CXL — CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) Review Part 5

In this review of CXL — Conversion rate optimization, I will be explaining the importance and process of product messaging.

Product Messaging goes through an in-depth analysis and is an independent course in the short course section of the CXL course as it has its certification when you pass the exam. The exam is pretty difficult as the passing criteria are 90% and above, it utilizes all aspects of the things you learn throughout the course.

The Course starts with a teardown of the copy. There are some important fundamentals to understand when you are conducting a copy teardown.

Number one, we want to conduct a conversion-focused tear down of your sales page, and I’m going to do that from my perspective as well so that you can understand how to make a systematic framework that you can repeat and share with your team. Number two, I’m going to show you how you can sort of quantifying at a glance, like what the persuasive power of your existing copy is, ’cause it’s really important that you don’t just spend time looking at your copy and having arguments about is this good, or isn’t it, right? We want to understand, does our copy include those fundamental conversion critical elements that we need to make a compelling persuasive argument? And number three, I’m going to show you how you can identify and prioritize, in just a few minutes, what you need to change to improve your sales copy.

Current Issues with Page Teardown

So the first thing that we need to know is what is the real problem with conventional page teardowns? And the biggest problem is that page tear downs or these heuristic analogies, can be hugely opinion-based, and when that happens people contend to just revelling channelling their inner Simon Cowell and just ripping a page to shreds based on just what they like or they don’t like, right? And even domain experts can really dive into this and get all caught up and then give you a bunch of advice that A, isn’t that actionable, and B, can kind of change radially from expert to expert like you ask one person one thing and they say to do this, and you ask somebody else something else and they say to do the opposite. And I’ve seen this in heuristic tear down videos like Unbounce’s Page Fights or whatever, like great, great advice for the most part but sometimes completely contradictory. So a better way to use teardowns is to try to make sure that you’re always basing them on proven persuasion principles, right? You’re not just basing it on what you like or don’t like. It’s always a great idea also to remember that a teardown will never tell you what your page needs to say, right? That this message is going to convert better than this other message. That’s never going to happen. The only way that you can get that information is if you talk to your customers and your prospects, right? The people who are visiting your sales page.

Understanding Message-Mining

All right, so what is message-mining? Message-mining is essentially the process of scouring the internet or other sources for instances of your target customer voicing what they care about most when it comes to your product or solution. And it might be about a competitor product or other solutions within your space if you are sort of new to the market. It’s also just a very handy, quick and dirty way to listen to target customers when you don’t have any customers to listen to yet, or if you’re just a social introvert, and you don’t want to do these voice of customer interviews. So the great Joanna Wiebe, the Original Conversion Copywriter, once said it best, instead of writing your message on a blank page, just steal it. Steal it directly from the mouths of your prospects. Because the reality is, most of the time, your customer is way more effective at recognizing and explaining what the value of your product or solution is than you are. Because they’re the ones who use it and they’re the ones who justified paying money for it, right? They also speak a common language with your market. So they sound very authentic and they naturally filter their comments about products related to specific motivations and value in their lives, right? That is a problem that we tend to have as marketers when we write copy, is that we get way too inward, we’re thinking way too much about the specifics of our product in terms of its features, how it compares to competitors, and we neglect to talk about what the value is, what the big overarching day-to-day benefit is of using the product. But customers only care about that stuff, so that tends to be the only thing that they talk about.

Further, the course guides you through what is good message mining, how to start with message mining, Message mining examples, and how to collect the information that we have received through our mining session and prioritise based on relevance importance and use.

This was really an eye-opener for me as when I applied these applications for my company it really helped me to write better copies and increase the conversion rate by 15% in the first week. I am yet continuing with the A/B tests as it is too early to judge the results. The Message mining technique is something that is quite underutilised by many marketers and we should consider it before creating or while creating our product value proposition. And we’ve learned how to identify the most vivid, compelling instances of these messages to swipe and use in your future sales pitch copy. Here are two important tips from my end while you are conducting message mining:

• Find high concentrations of prospect-generated messages about your product online.
• Identify promising, powerful instances of these messages to “swipe” and use as the future sales copy.

I hope you enjoy your CXL session at cxl.com if you are into digital marketing or unable to figure out your career path in digital marketing this is a must-do course for you.