CXL Institute Conversation Rate Optimization Minidegree : Week 6

Hello and welcome back to week 6 of my journey as a student and scholarship awardee of CXL institute for their Conversion Optimization Minidegree.

In the previous week, I shared with you what I learned from lesson 4 of the Optimized copywriting course. In this lesson, we will go through what I learned in lesson 5.

My progress hasn’t been as fast as I wanted it to be and that’s mainly because I have been also preparing for my Turkish exam. Guess what? I passed with 84/100! I am now officially a level A2 in Turkish.

Starting from next week, these blog posts will probably be longer and will cover more than one lesson for sure so stay tuned!

In lesson 5, we worked on three main things :

• Storytelling and its impact to improve the impact of your page.
• How to construct an amazing value proposition using the data you already learned how to collect in the previous lessons
• Organizing your data in a hierarchy using a spreadsheet given by Momoko.

Applying Storytelling principles to your copy page :

What are the building blocks of a good story? You probably studied this in school, and even if you did not, you probably know this already if you have watched at least one movie or read one book in your life.
Just like a story follows a beginning where you set the scene and introduce your story then take you to a conflict/ climax and then to the resolution, your copy needs to follow the same structure.

We humans think in a similar structure, and it can be beneficial for us to build our copy. This is how we do it :

• Setting the context: The first thing in a story is to give your audience enough information and set the background, so they can later on understand the details of the story you are trying to tell them. They need to know the characters at play and understand why the events are taking place. So similarly, if you think of your clients as your protagonist, this is the time when you explain to them why your procut is for them and give them enough information about what exactly are you selling and why are you selling it?
• Features and benefits: As you are building their excitement, you need to tell them more about what you are offering. You want to build anticipation as to what will come next, keeping the goal that your product or service will help them achieve.
• As your audience continues their journey with you, you will lead them to the climax which will consist in giving them a “pay off”. This is a good time to include your call to action and give them an incentive.

As they decide to take action, the story will come to its resolution which will consist of the post-conversion user experience.

Now again, the way you will do this will depend on the awareness of your audience. If you are dealing with an audience with low awareness. If you are dealing with an audience with low awareness you will need to create a more lengthy copy and build a persuasive argument. You need to motivate them or even if they are not aware they actually have a pain or a problem that you are addressing, you will need to make them think about it.

In other words, with audiences who have low awareness, we need to identify if they are already problem-aware or not. If they are not, then our work will need to be longer and if they are already problem-aware, we need to spend more time explaining to them the solution that we are offering and make them more aware of our product.

However, if you are dealing with an audience with high awareness then your approach will be different. You don’t need to spend as much time explaining the problem and motivating them to act.

Constructing a value proposition with the data you have collected :

Following three steps, we will sort and rank the messages and come up with a hierarchy.

Organizing your data in a hierarchy :

Step 1 : Gauge visitor awareness :
Are they ?

• Problem- aware
• Solution-aware
• Product-aware
• Brand-aware

Then, once we identify that, we will need to make conclusions about the visitors and what are the next steps that need to be taken.
The lesson uses a website, the same that we started which was a really great way to see how the applications of what we learned.

For example, since the visitors of the website were mainly already highly aware of the problem and we're looking for a solution that conclusion that.

This is of course the observations that were done regarding that specific website and will change according to the type of visitors that you have on your page already.

Step 2 : Pinpoint your UVP (ideally using voice-of-customer research)

What we are looking for ?

What you are trying to achieve is finding a middle ground between what the customers want, and more specifically what your visitors want, what your product does and wha t is unique about it as it is shown in the below diagram :

Some of the questions that were asked in order to d efine our strongest UVP for the established product were:

• What matters most to you when choosing a product ?
• What does the product do / have that is special ?
• What are they looking for and how are we able to provide the best fit.

Step 3 : Mine your surveys, transcripts, polls, user tests for top motivation/value/anxiety messages

This part of the session consists in a screen share showing how to use the excellent spreadsheet that Momoko shared in the lesson.

She uses something called pivot table. So before I tell you more about the method let me explain what a pivot table is. To be honest, I also had a hard time following this part of the lesson before I took the time to learn about pivot tables myself so if you are taking the course, I am sure this will be very helpful for you.

In simple terms, a pivot table is a way that will allow you to summarize a spreadsheet that contains a lot of information to make extracting information easier for you. So you are asking questions that will allow you to filter the original data according to a specific element so you don’t have to keep looking for them. It is really an easy and interactive way to look at data.