framing somewhat familiar. As with the print ad below, the Get a Mac campaign wasn’t fought over features, it was staged with two scenes side by side, doing the comparing for you.

In this Copywriting Friday, we’ll examine the strategy at the heart of the Get a Mac campaign, then pull three specific lessons you can apply to your own marketing.

The core strategy: Talk about PC, not Mac

The breakthrough wasn’t really “make it simple.” It was an audience flip.

The agency had been coming up with reasons for people to like the Mac, but as their planning team eventually found, that wasn’t the problem. As creative director Eric Grunbaum put it:

“The problem isn’t that people don’t know Macs are great. The problem is that people that use PCs don’t understand that PCs suck. So that got us thinking, ‘We can’t just talk about the merits of Mac. We also need to talk about the challenges or the difficulty of the PC.’”

That’s a big pivot. Once the team accepted it, the format almost wrote itself. If a Mac walked into the room and started talking, he wouldn’t talk about Mac. He’d talk about PC. He’d join the conversation Windows users were already having in their heads.

Get a Mac is what comparison advertising looks like when you stop talking about yourself.

The PowerBook ad had done it on the page, with two photographs and two captions. Get a Mac did it on screen, with two characters and a white room. Both were really saying the same thing: here is what life is like with the alternative. The audience does the rest.

The three techniques below are all variations on that one move. None require a TV budget. They work just as well on a landing page, in an email, or in a sales deck.

1. Personify the choice—and make your competitor likeable

Look at almost any spot in the campaign and you’ll see the same setup: Mac, calm and easy-going. PC, well-meaning but slightly out of touch. The viewer isn’t asked to evaluate features. They’re asked to identify with one of two people.

In the Out of the Box spot at 2:35, Mac is unboxed and ready to go:

“I might make a whole movie, or maybe create a website, try out my built-in camera. I can do it all right out of the box. So what about you?”

PC, polite and apologetic, is still in his box:

“Well, first I got to download those new drivers, and I got to erase the trial software that came on my hard drive. And I’ve got a lot of manuals to read.”

Then, almost shyly: “The rest of me is in some other boxes—so I’ll meet up with you later.”

There are no comparison tables here, just one character ready to live and another character explaining why he’s not yet. If you watched it on mute, you’d still know which computer to buy.

A key part of why this works is that the PC has to be likeable. The Get a Mac team explicitly resisted the idea that PCs were stupid because their target audience was PC users. PC may be bumbling, but he’s funny and loveable. Mac may be “better”, but he’s supportive and encouraging.

Like the Short course in railroading we studied in a previous article, Get a Mac shows the power of treating your competitors fairly. The sympathetic personification of PC let the audience see themselves in the losing character without resenting the comparison. The subtext through all the ads is that PC users aren’t idiots; they just got handed the wrong computer at work.

How could you use this? If you had to play yourself and your biggest competitor as two characters in a sketch, who would they be? Not just what would they say—who would they be? For example:

A consultancy might contrast “the agency that’s always pitching” with “the team that’s already shipping.”
A premium e-commerce brand could play the patient craftsman against the disposable bargain-bin upstart.

The trick is that the personification has to be honest and sympathetic. PCs did come with lots of manuals and unwanted software. If the competitor feels like a straw man or a punching bag, the audience will smell it and turn away.

2. Let your competitor voice the objection

The technique that does the heaviest lifting in the campaign is the way it handles objections. In the Windows 7 launch ad at 32:10, PC tells Mac:

“Windows 7 is out and it’s not going to have any of the problems my last operating system had.”

Mac, deadpan:

“I feel like I’ve heard this before, PC.”

Cut to a flashback montage of PC promising the exact same thing about Vista. Then about Windows ME. Then 98. Then 95. Then Windows 2.

The objection being addressed is trust: why should I believe Apple’s claims about reliability when the whole industry makes claims like this? Apple doesn’t address the objection in their own voice. They put it in PC’s mouth, then let PC discredit himself.

This is a much stronger move than the standard testimonial-and-feature combo. As we explored in our analysis of how SawStop persuades skeptical people, the most powerful objections are the ones the audience didn’t quite know they had until you named them. Naming them through a competitor figure makes the move feel more honest, even when it’s clearly partisan.

How could you use this? What does your prospect quietly worry about that your category has earned a bad reputation for? If you collect client testimonials (and you should), ask your customers what they were worried about before they chose you. Their answers will address your skeptics far more efficiently than any rebuttal you could write.

3. Trade abstractions for specifics

Most copy makes abstract claims. Faster. More reliable. Easier to use. The claims aren’t really information, they’re marketing.

Get a Mac almost never makes abstract claims. It dramatizes specific moments instead.

In the MagSafe spot at 4:05, PC has been knocked to the floor.

“I was sitting on my desk, someone walked by, carelessly tripped over my power cord, yanked me straight down to the ground. Bam.”

The spot is about just one specific feature of the Mac: MagSafe. There’s no mention of price, screen, OS, software, or speed. Just Mac talking about the power cord that connects magnetically, so when it gets pulled it just “pops right off.”

Notice what the spot doesn’t do. It doesn’t claim MacBooks are “more durable” or that PCs are “vulnerable to damage.” It just shows the moment after a cord gets tripped over, and two different outcomes. This is a scenario that every prospect has imagined or lived through, and they supply their own conclusion: I want the cord that pops off.

The specificity of the MagSafe ad is what makes the one-sided comparison feel honest instead of partisan. Abstract claims feel like marketing. Specific scenarios feel like reporting.

How could you use this? We still see huge amounts of marketing that focuses on lists of abstract benefits: Save time, cut costs, improve efficiency. And because audiences have a tough time picturing abstractions, little of it sticks.

Look at the last benefit-statement you wrote. How would you dramatize it? Where does the prospect start? What happens to them? What is the moment of relief or frustration?

If you can’t picture the scene, your prospect can’t either, and the benefit-statement probably isn’t doing much work.

The hidden ratio inside the campaign

We started this article by recounting how hard it was for the ad team to get a new campaign approved by Steve Jobs. You might have thought that was the hardest part, but you’d be wrong.

The Get a Mac campaign consisted of 66 ads, but can you guess how many the team wrote, shot, and edited?

323.

That means that 257 ads—roughly four out of every five—never made it onto the air. This is a crazy ratio for advertising. Typically, an ad that is shot is aired. It’s exceedingly rare that something finished is pulled, let alone 80%.

For Apple, this was a deliberate policy. Steve Jobs killed scripts that other clients would have aired without a second thought. Spots starring Tony Robbins, James Carville, and Zach Galifianakis got scrapped because they weren’t exactly right.

And pushing for “exactly right” worked. In the four years the campaign ran, Apple’s share of the US computer and laptop market went from 4% to 8.8%, and Microsoft eventually fired back with a $300 million “I’m a PC” campaign… the surest sign that Get a Mac had got under their skin.

To be clear. The lesson of Get a Mac isn’t “shoot 323 spots,” it’s be willing to throw out good ideas so you can deliver on great ones. If your product or service walked into a room with your target audience… what would it say?

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

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Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
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Win Report: Are you selling what your customers are buying? (+26%)

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

In the next three minutes, we’ll show you how replacing a lifestyle hero video with a benefit-led one increased conversions by 26%.

DiamondBack Covers manufactures premium, American-made aluminum truck bed covers. Known for their rugged, lockable designs, they sell direct-to-consumer and have a loyal following among truck owners who need serious protection for their gear.

Research: Is it secure truck covers or outdoor adventures?

When we asked real customers the main reason why they bought and valued DiamondBack Covers, one answer overwhelmed all the others. Security.

Security, it turned out, was also front and center in the headline on the homepage:

Keep your gear secure & dry on whatever wild adventure you dream up.

The headline sat superimposed above a beautiful video that showcased those same adventures, including campfires, sand dunes, and mountain trails. The video was beautifully shot. In fact, it was so well done that some visitors were confused about what the company was selling.

During our user testing, participants said:

“A lot of this content on this video is confusing to me in the context of you’re just selling covers. Is it outdoor adventures or is it truck covers?”

“Perhaps the homepage video showcases more covers and less outdoor activities.”

Even though the existing headline highlighted security, the video led with adventure. Not only was that message distracting, it also pushed more relevant content off the screen for some users.

How could we better match the video’s “cover story” to the value proposition that real customers cared about most?

The original page (or control)

Here’s the original page, including a lifestyle video of camping, off-roading, and outdoor adventures.

And here’s the video that played behind that headline (without the copy):

The tested page (or variation)

Here’s the tested page, including a new headline, subhead, and video.

Here’s everything we added:

A benefit-led headline: “The most secure, storm-proof folding bed cover ever built.”
A direct supporting line: “Tested and proven in extreme conditions.”
A solid background to the “Shop Truck Covers” CTA to improve legibility.
A product-focused hero video to visibly demonstrate the cover’s security, weatherproofing, and durability.

Working with the team at DiamondBack Covers, we repurposed clips from elsewhere on the site to support the benefit-led hero video. Here it is (without the copy):

In addition, the mobile version of the page featured its own video:

Result: Conversions increased by 26%

During the test, we observed a 26% increase in conversions.

Bringing the product’s real strengths above the fold gave buyers what they’d already told us they came for, and they responded.

A short video interview with the client

Having previously worked with DiamondBack Covers, we were extra delighted to welcome them back for a second engagement. Here’s what they said about their first experience of working with us.

“It translated into literally millions of dollars of increased revenue for us,” says Brandon Moist, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer of DiamondBack Covers.

What’s next

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of DiamondBack Covers’ business and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

Thanks to DiamondBack Covers for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Copywriting Friday: How to compete when you can't outshine the giants

Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In the second half of the 1940s, American magazines were a battleground for ads of all types, but one category was particularly lathery. Soap.

Procter & Gamble, Lever Brothers, and Colgate-Palmolive were spending fortunes telling homemakers that their detergents contained miracle ingredients. These exotic and branded compounds promised whiter whites, smoother hands, and, by implication, happier lives.

Then, in September 1949, a small California business called the Stryker Soap Company ran an ad in Reader’s Digest that did the unthinkable.

It told the truth.

Download a full PDF of this ad to enjoy it at a larger size.

What makes this ad worth studying isn’t just a grab bag of techniques; it’s a strategic positioning choice that allowed Strykers to compete against far bigger brands.

Positioning before copy

Let’s look at that strategic choice before we look at how.

Every other soap was positioning itself the same way: a miracle product, full of mysterious ingredients, capable of transformations that border on the supernatural. The subtext to the audience of the day was transparent. Buying it will make you a better spouse. A more loved parent. A more enviable neighbor.

The Strykers ad took the opposite position. We’re the soap that’s just soap. Not a miracle. Not a transformation. A darn good washing product, fairly priced, made by a company that’s happy to tell you exactly what’s in the box.

The ad has great copy, but that’s only possible because of the positioning. The counter-category framing gave the copywriter the license to write a creative, playful, and honest ad.

And we’re guessing they did it with a smile on their face.

What the position lets the ad do

Mocking the category’s language

For starters, the headline names something that doesn’t exist:

Phool-ium, we can confirm, is not a real ingredient. Nor are hooey-um, hotair-ium, or baloney-um, all of which Strykers cheerfully confirms its soap also doesn’t contain. The joke hits the target audience because they have seen the ads too.

The goal here is pattern interruption at the category level. While every other ad on the newsstand is shouting about a proprietary breakthrough, Strykers is naming the genre and making it look silly. The reader, who has been steeped in years of “Now with Ingredient X!” copy, looks up—Wait, this one’s different.

This only works because of the position. You can’t credibly mock the category’s hype if you’re planning to add some hype of your own. The position has to be authentic before the parody can land. (We’ve written before about how picking a fight with the conventions of a niche builds rapport.)

How could you use this? Every category has its own phool-ium, the overwrought claims, the buzzwords nobody really understands, the imaginary syllables added to ordinary ingredients. If you can name them and gently mock them, you create instant separation.

But to do that successfully, you have to earn the right.

Admitting the weaknesses up front

The ad’s main block of copy is framed as a “shocking uncensored letter” from the Old Soapmaster, and most of the body is a list of things Strykers won’t do for you:

It won’t make your whites white for life.
It won’t make things 23½ times whiter than new.
It won’t get you in a lather (Strykers will, but you won’t).
It won’t help you snag a new husband.
It won’t even do much to improve the one you may have now.
It won’t make you look any younger.

As the ad says (and we love this line):

“It just makes soap bubbles… not hope bubbles.”

Humor aside, the psychology at play here is straightforward. When a person or product tries the hard sell, our defenses go up. When they tell us what they can’t do, we tend to relax. The ad is leveling with us in a humorous way. And from that point on, every positive claim Strykers does make lands with much more weight.

Notice that this also only works because of the position. A brand selling miracle ingredients can’t run a list of damaging admissions; it would contradict the entire pitch.

How could you use this? What are things your audience secretly (and correctly) worry your product can’t do? Can you get out ahead of them by writing them into your copy yourself? Not only does this create the trust effect above, it can often take the wind out of competitors (who are surely giving you the same critique).

Earning the right to be specific

Once the damaging admissions have done their work, watch what happens when Strykers finally turns to selling. The ad gets two short paragraphs to make its case, and the specifics are striking:

Look at how concrete those claims are. Not “better.” Not “more effective.” Ten to fifteen per cent soapier. More actual soap by weight.

Here’s the thing about specifics: they only persuade if the reader believes you. Strykers’ competitors were also full of numbers (“23½ times whiter!”), but the reader had learned to discount them. The damaging admissions earlier in the ad have flipped the polarity. Now, when the writer says “ten to fifteen per cent,” the reader thinks: Well, if he’s been this honest about what the soap doesn’t do, the number is probably real.

Proof works in context, not in isolation. A guarantee, a statistic, or a test result is only as persuasive as the surrounding copy allows it to be. (See our ultimate guide to proof for the main categories of proof you can deploy, and our analysis of how to persuade skeptical audiences for how the order of claims affects whether they get believed.)

The point here is that the structure of this ad matters. Because Strykers earns the right to be specific, their claims land harder.

How could you use this? Can you apply that structure to your products or services, or test it in an ad? In a noisy world, it’s a rare and powerful way to stand out from the crowd.

Naming what’s actually in the box

Finally, the copywriter calls back to the ad’s headline to turn the joke into a sale. The last block of body copy is a lovely piece of work:

The competitors’ strategy was to take a common ingredient and give it an exotic name. Strykers does the opposite. They name the real ingredient, explain what it is in plain English, and connect it to something the reader already values—the same stuff you get in hand lotions that cost scandalous prices.

And, again, the only reason this works is the position. A brand selling miracles couldn’t credibly say “it’s just glycerin.” A brand selling honesty can, and the unvarnished description makes the product feel more premium, not less, because the reader does the work of comparing it to expensive hand lotion themselves.

The lesson is much broader than soap. If your product has a genuine, demonstrable advantage, the most persuasive thing you can do is describe it the way a friend would describe it. No exotic words or trademarks… just what it is and what it does.

Copy like this feels more like a conversation among friends than a pitch, but it still sells.

How could you use this? What’s the unglamorous, true, specific version of the thing you sell? Could you describe it without inventing a single piece of phool-ium?

Can your brand make a clean break?

Over 75 years after the ad was published, most marketing categories still run on phool-ium. Products get dressed up with capitalized ingredients, vague superlatives, and breathless promises. The arms race never really ends and nobody wins it, because readers learn to discount the whole genre.

The lesson of the Strykers ad is that the way out is a different position. Decide what you’re going to claim, and decide what you’re going to refuse to claim, and let the copy follow.

When Volkswagen ran their classic “Think Small” ad for the VW Beetle a decade after Strykers, they were drawing on the same playbook. Tell the truth. Admit the weaknesses. Trust the reader to do the math. This positioning strategy works.

In your business, the question isn’t whether your competitors are running on phool-ium. They almost certainly are. The question is whether you have the position that lets you run without.

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

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2. Learn how to do conversion

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

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Win Report: Less cognitive load, 41% more conversions

Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

In the next two minutes, we’ll show you how reducing cognitive load increased conversions by 41% for one travel client.

Our client operates one of the largest online travel marketplaces in its region, connecting visitors with tours, activities, flights, hotels, and vacation packages. Millions of travelers use the platform each year to plan trips to one of the world’s most spectacular destinations. The client has asked to remain anonymous.

Product pages are where high-stakes purchases live or die. For a vacation—something visitors are often excited and stressed about in equal measure—every piece of information on the page is doing a job. The question is, how much of that job should be done at once?

During our user testing for this client, we kept seeing the same behavior. Participants stalled on the product page. In particular, they were constantly checking back and forth between the main page content and the booking widget on the right-hand side. The widget was meant to act as a useful trip summary, but in practice it divided and disrupted the participants’ attention.

This is a classic cognitive load problem. Pile up too much information at once and a visitor’s decision-making slows or stops entirely, especially if that decision has big consequences. Fortunately, a fix for cognitive overload is well-established: Progressive disclosure. Reveal information in layers, and let visitors pull on the thread when they’re ready for more.

How could we keep the widget’s usefulness while letting visitors move through the page one comfortable step at a time?

The original page (or control)

Here’s a mockup of the original product page. The content stretched much further, but you can see the start of it and the booking widget on the right-hand side.

The control: A product page with a booking widget showing full itinerary details alongside page content.

The tested page (or variation)

Here’s a mockup of the simplified variation we tested. The widget still exists, but we’ve transformed it into a compact, collapsible summary.

Variation: The product page with a collapsed accordion booking widget showing collapsible summary sections.

Here are the key things we changed about the widget:

Collapsed by default: Instead of expanding all details at once, the widget now shows four collapsible sections—Travel Details, Transfer, Hotels, and Tours. Each one is visible only when the visitor chooses to open it.
Section edit links: Each section title includes a clear edit button, allowing visitors to adjust their selections without hunting through the page.
Inline navigation: Clicking any section in the widget scrolls the visitor to the corresponding content within the main page, turning the sidebar into a navigation aid.

Result: Conversions increased by 41%

During the test, we observed a 41% increase in conversions.

When visitors had more space to think, they could focus more on the decision itself. Reducing cognitive overload, it turned out, helped a lot more people reach their final destination.

What’s next

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of the client’s website and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

What to do when your organic traffic drops (and how to recover lost growth)

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Something we’re hearing more and more is “Our organic traffic is way down. What should we do?”

If your organic traffic looks like this, read on…

For some companies, it triggers a flurry of panicked activity… more content, more SEO, more ad spend. For others, it creates a kind of paralysis. If traffic is falling despite doing “all the right things,” what’s left to try?

Traffic is falling (and this time it’s not coming back)

Over the past two years, many of our clients have experienced something genuinely unsettling. Traffic is falling—not temporarily, but structurally.

AI answers, zero-click search results, and platform-controlled discovery mean customers increasingly get what they need without ever visiting a website. We work with companies whose organic visits are down 20%, 30%, even 40%.

Before you decide how to respond, it’s worth taking a step back and asking an important question. Why?

How to tell if AI is the culprit

Traffic can fall for many reasons—updated algorithms, technical issues, seasonality, or new competitors entering the space. But AI-driven drops tend to leave distinct fingerprints that are easy to spot.

The more of these you’re seeing, the more likely it is that zero-click search is behind it:

Information queries are down, but branded search is more stable. AI systems tend to intercept research queries, not navigational ones.
“Direct” traffic is increasing as a share of your mix. AI tools often strip referral data, meaning more visits appear as direct.
Conversion rate is rising, despite traffic falling. Casual browsers and early-stage researchers get answered by the AI, and those who make it to the site tend to be further down the decision path.
AI platforms are starting to appear in attribution reports. More analytics platforms are now surfacing AI referrals and UTM data from tools like ChatGPT.
Customer surveys increasingly mention AI tools as the discovery source. When you ask “How did you hear about us?”, more customers are answering with platforms like ChatGPT.

What most companies do next

When traffic drops, most companies instinctively try to get it back:

They invest more in SEO.
They produce more content.
They increase paid acquisition.
They test new channels.

All of these can help, but they share a common limitation—they operate in an environment where costs are rising and control is limited. In other words, the return on investment of these activities is uncertain, and therefore, inherently risky.

But step back, and the real problem becomes clear. It’s not lost traffic, it’s lost growth.

Traffic was simply the mechanism used to deliver that growth, and when it fails, the instinct is to repair it.

Conversion rate optimization offers a faster, more predictable path to recovering that growth, without relying on platforms or waiting for traffic to return.

And in the era of AI-mediated search, its benefits extend further than most companies have yet appreciated.

Lost traffic, lost growth

Imagine a mid-sized e-commerce business that’s healthy and growing at the start of 2024:

Metric	2024 (baseline)
Monthly visitors	100,000
Conversion rate	2.00%
Customers per month	2,000

Traffic had been rising by around 20% per year. If that had continued, the start of 2026 would look like this:

Metric	2026 (expected)
Monthly visitors	144,000
Conversion rate	2.00%
Customers per month	2,880

Instead, zero-click search has taken a 30% bite out of traffic. The remaining visitors are more qualified, so the conversion rate has nudged up, but not enough to offset a significant fall in sales:

Metric	2026 (actual)
Monthly visitors	70,000
Conversion rate	2.40%
Customers per month	1,680

The good news is that sales haven’t fallen 30% since 2024, they’ve fallen 16%. The bad news is that instead of the 2,880 customers the business expected, it’s getting 1,680. That’s a panic-inducing gap of 1,200 customers every single month, growing larger with every passing quarter.

Traffic may be down, but the growth gap is closable without recovering a single lost visitor.

The predictable response—more ad spend, more SEO effort, new acquisition channels—addresses that gap from the top of the funnel, where control is limited and costs are rising. But there’s a better lever.

The one variable you have the most control over

Revenue is determined by three variables:

Revenue = Visitors (traffic) × Conversion rate × Customer lifetime value

Traffic is increasingly controlled by platforms and algorithms. Customer lifetime value is meaningful but slower to influence. Conversion rate is typically the variable you can influence most… And crucially, it determines how much value you extract from every visitor who reaches your site.

In our example, if the conversion rate improves from 2.40% to 3.50%:

70,000 × 3.50% = 2,450 customers

Most of the gap closed—without a single additional visitor, without bidding against anyone, and without waiting for an algorithm to change.

At 4.00%:

70,000 × 4.00% = 2,800 customers

Almost exactly where it was forecast to be based on its 2024 growth trajectory.

The traffic hasn’t returned. The growth has.

As the conversion rate rises, the growth returns.

Why so many companies are solving the wrong problem

For years, buying traffic was easy. Organic search rewarded content volume. Paid channels scaled predictably. And because more traffic reliably produced more sales, most businesses never developed the habit of asking a harder question: how much value are we actually generating from the visitors we already have?

The result? A strategy and pattern of investment that is becoming increasingly indefensible.

It’s still not unusual to see companies spending hundreds of thousands—or even millions—driving visitors into a funnel that hasn’t meaningfully changed in years. Meanwhile, CRO, the discipline that determines what happens to every one of those hard-won visitors, sits on the to-do list for later.

Later has arrived. The companies pulling ahead right now are the ones that have elevated CRO to a leadership-level priority, not a line item.

CRO doesn’t just close the gap; it widens your lead

As we explore in our Power Law of CRO series, improving your conversion rate has compounding effects that extend well beyond simply converting more of your current visitors. It:

Increases profit per visitor.
Improves return on ad spend (often dramatically).
Raises your allowable acquisition cost, meaning you can outbid competitors for the paid traffic that now matters more.
Unlocks previously unprofitable marketing channels.

In other words, CRO doesn’t just close the gap created by falling traffic. It makes you more competitive in every channel you use to replace that traffic.

And there’s one more effect that’s quieter than the others, but increasingly important.

The AI opportunity most businesses haven’t spotted yet

There’s a secondary effect that very few businesses have considered. When an AI platform decides which businesses to surface and recommend, it is making a judgement about quality, clarity, and authority. It is asking, in effect, does this business clearly explain what it does, who it’s for, and why it’s credible?

Those are exactly the questions a good CRO program is designed to answer. Clearer value propositions, stronger proof, sharper competitive positioning, genuine demonstrations of expertise—these improve your conversion rate and your AI visibility at the same time. The same work serves both goals.

CRO doesn’t just improve how your site converts the visitors who arrive. It improves your chances of being the business that gets recommended in the first place.

The traffic trap

For years, digital growth followed a spend more to get more traffic playbook. But as platforms hoard more and more attention, that strategy becomes fragile and expensive.

As a result, conversion rate—long treated as secondary to volume—is an increasingly decisive competitive advantage.

If your traffic is falling, the question to ask isn’t “how do we get more?”… it’s “are we truly confident that we have optimized the traffic we have?”

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Copywriting Friday: Five techniques from Amazon’s relentlessly tested product pages

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Copywriting Friday tends to analyze classic ads that have stood the test of time, but this week we’re looking at something that evolves continually—an Amazon product page.

Specifically, this is a page for one of Amazon’s Ring doorbell cameras.

Download a full version of the page we studied.

Direct response copywriters have always relentlessly tested their copy. In the past, unique coupon codes, PO boxes, and phone numbers allowed writers to measure the success of different headlines, CTAs, prices, and more.

The web, of course, takes that practice to the next level.

Amazon tests everything. When we look at the page above, we know that every headline, bullet point, and image has earned its place in real transactions with real buyers. Let’s walk through what the copy is doing, and how you can borrow every one of these techniques.

Five techniques (and how you can use them)

1. Emotional and algorithmic appeals

The most visually dominant message at the top of the page isn’t about doorbells at all.

Stay in the know on the go.

The headline is about staying connected to what matters at home, wherever you are.

The best copy doesn’t introduce new ideas to the reader—it enters the conversation that’s already happening in their head. Homeowners who need a video doorbell are already thinking about stolen packages, someone calling while they are at work, or not knowing who’s at the door. Stay in the know on the go meets that conversation exactly where it is.

And that emotional message is paired with the product’s full listing title:

Ring Battery Doorbell, Home or business security with Head-to-Toe video, Live View with Two-Way Talk, and Motion Detection & Alerts, 2-pack, Satin Nickel

Amazon’s search engine—like Google’s—rewards titles that contain the words people type. This is written for the algorithm, and for shoppers who already know what they need. But even within the title, notice that the features use benefit-inflected language wherever possible. Not “180-degree vertical field of view” but “Head-to-Toe video.” Not “passive infrared sensor” but “Motion Detection & Alerts.”

Both headlines are looking to create an emotional yes—to make the right person feel understood before they’ve read a single word of explanation.

How could you use this? What’s the conversation your prospect is already having with themselves before they find your product? Not just the features they’ll appreciate once they own it—the worry, the desire, the half-formed hope that’s already there.

This approach follows the jobs to be done framework. People don’t buy products; they “hire” them to make progress in their lives. The job a video doorbell gets hired for isn’t “monitor the front door”—it’s something more like “stop worrying about parcels sitting outside my door.” The closer your copy gets to the actual job your product is hired to do, the less work the reader (and search algorithm) has to do to recognize its relevance.

2. Every subhead pulls double duty

The Ring page isn’t just built for one type of reader. Some people will read it top to bottom. Most won’t.

Any long page must accommodate what we explored in our analysis of the classic Ogilvy travel ad. In this dual-track reading behavior, some visitors read every word and others scan only the signposts. The Ring page solves this elegantly because every section subhead is a complete benefit statement.

Here’s a list of all the subheads:

Know what’s up—and down. (Head-to-toe vision).
Stay connected to who’s there.
DIY install.
Easy charging. Complete control from the Ring app.
See more. Know more. Protect more.
Works with Alexa.

That’s a full sales pitch, compressed into under 40 words that a scanner can absorb in under ten seconds. For readers who slow down, each subhead introduces body copy and visuals that deepen the case. The subheads serve both groups simultaneously, without sacrificing anything for either.

How could you use this? Run the “subheads only” test on your own pages. If you read just the section headers—nothing else—do they make a coherent, compelling argument for your product? If they don’t, your scanners are leaving unconvinced.

3. Two objections neutralized in four words

The installation section deserves its own study. Two sentences. Four words. Two big objections pre-empted. DIY install. Easy charging.

Every potential buyer of a smart home device has the same anxieties: Is this going to be a pain to install? and What happens when the battery dies? The copy doesn’t wait for those objections to crystallize in the reader’s mind. It answers them upfront, before the questions are even asked.

This is the Objection/Counter-Objection (O/CO) approach that sits within step 3 of our methodology—identifying the concerns that kill purchases and neutralizing them as early as possible on the page. The Ring page does it in a subhead.

Notice also what the copy doesn’t say. It doesn’t say “simple installation,” which is vague and could mean anything. “DIY” is specific and carries a particular meaning. You can do this yourself today. That specificity is doing work that a softer phrase couldn’t.

How could you use this? List the two or three objections your customers typically have before they buy. Now ask: where does your copy address them? If the answer is “buried in the FAQs” or “in the third paragraph,” you have a clear opportunity to bring those answers forward. Earlier is better.

(If you need a way to gather customer objections, read our article on the five golden questions.)

4. The “slippery slide” to make installation feel simple

Below the “DIY install. Easy charging.” subhead, the copy reduces the entire installation process to three verbs: Connect. Mount. Recharge.

Joe Sugarman described this kind of approach as the “slippery slide”—the idea that every element of copy should keep the reader moving forward rather than giving them a reason to pause. A complicated installation section is the opposite of a slippery slide. Three simple verbs feel frictionless.

Contrast this with how the same information might have been written as a paragraph:

First, download the Ring app and connect the device to your home Wi-Fi network. Then, mount the doorbell to your door frame using the included installation kit. Finally, recharge the battery via USB cable when the indicator light shows low power.

That’s accurate, but reading it feels like work.

The three-verb version isn’t hiding information; it’s making a promise. This is the kind of thing you can do. The rest of the page delivers on that promise with visuals and step-by-step detail. But the first impression is one of lightness.

How could you use this? Where are you making something feel more complicated than it is? Every additional step, every caveat, every “but first you’ll need to” adds perceived friction. What can you collapse or eliminate without losing meaning?

5. Different types of proof for different types of skepticism

The Ring page includes piles of proof, but it doesn’t deliver it all in one place. It distributes it deliberately across the entire experience.

At the top: star ratings and review counts—social proof, immediately visible to any visitor.

As we’ve seen before, the benefits sections includes app interface screenshots (demonstration proof) showing you exactly what the experience looks like.

Then the “Works with Alexa” section—borrowed authority from one of the biggest brands in consumer technology.

There’s even a technical details table (which we’ll save you from here) that provides the exact specs and capabilities for buyers who need them.

Can you see how each type of proof speaks to a different kind of skepticism?

Star ratings reassure first-time buyers who are on the fence.
App screenshots reassure people who want to know what the experience will actually feel like.
The Alexa integration reassures people who worry about compatibility with what they already own.
Technical specs reassure geeks (like us at CRE) who go deep into the details.

Our ultimate guide to proof identifies seven types of persuasive proof elements—and the Ring page uses at least five of them, spaced across the page so the reader encounters fresh reassurance at each scroll depth. Skepticism never gets time to build.

How could you use this? You probably have proof of your own—testimonials, data, guarantees, demonstrations—but where does it appear?

If it’s all concentrated at the bottom of the page, you’re asking readers to make most of the journey unconvinced. Ensure that you spread proof across the experience so there’s always a reason to keep believing.

The lab that never closes

Here’s what makes the Ring Amazon page worth your time: it isn’t the work of one copywriter’s best instincts. It’s the accumulated result of real experiments run against real buyers, where sales is the only metric that matters. When copy performs in that environment, it’s not a fluke.

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Win Report: How answering one question increased conversions by 18%

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

In the next two minutes, we’ll show you how answering a single question increased conversions by 18% for DiamondBack Covers.

Research: The question that the homepage didn’t answer

When we user tested the DiamondBack Covers website with real truck owners, one question surfaced before testers had even scrolled down the homepage. In fact, we heard the same thing from nearly every participant:

“Will these covers fit my truck?”

This is a classic example of the power of user testing, because it’s the kind of question that only surfaces when you talk to real users who don’t know what you know. Everyone at DiamondBack Covers knew that their products were available for every truck. They even included this banner on key pages of the website. (See the engagement in this heatmap view.)

As we say in step 5 of our methodology, Spotting the hidden wealth in your business:

Each of our clients has had elements within its business that would have been highly persuasive to its prospects but that the prospects never saw. The key is to identify all of these persuasion assets and then present them to the prospects at the right time in the buying process.

For DiamondBack Covers, the truck compatibility banner was one such asset. Its absence from the homepage, one of the site’s most visited pages, added an extra layer of friction for visitors who might already be concerned about prices or shipping lead times.

What would happen if we added the asset to the homepage, right where first-time visitors were asking the question?

The original homepage (or control)

Here’s the original homepage hero section, featuring a lifestyle video and a “Shop Truck Covers” CTA. Although the page continued below, there was no mention of truck compatibility.

The tested page (or variation)

Given that the existing “Available for every truck” bar had gotten good engagement on subpages, we added it to the homepage immediately beneath the hero video.

In addition to the text heading, the bar showed the logos for Ford, Chevrolet, RAM, GMC, Toyota, Nissan, Jeep, and Honda.

Result: Conversions increased by 18%

During the test, we observed an 18% increase in conversions.

We didn’t create anything new; we just took reassurance that worked elsewhere and put it where our research told us it was needed.

This is a pattern we’ve seen across many Win Reports and is a good example of using both quantitative and qualitative research to create a hypothesis. In this case, quantitative analytics showed the homepage was important (which isn’t always the case), and qualitative user testing revealed a question.

And when the research tells you what questions are on your visitors’ minds, it’s always worth testing an answer.

What’s next

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of DiamondBack Covers’ business and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

Thanks to DiamondBack Covers for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).

A short video interview with the client

Having previously worked with DiamondBack Covers, we were extra delighted to welcome them back for a second engagement. Here’s what they said about their first experience of working with us.

“It translated into literally millions of dollars of increased revenue for us,” says Brandon Moist, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer of DiamondBack Covers.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Copywriting Friday: How to outmaneuver competitors without raising your voice

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most businesses are afraid to mention their competition, but it can be a powerful strategy if you do it with a smile on your face.

In 1946, America’s commercial airlines were booming. Railroads, which had dominated long-distance travel for decades, suddenly found themselves positioned as slow and old fashioned. In response to the challenge, Southern Pacific Railroad published the ad we are analyzing today, “A short course in Railroading… for Airline executives.”

It may not look like a modern-day ad, but it’s a treasure trove of techniques for anyone in a competitive market.

See a full version of the ad.

While the ad is addressed to airline executives, its true audience is everyone else. And now, eighty years later, we still get to learn from the ways that Southern Pacific’s copywriters used to attack the problem.

Let’s look at what makes it work, and how you can use these techniques for your own business.

Five techniques that you can use

1. Address your competitors to reach your audience

The ad’s headline begins with misdirection:

A short course in Railroading… for Airline executives

Of course the ad isn’t for airline executives at all. It’s for the traveling public—business travelers, families, anyone deciding between a train ticket and a plane ticket.

So why not just say that?

By addressing airline executives, Southern Pacific accomplishes two things at once:

It positions the railroad as the travel authority. The word “course” implies the airlines need educating. Southern Pacific is the teacher. The power dynamic is established before the reader finishes the headline.
It flatters the real reader. If you’re a regular traveler reading this ad, you feel like you’re eavesdropping on an insider conversation. You’re getting access to information the airlines don’t want you to know.

Gary Bencivenga, widely regarded as one of the greatest living copywriters, talked about the importance of calling out your audience in the very first line. This headline calls out two audiences simultaneously—the stated one (airline executives who need an education) and the real one (travelers, who feel like insiders).

How could you use this? Think about who your competitors are talking to, and consider addressing them directly. A project management tool might write “A quick guide to productivity—for spreadsheet lovers.” A boutique hotel might write “What the big chains don’t tell their guests.” You’re not really talking to the competitor’s customers. You’re talking to your prospects, and making them feel like they’re getting the real story.

2. Kill them with kindness (and then with facts)

Watch how the ad opens:

Airline executives are mighty proud of their airlines and we don’t blame them. The airlines have been progressive and they have their place in the transportation scheme of things, just as the railroads have theirs.

This is generous. Warm, even. The reader’s guard drops immediately. This doesn’t read like a competitor on the attack; it reads like a reasonable person being fair.

Then comes the pivot:

But we wish they wouldn’t spend so much time talking about the railroads in their advertising. They seem to know so many things about railroad service that aren’t so!

And a few lines later:

We don’t like to mention a competing service in our advertising but now we’re rather forced to talk about the airlines in order to inform the airlines (and the public, too) about some of the facts of the railroad business.

This approach works because although people instinctively resist being sold to, they welcome being informed. Copywriting legend Joe Sugarman called this the difference between pushing a product and pulling the reader in. By framing the ad as a reluctant correction—“we’d rather not, but someone has to set the record straight,” Southern Pacific transforms a competitive attack into an act of public service. And as we explored in our article on persuading skeptical people, replacing emotional language with hard facts is exactly how you win over an audience that doesn’t want to be sold to.

How could you use this? If you need to position against a competitor, start by genuinely acknowledging what they do well. Then introduce the specific area where they fall short, not as an attack, but as a correction. Here’s a basic template:

“[Competitor] is ideal for small teams. But once you’re scaling, the differences become significant—here’s what they look like.”

The lesson is that the concession makes the critique more credible.

3. Reframe the comparison (and expose the hidden costs)

The airlines had been running ads comparing their fares to railroad fares and claiming air travel was cheaper. Southern Pacific doesn’t just dispute this, it reframes the entire comparison.

First, the one-way vs. round-trip reframe:

… they always compare the one way fares. Since airlines make no reductions on round trips for travel in this country, the airline people apparently think the railroads don’t, either. As a matter of fact, railroads make substantial reductions for round trip tickets. We figure most people have to get home sometime.

That last sentence—“We figure most people have to get home sometime”—is a lovely piece of writing. It’s funny, it’s common sense, and it makes the airlines look like they have something to hide.

Then the apples-to-oranges reframe:

The airlines, in comparing fares, always add in the cost of a Pullman lower berth. A comparison of a seat in a plane and a berth on the train is the same as comparing a chair with a bed.

And later, on the hidden costs:

The airlines forget to add in the bus fares to and from the airports (and bus travel time as well). Also they overlook their limited baggage allowances, which increase air travel cost with a normal amount of luggage.

This works because it doesn’t rely on opinion. It simply changes the frame of reference—and once you see the comparison the right way, the airlines’ claims start to strain under their own logic.

We’ve seen this principle at work many times. Often, the winning move isn’t to argue harder within your competitor’s frame, it’s to change the frame entirely. If your competitor is winning the “cheapest” argument, shift the conversation to total cost of ownership. If they’re winning on features, shift to outcomes.

How could you use this? Look at how your competitors frame their comparisons. Are they cherry-picking metrics? Comparing apples to oranges? Ignoring hidden costs or trade-offs? Don’t just counter their claims, reframe the comparison so the reader sees the full picture.

4. Let the numbers do the fighting

In the center of the ad sits a simple fare comparison table:

There’s no spin here. The table is just the numbers, side by side.

This is one of the most reliable principles in copywriting: specifics are more persuasive than generalities. As Gary Bencivenga put it, never make your claim bigger than your proof. Southern Pacific doesn’t say they’re cheaper. They show you exactly how much cheaper, on specific routes, in both coach and first class.

Notice too that the table includes first class railroad fares—which are still dramatically cheaper than the airline’s standard fare. The reader doesn’t have to do any mental math.

We wrote an entire guide to how proof works in persuasion, and this ad is a textbook example. When your proof is this strong, you don’t need to editorialize. You just present it and let the reader draw the obvious conclusion.

How could you use this? Wherever possible, replace claims with data. Don’t say “we’re more affordable,” show a side-by-side comparison. Don’t say that your customers get faster results, show the median time to value.

And when you make a comparison, make it easy to scan. Tables, charts, and side-by-side layouts do the heavy lifting so your visitors don’t have to.

5. Concede your competitor’s real advantage (and watch your credibility soar)

We’ve touched on this in technique 2, but it’s worth emphasizing again here because of what the copywriter does near the end of the ad:

We accept the fact that airplanes have one primary advantage—speed. But we think trains have a lot of advantages, too, including economy and plenty of room to move around.

By the time the reader reaches this line, Southern Pacific has spent the entire ad proving the airlines wrong on fares, on comfort, on baggage, on family travel, on total cost. The reader might be thinking: Okay, but planes are obviously faster.

And then the ad says it for them.

This does two things. First, it eliminates the reader’s main objection as a reason to dismiss everything they’ve just read. Second, and more importantly, it makes every other claim in the ad more believable. If Southern Pacific were just shilling, they’d never admit the airlines have any advantage. The fact that they do without hedging tells the reader something important: These people are honest. I can trust the rest of what they’re saying.

Sixteen years later, Copywriter Paula Green would turn this principle into one of advertising’s most famous campaigns: “Avis is only No. 2 in rent a cars. So we try harder.”

That campaign worked for exactly the same reason as the Southern Pacific ad does… admitting a weakness makes everything else you say more believable. Concede the ground you can’t win, and you fortify every position you hold.

How could you use this? Identify your competitor’s genuine, undeniable advantage and say it out loud.

Yes, [Competitor] is faster to set up. That’s because we spend the first week configuring the system to your exact workflow, so you don’t spend the next year working around a generic setup.

Concession isn’t a weakness. It’s often the foundation for your strongest argument.

The art of the velvet glove

What makes this ad remarkable isn’t just the individual techniques, it’s the tone. Southern Pacific demolishes every one of the airlines’ claims, and they do it while sounding reasonable, generous, and faintly amused. There’s no chest-thumping, just a calm, fact-filled correction from someone who clearly knows what they’re talking about.

The ad is signed by Claude E. Peterson, Vice-President, System Passenger Traffic. It’s not a faceless corporation speaking—it’s a named individual, putting his reputation behind every claim. That personal touch adds a final layer of credibility.

If you’re in a competitive market, and who isn’t, the instinct is usually to either ignore your competitors entirely or attack them head-on. This ad shows the third option: to be so generous, so specific, and so transparently honest that your audience makes the case for you.

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

How to get bigger, quicker wins by optimizing your testing workflow

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A poor experimental workflow can waste loads of your time. Here’s an extreme example: We’ve seen a company take six months to do something that took another company thirty minutes. That’s 8,760 times slower.

To grow quickly, you need to implement quickly, so our work with clients goes beyond suggesting what they should test; we build their in-house capability to “get stuff done.” This article describes a framework for speeding up your testing—so you can grow your profits quicker.

Many small changes or one big one?

If you’ve read our Win Report, A year’s worth of PPC leads in just three weeks, you may recall that our winning landing page was very different from (and much more effective than) the control:

Our winning variation included many individual changes from the control.

You might wonder whether we arrived at the final winning version via a series of smaller A/B tests, or whether we had simply tested the new page against the old one.

We had done the latter.

But we wouldn’t always do that.

How much should you incorporate into each A/B test? At one extreme, you could test every pixel change. At the other extreme, you could throw your whole year’s worth of ideas into one test. The ideal lies somewhere in between. But where? Here are some of the issues that our consultants consider when deciding how many changes to include in a single A/B test. These points should help you to decide which approach is best for you.

(Note that this question applies to multivariate tests as well as to A/B/n tests. In both cases, you’re faced with the question of how much to change in each page element.)

Why people do—and don’t—run tests

First, consider the following chart, which shows the main reasons why people do—and don’t—run A/B tests:

Reasons for—and against—A/B testing.

The reason to run an A/B test (represented by the green arrow) is to learn how a particular change affects conversion.

However, there are two drawbacks (represented by the grey arrows): (i) each test costs money and takes time to implement, and (ii) each test takes time to run.

In practice, each forthcoming test can feel like a departing bus. Ideally, you would put each change onto its own bus. However, buses may not come as often as you’d like, so it can be wise to squeeze in several changes, rather than waiting for the next one to come along. In the bus analogy, the grey arrows represent the cost of each bus. The green arrow represents how important it is for each change to have its own bus.

The split-testing bus. How many passengers should you put in each one?

When should you give each change its own A/B test?

This is the same diagram as above, but with a high driving force and low restraining forces.

You may want to A/B test every small change if:

The green arrow is long: In other words, you have a strong desire to learn how each change affects conversion, maybe for one of the following reasons:
- Because the change is expensive. For example, if you’re about to offer a bold guarantee, if you’re changing the price, or if you’re about to start giving away a premium (a free gift), you need to know how successful the change is, so you can work out if it’s cost-effective.
- Because the stakes are high. For example, you may be planning to implement this particular change on other sites, on other pages, or in other media (e.g., in offline advertising), so a bad decision would be costly.
- You’re testing changes that you aren’t confident will be effective, so you need to rely on an A/B test to tell you whether the changes are effective. This is fair enough. Most marketers are overconfident in their ability to spot a winner. A/B testing brings them down to earth with a bump.
The upper, grey arrow is short: The time and cost of implementing a test is low.
The lower, grey arrow is short: The time for a test to reach significance is low, perhaps because (i) the page gets a lot of traffic, so tests reach significance quickly, (ii) because you are testing changes that greatly outperform the control.

When should you include many changes in a single A/B test?

This is the same diagram as above, but with a low driving force and high restraining forces.

You may prefer to include many changes in one A/B test if:

The green arrow is short. In other words, you’re okay not knowing how each individual change affects conversion.
- This may be because you’re testing many changes, and you’d be happy as long as the overall conversion rate increases.
- Or it may be because you’re highly confident that your changes will be effective. For example, you may be fixing things that are broken, or you’ve run A/B usability tests on them (see example).
The grey arrows are long. This can be for several reasons. For example, because
- It takes you a lot of time and effort to get a test implemented. This can happen if (i) your workflows for creating content are inefficient, (ii) your company’s approval process is bureaucratic. Sometimes, “corporate brand police,” regulatory bodies, and IT departments feel like goalkeepers who were put there to stop you from scoring, (iii) your development resources are inadequate, or (iv) your software and technology is poor or poorly integrated. Clients often ask us to help them improve these aspects of their business, aware that it makes so much difference to their overall success.
- Your changes are intertwined, so it would be fiddly or impossible to separate them into separate tests or to run them as a multivariate test.
- The page has few visitors, so a small improvement would take months to be detected (i.e., reach statistical significance). Multivariate testing (MVT) allows you to overcome this problem by carrying out several A/B tests simultaneously on the same page. However, it usually takes more work to set up a multivariate test than a straightforward A/B/n test.
- You have an abundance of good, research-driven ideas to test, and implementation has become the bottleneck. There’s simply not enough time to implement and run each idea as a separate A/B test. Also, this has an opportunity cost: While a profitable idea sits on your to-do list, you effectively lose money every day until it’s implemented.

How to use these insights to grow your business faster

Consider whether you might progress faster by including more—or fewer—changes into each test.
Try to identify the bottleneck in your testing process—then remove it. For example,
- If you’re short of good test ideas, find ways of generating more of them. (This article and this one should help.)
- If you’re limited by the rate at which you can design and implement tests, look for ways of speeding things up. You probably find that certain types of tests are easier to implement than others. In particular, avoid tests that require new page layouts, complex code changes, or upstream approval.
- If your page doesn’t have enough traffic, look for ways of getting more. For example, if you have many landing pages, consider whether you’d benefit by sending more traffic to one page, on which you can then run much quicker A/B tests.

The bottom line

The right answer to “how many changes per test?” isn’t fixed—it shifts depending on your traffic, your implementation costs, your confidence in the changes, and how much you need to understand why something worked, not just that it did.

What stays constant is this: the goal is to learn and implement as fast as possible. That means regularly asking yourself where the friction actually is. Is it a shortage of ideas? Slow development cycles? A bureaucratic approval chain? Low traffic forcing you to wait months for significance? Each bottleneck calls for a different fix—and until you identify the right one, you risk solving the wrong problem efficiently.

The companies that grow fastest aren’t necessarily the ones with the cleverest test ideas. They’re the ones who’ve built a machine for turning ideas into live tests, and live tests into decisions. Optimise that machine, and everything else speeds up with it.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Win Report: How a simple “what next?” section increased conversions from blog traffic by 43%—and how you can do the same

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

In the next few minutes, we’ll show you how adding a handful of links at the bottom of a blog post increased conversions by 43% for a Gartner-recognised enterprise software company—how we knew exactly what to do before we’d written a single line of code—and how you can run the same test on your own site.

Our client is a fast-growing B2B SaaS company operating in the enterprise security space, with recognition from Gartner, Forrester, and G2, and a customer base that includes some of the world’s leading organisations. Their product is technical, high-stakes, and requires serious research before purchase—which means their blog plays a critical role in the buying journey.

Research: The traffic wasn’t the problem. The dead end was.

The client had invested heavily in content. Their blog attracted substantial organic traffic from IT leaders, security professionals, and procurement teams searching for answers to exactly the kinds of questions their product solves:

How do organisations manage access across hundreds of SaaS applications?
What are the risks of ungoverned software sprawl?
How do compliance requirements affect identity and access management?
What should enterprises look for when evaluating solutions in this space?

These weren’t casual browsers. They were senior decision-makers, actively researching a problem the client was uniquely positioned to solve. The content was doing its job—educating, building trust, and positioning the company as an authority in a complex market.

Then it stopped. And with it, the momentum. Visitors who’d arrived with a genuine business problem, read carefully, and were perhaps on the verge of taking the next step—were handed nothing. No prompt, no pathway, no invitation to go further. Just a footer and a faint sense of ‘what now?'

Heatmaps and behavioral analysis confirmed what we suspected: a classic “dead end” problem. Visitors would reach the bottom of an article and bounce—not because they weren’t interested, but because the website gave them no obvious reason to stay.

In B2B, where the sales cycle is long and trust is everything, this is a particularly costly mistake. Every lost reader represents not just a missed click, but a missed opportunity to move a high-value prospect one step closer to a conversation.

This is a surprisingly common pattern. Content teams work hard to attract qualified traffic; UX teams work hard to turn browsers into buyers. But the handoff between the two—the moment a reader finishes an article and looks up wondering “what now?”—is often left entirely to chance.

Not for long.

The original page (or control)

Blog articles ended abruptly. The final paragraph gave way to a footer. There was no bridge between “I’ve just read something useful” and “I’d like to find out more”—let alone “I’d like to speak to someone.”

The tested page (or variation)

We added a single section at the end of each blog article: “What you should do next…”

At the bottom of the article, we added a “What you should do next…” section.

It sounds almost too simple. But the details mattered.

The section was designed to feel like a natural continuation of the article, not a bolt-on promotion. It matched the visual style of the content around it. And crucially, it addressed visitors at different stages of the buying journey—offering a next step that felt appropriate whether they were ready to commit or simply wanted to stay connected.

The three options were:

Subscribe to our newsletter—for those who wanted to keep learning without any commitment.
Join a weekly group demo—for those curious enough to see the product in action, but not yet ready for a sales conversation.
Schedule a personalized demo—for those ready to have a direct conversation.

Each option met the visitor where they were. The section didn’t push. It guided—a logical safe step.

Results: Conversions increased by 43%

During the test, we observed a 43% increase in leads from blog traffic. Visitors who had previously read and left were now exploring the site—and requesting demos.

But this only tells half the story. The traffic already existed—paid for in time, effort, and years of SEO work. Adding a pathway to the product didn’t cost a penny. It simply unlocked value that was already sitting there, effectively creating a new stream of customers from traffic the business already owned.

In enterprise SaaS, where the cost of acquiring a qualified lead can run into hundreds or thousands of dollars, that’s a significant commercial shift—achieved with a single, well-placed section.

The lesson: these visitors didn’t need to be sold harder. They just needed to know what to do next.

This isn’t a one-off—it’s a pattern

This test came from our Wins Database—a proprietary library of proven tests built up over nearly two decades of CRO work across hundreds of clients.

We’ve encountered the dead end problem across a wide range of clients and industries. The details change; the fixes—and the results—rarely do. Here are a few similar wins using this pattern:

A global wealth and lifestyle advisory firm serving high-net-worth clients saw a 54% increase in conversions from blog traffic.
A B2B SaaS platform for meeting management saw a 129% increase in newsletter sign-ups from blog traffic.
An online flooring retailer saw a 46% increase in transactions from blog traffic.
A specialist nutrition brand saw 43% more orders from blog traffic.
A behavioural science and product psychology website saw a 100% increase in course downloads from blog traffic.
A premium health supplement brand saw a 171% increase in transactions from blog traffic.
A conservation project that lets customers purchase plots of land in protected nature reserves saw a 104% increase in conversions from blog traffic.

Could this work for you?

If your business publishes content—blog posts, guides, articles, resource pages—there’s a reasonable chance you’re sitting on the same opportunity. The test is straightforward: find pages that get meaningful traffic but leave readers with nowhere to go, and add logical next steps. No redesign, no lengthy development cycle. Just a clear pathway from content to conversion.

And finally, can you guess what’s coming next….

What’s next

We added this version of the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of the client’s business and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one‑on‑one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Win Report: A product title change that increased conversions by 23%

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

In the next three minutes, we’ll show you how adding a descriptive title to a product page delivered a 23% increase in conversions for Optibac.

Optibac is the UK and Ireland’s most recommended brand of probiotic supplements. They have also been recognized with the Queen’s Award for Enterprise, the UK’s highest award for business.

Research: Driving down uncertainty and doubling down on previous wins

Our Research Department discovered that site visitors were sometimes uncertain about which product was right for them. They said things like:

“I don’t feel as if there is any concrete information telling me what I should be using and why.”

When we conducted user tests, participants often zoomed into the side of the product images to focus on the dosing information on the label.

These findings implied that clearer information and signposting would improve conversion, and earlier Optibac tests had confirmed this. In particular, we had seen success by adding more information to the product pages.

Leveraging past wins is a critical part of our CRE Methodology™. Here’s what we say in Step 6:

“Has this idea worked before? Once you’re testing, you’ll quickly start learning what your visitors respond to. Every test we develop is documented so that we can review and prioritize ideas that are inspired by winning tests.”

This time, we wanted to double down on the previous wins to see whether more informative product titles would also boost conversion.

The original page (or control)

We ran the test on one of Optibac’s most popular products, their Every Day supplement. Here’s the top of the original page:

The original page had the straightforward title, “Every Day.”

The tested pages (or variations)

As the page gets so much traffic, we decided to test two variations against the control.

(When there is sufficient traffic to a page, testing multiple variations can accelerate understanding of what works and help tune ideas for future tests. You can see a similar approach in our Win Report, How a “sticky” call to action increased sales by 25%.)

Here are the two variations we tested. Only the titles change.

Variation 1: “Every Day 30 Capsules | 1 month supply”
The title contextualizes the supply and how often customers need to buy. This was a small change based on the research observation that users lingered over supply and dosing information.
Variation 2: “Every Day | Scientifically Proven to Increase Natural Gut Bacteria | Daily Digestive Supplement | 30 capsules | 1 month supply”
This title added much more information about what the product does and who it is for (including supply details). Formatted with pipes.

It was a close race, but one of them beat the control by 23%. Can you tell which?

Result: Variation 1 increased conversion by 23%

Although each variation beat the control, Variation 1—with its emphasis on dosing and supply—won overall. During the test, we observed a 23% increase in conversion rate and a 34% increase in revenue.

This is a great example of a test that both resulted from previous wins AND triggered further wins. In subsequent tests, we added supply information wherever there was a product title, and won again.

We add every successful test to our proprietary Wins Database, then look for ways to apply the lessons to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

Thanks (again) to Optibac for letting us share these insights (and for being such a fantastic team to work with).

A few words from Soraya Janmohamed, co‑founder of Optibac

A family business: Soraya (right) with her sibling co-founders, Farah and Jalal.

“Working with CRE has been amazing. The return on investment, it’s incredible,” says Soraya Janmohamed, co-founder of Optibac.

Thanks to Optibac for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Copywriting Friday: One of the few things on the Space Shuttle that didn’t have a backup system

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How do you prove your product is reliable?

You could talk about your “rigorous testing,” your “high-quality materials,” or your “satisfied customers.” But in a world where every competitor is making the same claims, those words often fall on deaf ears. They’ve become “wallpaper copy”—text that people see but don’t actually process.

The ad we’re looking at today, a 1981 masterpiece from Nikon—and part of a wider, iconic campaign—avoids the “we are reliable” trap by using a high-stakes association that is impossible to ignore.

Here is the ad:

Four persuasion techniques behind why this ad works

If you break the ad down, you’ll find four persuasion techniques—each doing a specific job, and together creating something far more convincing than any single claim could.

1. Let someone else make your biggest claim

The headline is a masterclass in high-stakes positioning:

In 1981, the Space Shuttle was the pinnacle of human engineering. Everyone knew that space flight was a world based on redundancy—everything had a backup, and those backups had backups. By positioning Nikon as the deliberate exception, the ad isn’t saying the camera is “good.” It’s saying it is beyond question.

This is proof by absence. The lack of a backup doesn’t just imply reliability—it demonstrates it. And crucially, Nikon doesn’t make that argument directly. NASA’s standards make it for them. The authority of the space programme is transferred wholesale to the camera in your local shop. This is a classic application of Authority Bias, the psychological tendency to respect and trust the judgment of experts and institutions.

That’s the move worth studying: Nikon didn’t borrow NASA’s logo. They borrowed NASA’s judgment. The question for your own product is the same: who is the most demanding user you have, and are you telling that story? An expert or world-class organisation relying on your product for their hardest problems is worth more than any claim you could make about yourself.

2. Use specificity as a credibility signal

The image pulls you in—an astronaut’s gloved hands holding the camera. It creates intrigue and draws the eye. But it’s the copy that does the heavy lifting, grounding that curiosity with specific, credible proof.

Notice the date: 1971. Not “for years” or “for decades”—a specific year. Vague claims feel like marketing; specific facts feel like history. If you can swap a generalisation in your own copy for a date, a number, or a named client, do it.

Then comes the footnote at the bottom of the ad:

The small print says “*Camera used was a modified Nikon F. Future flights will use a modified F3…”

At first, you might think it would be best to omit the word “modified,” but by volunteering that limitation, they make every other claim feel more trustworthy.

Readers sense—consciously or not—that a brand willing to disclose the small stuff probably isn’t lying about the big stuff. It’s a principle worth applying to your own proof points: a minor qualification, honestly stated, often makes the surrounding claims land harder.

3. Always connect it back to the reader

Marketers often focus on impressive extremes. But unless you clearly show what that means for the reader, the message stays abstract—an impressive story about someone else.

Nikon does this in a single move:

The logic is elegant: if it works without a backup on a Space Shuttle, it will certainly handle whatever you’re shooting. The extreme case becomes a guarantee for the everyday one. It’s a step that’s easy to skip—ads often open with authority and forget to land the plane.

Once you’ve proven your product can handle the impossible, you still need to explicitly connect that to your reader’s daily reality. They won’t always make the leap themselves.

4. Sell the outcome, not the object

The tagline lands the whole thing:

Not “we make the world’s greatest cameras.” The result, not the product. By the time you reach that line, it doesn’t feel like a boast—it feels like a logical conclusion. Worth asking of your own tagline: are you describing what you sell, or what the customer gets?

A final thought

Most companies try to prove reliability with words. Nikon proves it with context.

Instead of saying “trust us,” they place their product inside a world where trust is non-negotiable—and let that world do the talking. The principles at work here aren’t unique to cameras or space travel. Borrowed authority, proof by absence, strategic honesty—each one is available to any business willing to look for the right context to put them in.

And in case you’re wondering, NASA still trusts Nikon for its photographic requirements, including on the Artemis II lunar flyby—the farthest any human has travelled from Earth.

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Win Report: One word, 38% more bookings

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

In the next two minutes, we’ll show you how adding a single word to a search button increased bookings by 38%.

Research: Bridging the intention‑action gap

When visitors arrived on our client’s website, they were often in a browsing mindset—exploring, dreaming, and gathering ideas. In the travel industry (and many others), this “inspiration phase” is a high‑traffic but low‑conversion zone.

The gap between liking the idea of a trip and actually booking one can be surprisingly wide. The difference is what behavioral scientists call an intention‑action gap (or value‑action gap). These occur when a person has a goal but fails to take the necessary first step.

For companies like our client, these gaps were often caused by:

Choice paralysis: The sheer volume of travel options creates a “freeze” response.
Temporal discounting: The brain prioritizes the comfort of the present (browsing) over the effort of real planning.

The desire is there, but without a nudge toward the present, visitors drift into a “later” that never arrives. The question was, how hard would a “nudge” have to be to make a real difference?

The original page (or control)

Here’s the client’s homepage. with the search widget featuring a standard “Search” button.

The tested page (or variation)

We made a single one‑word change to the tested page. Can you see it?

Yes, that’s it. The label on the search button changed from “Search” to “Search Now.”

Nothing else changed.

Result: Bookings increased by 38%

During the test, we observed a 38% increase in bookings.

But why?

If you’ve read our article on the Safe Step Principle, you might wonder: doesn’t adding “Now” risk the same problem we warned about with “Buy Now” buttons?

The Safe Step Principle shows that pushy CTAs backfire when they demand more commitment than the visitor is ready to give—“Buy Now” on a category page asks visitors to leap past their readiness. However, “Search Now” is fundamentally different for three reasons:

Low friction: Searching is the safest possible step. It costs nothing, commits to nothing, and carries no risk.
Temporal prompting: Adding “Now” doesn’t increase the commitment; it simply injects a sense of the present tense into an action the visitor already intended to take.
Directivity: Research suggests that specific, directive language reduces cognitive load. “Search” is a label; “Search Now” is an instruction.

The change worked because it didn’t ask visitors to do anything different; it simply reminded them that the time to act was the present.

What’s next

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of the client’s business and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one‑on‑one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

Thanks to our client for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Win Report: How reusing winning copy increased conversions by 82%

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

In the next two minutes, we’ll show you how adding an exit-intent lightbox to article pages increased conversions by 82%.

Our client operates a large online marketplace for tours, activities, and vacation packages, connecting travelers with curated experiences across one of the world’s most spectacular destinations. As a market leader operating in a highly competitive space, they have asked to remain anonymous.

Research: Readers who never became buyers

The client’s site includes a huge library of detailed travel articles—guides to natural wonders, regional itineraries, and seasonal travel tips. These pages attract enormous organic traffic, but our analytics review revealed that many of these visitors never transferred to the main booking funnel.

In effect, the visitors were treating the website like a high-quality travel magazine. Lots of research, relatively little booking.

As other tests for this client showed, the stunning content and imagery created a genuine emotional response in their visitors. How could we build on those “wow” moments to bring more people into the main booking funnel?

The original page (or control)

Here’s a mockup of one of the original article pages. The real site was filled with high quality, engaging content written by genuine experts and led by stunning imagery and video.

The control: Visitors who engaged with this content are a warm audience for the booking funnel.

The tested page (or variation)

For the test, we added an exit-intent lightbox that appeared automatically when a visitor’s cursor moved toward the browser’s close or back button. (If you want to test something similar on touch devices, you can trigger the lightbox a few seconds before the average visitor leaves the page.)

The variation: Visitors who engaged with this content would want to visit these places and have these experiences.

The content of the lightbox was informed by test wins we’d had on the site’s homepage, allowing us to reuse:

A proven headline and subhead: The lightbox featured copy that had already won on the homepage, reminding visitors that everything they needed for their trip was in one place and subject to a best-price guarantee.
Signposts to the most popular activities: We pulled the “Top things to do” image tiles from the homepage, giving visitors a set of ice-breakers—specific, clickable starting points rather than a blank search field.

And finally, the lightbox added:

A single, inviting call to action: The “Build my dream trip” button provided a safe next step that felt like the beginning of an adventure.

Result: Conversions increased by 82%

During the test, we observed an 82% increase in conversions.

This result proved that many of the “magazine” visitors were interested in booking—they just needed a well-timed nudge before they drifted away. The exit-intent lightbox was an efficient way to deliver that nudge because we didn’t need to change any article content. And we didn’t need to guess what would resonate because we could repurpose copy and content that had already won elsewhere. (If you’ve followed our past Win Reports, you may recognize this as a pattern.)

The previous win had done much of the heavy lifting. This test simply inserted a proven message into a new and valuable context.

What’s next

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of the client’s business and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

Thanks to our client for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Conversion Rate Experts

“The CRE team made it their business to understand ours… The results spoke for themselves,” says Journey Health & Lifestyle

Your non-converting visitors already know why they aren’t buying

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

2. Learn how to do conversion

3. Join our team

4. Contact us

Copywriting Friday: If I bought a car

The signed advertisement

Start your engines: four techniques you can use today

1. Put the maker in the buyer’s seat

2. Build credibility by admitting what you could have skimped on

3. Flood the reader with specifics

4. Close on trust, not on price

A closing thought (as we drive our Reo into the sunset)

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

2. Learn how to do conversion

3. Join our team

4. Contact us

Win Report: How button microcopy increased sales by 29%

Research: Have you really solved the problem?

The original page (or control)

The tested pages (or variations)

Result: Variation 2 increased sales by 29%

What’s next

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

2. Learn how to do conversion

3. Join our team

4. Contact us

Tips and tools: Our new favorite podcast, the software that shaped the world, and a test that stumps AI

Here are some great resources we have recently shared with one another

Our new favorite business podcast

The most important software you never think about

Should you walk or drive to the car wash?

And speaking of AI’s impact…

Coffee break? Can you survive 100 jumps?

Have you come across something worth sharing?

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

2. Learn how to do conversion

3. Join our team

4. Contact us

Win Report: How a homepage redesign won by 25%

Research: Two clear threads

The original page (or control)

The tested page (or variation)

Result: +25% conversions for this test

What’s next

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

2. Learn how to do conversion

3. Join our team

4. Contact us

Win Report: How resolving pricing page doubt increased conversions by 8%

Research: A lack of balance

The original page (or control)

The tested page (or variation)

Result: Conversions increased by 8%

What’s next

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

2. Learn how to do conversion

3. Join our team

4. Contact us

Copywriting Friday: A Mac walks into a room

The core strategy: Talk about PC, not Mac

1. Personify the choice—and make your competitor likeable

2. Let your competitor voice the objection

3. Trade abstractions for specifics

The hidden ratio inside the campaign

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

2. Learn how to do conversion

3. Join our team

4. Contact us

Win Report: Are you selling what your customers are buying? (+26%)

Research: Is it secure truck covers or outdoor adventures?