Having incredible copy is one of the fastest ways to increase your conversion rates and sales, yet so many companies are terrible at it.
Recently, I decided to improve my copywriting skills, so I talked to my friend Neville Medhora, who is a copywriter. The reason I trust his judgment over others is that besides being the most popular copywriter I know, he actually does client work four days out of the week. He rewrites copy every day, then sees it in action through every industry (online, offline, ecommerce stores, software-as-a-service businesses, etc).
I immediately saw a 20 percent boost just by using Neville's tips to rewrite the sales copy for my recent real-estate-investing book. (I'm split-testing the page now -- visitors might see one of several versions.) I don't know about you, but a 20 percent lift overnight is pretty darn awesome!
(Maybe I should have stated this first: If you don’t know what copywriting is, it’s the rearranging of words so they sell better.)
For the purpose of helping those in the Entrepreneur.com world achieve incredible lifts in sales conversions, I probed Neville to get answers about the biggest “wrongs” people make in copywriting and what they should do instead. Here are his top five copywriting "hacks" in order:
1. Sound like a human.
You. Are. Not. A. Robot. Affirmative.
Please don’t talk like one. When we talk face to face, we have no problem saying things in a casual tone. But whenever people sit down at a computer to write copy (for webpages or emails), they tend to go all formal, like this:
All of that could’ve been much easier said (and easier to understand) if it was written more casually, just like the way you speak. In different industries, the tone of voice for your copywriting may vary. However keeping things slightly casual reduces confusion and is more efficient than long-winded and vague language.
2. Don’t bore your cold-email prospects.
Bob likes football, telling dirty jokes and drinking beer. However, when a salesperson tries to cold email Bob, he or she ends up sound like a boring robot. This leads to unread or deleted emails.
The problem is a lot of salespeople tend to formalize their emails to look professional. Neville tells me that he actually tested this in many industries (including banking and business-to-business sales), and found that a “casual tone” always outperforms boring emails.
For example, in these B2B email templates from inside Yelp, two versions were sent out to potential customers: A boring email and a casual-sounding one.
Yelp boring template email results:
- 50 sent
- 33 opened
- 1 response
- 3.33 percent response rate
Personalized template results:
- 50 sent
- 35 opened
- 4 responses
- 11.43 percent response rate
Whoever says “I can’t write casually because I’m in a market that doesn’t tolerate it” should just look at those results. It was initially worrisome to have salespeople sending out such “casual sounding” emails, but when results went from 3.3 to 11.4 percent, everyone changed their minds.
What would happen to your business if you tripled your response rate overnight?
Typically, people don’t like reading a sales pitch, but if it contains a ton of great information, they won’t mind. This style of mixing great info with the sales pitch is one of the best ways to make people pay attention to your sales pitch without getting turned off by it.
Hopefully, some of these tips get you writing differently, and leads to a boost in sales.
Thank you for the good writeup.
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