Copy Hackers Conversion Copywriting

Course: Home Pages

Transcript – Week 3 of 10
TIME TRANSCRIPTED AUDIO NOTES
0:01 – This week were going to do things a little differently. So
for the past two weeks I’ve done this instruction and then
at the end I’ve given you an assignment. But this week
the assignment is going to be based in large part on what
you did last week. And the reason for that is I didn’t want
to give you everything to do last – like all this amazing
amount of research to do all in one week; I think that
would’ve been really overwhelming. Plus, you needed to
do UserTesting.com first in order to be able to move
forward with creating a survey, at least for the purposes
of this course, at least that’s how I recommend you do it.

So this week as you can imagine, if you completed your

homework from last week – and you’re a good student so
I know you did – then this week we’re going to take what
you learned on UserTesting.com and we’re going to use
that to do the rest of the research that you’ll need to do
for this project. So your homework is coming at the
beginning of the week so we can get that out of the way,
you’ll know what you’re doing and then for the rest of
this lesson today we’re going to talk about how you can
take the research you’ve already started doing, all this
data you’ve started compiling, and put it into a place
where you can actually make sense of it and use it to
drive your copy optimization for your homepage.

So that means that, this week, we’re going to go through

the full report, the way to fill it in, the way I filled it in for
App Design Vault, and the way that I recommend you fill
it in when you’re putting together your own messaging
report.

2:03 But first, let’s show you your homework, get it out of the
way, and move on then to the report:

IF YOU HAVE CUSTOMERS: Put Survey.io or a similar

survey on your site. Create a survey and invite your
paying customers (not your list) to complete it.

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 IF YOU DON’T HAVE CUSTOMERS: Put Survey.io or a
similar survey on your site.
This week’s lesson requires your active participation. So
this homework is just part of your work for the week. 

THE RESEARCH SUMMARY

Exactly how to fill in the summary that will help you make
sense of the VOC data and know where to look when it’s
time to start writing!

What I’d like you to do to start this lesson off is go into

your dashboard, go to the files for this week and open up
the one marked “COMPANY NAME – Research Summary
– For Home Page CRO – Blank”.

That’s what it should be called at least, so open that up.

Open it on one monitor, or open it in your full monitor
and just listen to this video today and skip back and forth,
whatever works for you. Um, but have this document
open as I’m talking through today’s lesson because
todays lesson is entirely focused on taking new data and
putting the raw stuff into a form that you can use to write
your homepage copy.

3:17 HAVE THESE HANDY:

1. Blank report to start filling in today
2. Completed Amazon review mining (week 2)
3. Completed competitor content audit (week 2)
4. UsterTesting.com results (e.g., Excel) (week 1)
5. Notes from your interviews (week 1)

Throughout this document, you’re going to see square

brackets used to indicate the places you need to fill
certain information in, so I won’t go through at this point
and say – let’s take the homepage as an example – “fill in
your brand name In the square brackets.” I’m not going
to burden you with the minutia of the obvious (ha-ha),
right? Let’s just get that out of the way. You know how to
fill in things; once you know square brackets get filled in…
voila!

So let’s skip right down from the home page, we won’t

talk about it, it’s obvious, um, if you have questions of
course at all about anything I’m going to talk through
today in this report, Office Hours, that’s what they’re
there for.

2 Transcript of Conversion Copywriting Course – Week 3 – CopyHackers.com

 Now, let’s talk through the table of contents, or “inside”
as it’s called. Um this is obviously just the breakdown of
all the pages that were going to have throughout this
document.

If you’ve done all the research I’ve recommended you do,

you should be able to fill in all of these pages. It might
look like a lot, and guess what it is, because you’ve
gathered a lot of data. So as you’re completing this, we
want to complete it by always referring as much as
possible to the raw data itself. Starting at that point and
then building in the summaries, of course, right? Makes
sense. That means that our recommendations summary
won’t happen until the very end. The proposed
messaging hierarchy won’t happen until you’ve gone
through and looked at all the different things that people
are saying about you. So, we won’t end up with the end
result until… the end!

5:17 Let’s take a look page titled “Research Conducted”. This is

where you’re going to enter in all the information about
what you’ve actually done for research.

So again lots of square of brackets you’ll fill in yourself,

and what’s your doing is really, course, documenting only
what you’ve done. So I’ve listed here the number of
things that you may have done, and in most cases you
WILL have done all of them...ha-ha, I hope. So fill this in –
and it’s not to learn from, it’s just to help when you’re
reviewing or if someone else reviews this document to
know exactly what’s been done. You’ll also note the
bottom point here, “All raw data available as an
appendix”; everything you’re doing, your
UserTesting.com data, everything that you’ve putting
together, your content audit, whatever it might be, all of
it can make its way and should makes its way into the
appendix.

Okay, let’s go to the page marked “Verbatim and

Frequency of Statements”. You’ll complete this page
before you can complete your messaging hierarchy. So,
to fill this in, as you’ll see in the notes, you’ll want to go
look through your customer’s survey, your interviews and
UserTesting.com. It’s in that data that you’ll find
mentions of problems that your solution should
eliminate, problems that they have, and benefits. So we
want to focus, really, on what your product or solution
does here. This is about how you connect with this

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 person, not just generally their pains and experiences,
we’ll get into those later, but rather what’s great about
your solution, what it solves for them.

So, you’d list off from the survey from the interview data
and UserTesting.com data, the problems they’ll, that your
solution eliminates for them, any associated benefits or
standalone benefits, and then you’ll want to say how
often these are mentioned. So, one key problem that you
solved maybe mentioned again and again by all of your
users, and it should be, and it should be – ha-ha – it
definitely should be. Um ,because you’ll have top, top
solutions that you offer, right, top things that you do,
these benefits, these outcomes, these results that you
create for them, and the problems that you take away.
Tylenol will relieve headaches; it would be hard to
imagine people not mentioning how Tylenol relieves their
headache. So the problem is I had this headache, the
benefit is it was relieved or the benefit was I was able to
get back to work faster or I was able to take care of my
kids faster or I didn’t have to sit in the dark anymore, ha-
ha, because the light hurt my eyes. Problems: headaches.
Benefits: go very deep.

8:17 Frequency of mention: you’ll simply fill that out by adding

a little tick ha-ha for every time a problem or benefit is
mentioned. Now, if you referred to your files as well for
the week, you’ll see the completed App Design Vault
report. So if you’re not sure if you’re filling this in right, or
you’re not sure what to do, or you just want to make sure
you’re doing it right, or whatever, go check it out and use
it to compare what you’re doing to what I did.

The page marked “Existing customers: WHaLP

Assessment” is meant to be filled in with your survey
feedback, so you won’t have this necessarily to complete
right now because your homework this week is to do the
survey. But once you do that survey, you’ll be able to
start filling this report in. The “WHaLP” assessment is not
a term that’s like used, ha-ha. Its, it’s just one I use. I
want to think through what people want so there are
phrases that say, “I want more blank” or “I want to say
blank”. Things they hate, like “I hate wasting blank”, um,
things their lacking, things that are kind of, like there’s a
void in their life or their work life such as I need I really
need a personal assistant. I really need or I’m not able to
type my own letters, or I can’t (pause) do this alone
anymore. Things they’re lacking. Problems that motivate
4 Transcript of Conversion Copywriting Course – Week 3 – CopyHackers.com
 are really… it’s one part problem, ha-ha, one part
motivator. So, they won’t necessarily always be negative,
and they surely won’t be as negative as things they hate.

So, these words (e.g., “things they hate”) are chosen

because they make sense to me; if they don’t make sense
to you, but you get the gist of what these four columns
are supposed to be doing, then that’s fine. You could
rename it, you don’t have to have a “WHaLP” assessment
– that can be something that only I do – because it’s kind
of a dumb word anyway. 

10:31 Now, a page that you can start filling in is the one called
“Prospects: What Potential Customers May Be Looking
for”. If you’ve done UserTesting.com already, and you’ve
done a visitor survey or put Qualaroo on your site, then
you should already have the data to start completing this.

So this page is broken into two parts; you’ll simply copy

and paste the raw data here. So we’re looking, whenever
I say verbatim, I’m obviously, I think it’s obvious at least,
just suggesting that you pull in exactly what that person is
saying. You don’t have to summarize it and in most cases
you shouldn’t summarize it. So, copy and paste, just
highlight the line item, copy it, paste it here in its own
line, move on to the next. That’s how you’ll complete this
table, then you’ll assign a topic to it. So you’ll start to
collect all these verbatims and list them out and see that
similarities rise to the surface, where you can see that
these five people are mentioning this one thing. So they’ll
all get the same topic and that will just make it easier to
take something away from it, and then to summarize.

So, to summarize: once you’ve completed this table of

what potential customers or prospects may be looking
for, again based on what visitor and users are saying,
then you’ll be able to summarize what you saw. That
summary can help you with the strategy for your site and
your homepage, and it may also help write the words
down on the page. Sometimes you’ll be swiping directly
from what people say, and other times you’ll be taking
these great summaries that are still specific, and using
those to craft your messages. But, we’re getting ahead of
ourselves in talking about messages; right now we just
want to talk about pulling the raw data into the report.

12:33 The next page titled “Compelling Messages Written by

Customers or Spoken by Users” is a page that you’ll be

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 able to complete once the customer surveys done. You
can start pulling in anything you might have already seen
around messages that customers and users have said or
shared already – that can start going in here. So you can
get a head start on this page, and you’ll see that the table
is pretty much identical to the table you just completed,
which means that filling it out will be a pretty much
identical experience, except this time you’re looking for
compelling messages. So, real things that customers and
users are saying to you, the actual words that they’re
using.

Now we’ve had verbatims earlier, but were talking about

the most compelling stuff, not just a place to dump,
pulling mindlessly and dropping it in.

But rather, if something stood out to you in an interview

or whatever it may be, when it stands out, it goes in this
table.

And the reason is that you’ll want to take these

compelling messages – there will be a point when you’re
writing your page, where you’ll want to remember “what
was that thing that guy said, it was so awesome, it was
like an analogy about…” and you’ll need to know where
to find that. This is where you’ll find that.

13:57 Now, let’s talk about adjectives. I get really excited about
this question for some reason, I don’t know why. It’s
great to get these adjectives; that’s one less thing you
have to dream up on your own and guess at. So, this is
going to come from your customer survey if you ask the
question, you know, “what three words would you use to
describe your experience with us” or “your use of the
product” or the product, or the brand, or whatever the
questions is that you asked. That should be in your
customer surveys; one was in App Design Vault, and I
hope you put it in yours, but that’s your assignment for
this week, so keep that in mind as you’re writing your
survey.

What you’ll do to fill this page in, this “Adjectives to

Describe” is start on the page that comes right after it.
Where all that you’re doing is, again, just taking the
words that they say, putting them into this table, then
next to it putting frequency of mention just as we did
earlier. This time when you’re filling in those adjectives;
you may find that some are pretty close, right, they’re
6 Transcript of Conversion Copywriting Course – Week 3 – CopyHackers.com
 synonymous and you don’t know if you should just group
them all as one, or keep them separate and mention the
frequency. I recommend for terms that are synonymous,
you keep the word, the adjective itself, keep it and also
include in the same the line item, include its synonyms
that are used by other people, and then put a frequency
note for each one. And I say that because there are going
to be a lot of synonyms that people are using; and it
would be unfortunate to see words that are similar to
each other, and that stack up and show an indication
that, you know, people believe that your product is best
described as “user friendly” to have that actually appear
not to be very frequently stated simply because people
are saying it in multiple ways, like “great user
experience”. So, if you have a great user experience in
one note, and great UI in another one – they’re closely
tied together – or you gave “user friendly” its own note,
its own mention for frequency rather than stacking them
all together, then you can see how it might be a bit
misleading and you might miss out on actually noticing
and using the words that people are using to describe
your product.

16:33 Like the past page, “Biggest Objections” is the page that
will rely a lot on your customer survey feedback
responses. But you can still use things that you learned in
UserTesting.com and in your interviews that you did to
complete this page, or at least to start completing it.

So, these are your biggest objections. I don’t have them

ranked in order of like there top objections at this point;
so, the most frequently mentioned objection isn’t
necessarily how these are organized. What you can do to
drive home how many people are mentioning this, this
particular objection, is insert your summary of it in, and
then underneath it insert as many quotes as you have
that support that objection, or that speak to that
objection. So, if you have an objection that has five
supporting statements under it or statements that speak
to that objection versus the next one that has seven
quotes below it, then you can start to get a sense, of
course, for which one perhaps the bigger objection, or
which one you could hypothesize is a bigger objection
than the other. And in understanding which one is bigger
than the other, you can also help to understand how that
messaging hierarchy should work.

Now the page that follows is the page that you can use to

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 help flesh out the page you were just working on, and
that’s where you take things you learned in
UserTesting.com, and you actually block out exactly what
questions or objections these users were bringing up.

So, as you’ll be able to see in the App Design Vault

example, this table will be filled in with questions around,
you know, “how much does this cost”. That could be
what user tester 1 asked. And then user tester 4 in App
Design Vault example also said, “how much is this going
to cost”, so when people are asking these questions and
you can see early on in their use of your site that when
they ask these questions, right, so if they’re asking them
on the homepage as users, then in seeing those questions
or objections listed out here, then you can start to say
“okay, well, two and five users first asked how much this
is going to cost”, so maybe that is something that I should
answer early on in my homepage, either at the top or
somewhere on the page. If they’re also asking, “what
kind of templates are we talking about”, “are there
alternatives, is the functionality built in there too?” If
those are questions you can address, those three
questions exactly on the page right there, as three
columns on your page, and voila! You’ve just addressed
what users are wondering about.

19:37 Again, it’s one of those things where you don’t have to do
any thinking; you just have to take what they’re telling
you, make sure you know what they’re telling you, so
document it, and then refer to it when you’re laying out
your homepage and writing your copy.

Now, let’s look at purchase prompts. This is going to

come out of your customer survey too, but it may also
come from your site survey and customer interviews. This
is an answer to the question, “What was going on in your
life that led you to come looking for a solution?”

So you’ll want to insert the actual answers that people

gave you, verbatim, from the survey, from the other
places where you may gathered it, insert those first, and
then fill out the green shaded section, and that is the
summary with the most common purchase prompt being
the one that is called: Most Common. That can help you
when you’re crafting your homepage, and well get into
that when we look at what I did with App Design Vault.
The homepage assessment will be filled out in a way
that’s quite similar to the pages we’ve already seen
8 Transcript of Conversion Copywriting Course – Week 3 – CopyHackers.com
 where you start by entering the verbatim, this time from
UserTesting.com, and then fill in the summary.

The summary is broken into what’s working well, and

what you should keep, and what you could improve,
which is called “opportunities”, because that’s how we’re
supposed to talk about it, I think, rather than saying “stuff
that’s broken”.

And that leads us to the Appendix. If you did a survey in

Survey Monkey, you may have come up with some bar
graphs in there, or been able to export some of the data
as graphs that you can then refer to later. So, for App
Design Vault we exported the “Why did you chose us”
question; we turned it into a bar graph that helps us see
immediately the top reasons that people chose us. This
went into the App Design Vault appendix, but if you think
a graph will help you as you’re working through these
different pages in the research summary itself, you could
put that graph elsewhere, wherever you believe you’ll
need it so it doesn’t get lost in the appendix, which – a lot
of data can get lost in an appendix. But other than that,
everything else that doesn’t fit into the above, could go in
the appendix.

If you are asked a question that’s different from what I’ve

asked for App Design Vault, which is highly likely, you
may just want to come out with a different page to make
sure you’re documenting the response to that question,
all of the Reponses to that question. So that means
expect to create new pages in this research summary
based on new questions that you asked in Qualaroo, in
your survey, or other things that came out in your
interview, things that came out in UserTesting.com that
don’t fit in here but that are important to note. And when
you’re done the homework for this week and putting
your data in this document, when that’s all done, then
you’re able to able to come out with the
recommendation summary.

22:48 This is where you’ll say who you’re talking to, what sorts
of things you’ll want to say to them, what you’ll want to
do on the site to make sure that those messages get
across well, and any additional recommendations that
could be interesting to pay attention to as you’re going
through and optimizing your homepage for this. But
potentially also your other pages, if you move on from
this homepage project and decide to do optimizations of

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 the rest of your site.

So this week focused on showing you what to do with all

that data that you’ve been pulling in. This week is about
finishing off the research you were doing, and beginning
to fill in this report or research summary. So, what I’m
going to do is repeat your homework for you, and ask
that you keep in mind that part of your exercise for the
week is taking this research summary and beginning to fill
it in. So in addition to doing your customer survey, this is
going to be a big part of your homework because this is a
week of real, hands-on action.

So, good luck with it and we will see you next week!

24:06 YOUR HOMEWORK:

IF YOU HAVE CUSTOMERS: Put Survey.IO or a similar

survey site on your site. Create a survey and invite your
paying customers (not your list) to complete it.

IF YOU DON’T HAVE CUSTOMERS: Put Survey.IO or a

similar survey on your site

This week’s lesson requires your active participation. So

this homework is just part of your work for the week. 

10 Transcript of Conversion Copywriting Course – Week 3 – CopyHackers.com