My seventh week in the CXL Institute Mini Degree of Conversion Rate Optimization CRO — A Review

Today was the last day of my Product Messaging and Sales Page Copywriting course by Momoko Price in the Conversion Optimization mini degree. This course is hosted by the CXL Institute. If you haven’t been following my last 6 weeks’ posts, I was lucky enough to get the scholarship into this mini degree and I have to post a review article on LinkedIn every week on Sunday.

Today is the end of the seventh week. This review covers lessons 6 through 9 and the final lesson which has the mandatory quiz to pass this lesson.

Lesson 6 — Writing the First Draft of Your Sales Page

Lesson objectives:

• Create a customer-informed, data-driven first draft of your sales page, without having to battle the blank page … or even write much on your own!
• Shape raw, rambly customer-generated comments into surprisingly compelling headlines, subheadlines, and body copy.

Step 1

Momoko’s sales page template lays down the sequence of messages that one can use to start creating writing the draft of your sales page from all the data collected in a structured manner.

Step 2

Add the most dominant messages from each conversion element category in our VOC spreadsheet into the sales page template.

This was shown using the pivot table function of Google Sheets, which was pretty handy. The process of selecting the most dominant messages was not based on judgment but completely dictated by data.

Step 3

Where possible, replace each message with verbatim swipes from your spreadsheet.

This technique ensures copy-construction with minimal effort.

Step 4

Tweak the swipes in your template into a you-focused second-person narrative.

Step 5

Identify any areas that can (or should be) strengthened with third party proof points or social proofs

In this lesson, we also learn that we should put proof wherever we need to bolster confidence — throughout our conversion funnel.

Lesson 7 — Editing or “Punching Up” Your Sales Page

In this lesson, we learned how to improve weak sales copy by following a shortlist of simple, conversion-focused editing principles.

Clarity trumps persuasion. No persuasive trick will work if people cannot understand what the product is about or why they should care about it.

She used two different examples one with full clarity and one with a difficult-to-understand word. This second one also had no clarity in terms of what exactly the product was. I found the usage of that word quite exotic but I only liked it because I am an English writer, but it is quite possible that someone who is not extremely well-versed in English might not even register what the headline is trying to say. Even with me, I don’t know what that product really was (and Momoko didn’t show); I simply made a guess. My guess could go either way.

I think the idea is that while editing, don’t go so far as to keep the copy oriented to the product and don’t include words that are NOT DIRECTLY related to the product. Don’t hint at something that might not be true through images or any other element.

The key takeaway here is that if you don’t say it, your readers won’t see it. Tell your reader what they need to know.

A well-researched, message-matched headline will often outperform an “un-researched” persuasive trick headline. This is a very important lesson for you to learn if you have a good grasp of the language and don’t want to spend money/time/effort on a data-centered conversion copywriting process.

Message-match is also very important if you are running ads. If you spend a lot of money on ads, you have to ensure that any traffic that you are getting is heading down the page toward the CTA.

To message-match the CTA, think of a question that the CTA of the source ad or the hyperlink brings them to the page.

Make it irresistible, make it so good they can’t refuse it! Create a “waterfall of value”

Use quantity-based proof if you have the data.

Generic proof points (“thousands of reviews” and so on) sound weaker as something that can be easily made up. But specific claims (“5000+ positive reviews) are stronger and more believable — they wouldn’t come up with a number like 5000 unless they had at least 5,000 reviews, the exact number of “how many reviews above 5000” may make it better but it’s not very important, what matters is the relative specificity of 5000 over “thousands”.

What’s missing in this whole course is a discussion about specific “less than best” cases. Everything is centered around PetDoors.com, which is a great example because they have so much data. Not all websites will have this kind of awesome data. There will be many exceptions in the real world. I wish Momoko had spent some time covering those.

Refer to top stand-up comedy specials; they’re really good at doing this because it’s a part of their job to take people into the actual scene through their words.

A great tip for editing is that if it doesn’t match the messages we extracted in previous pages, it must be removed.

The easy way to do it: Take every piece of message-related copy with a different color. If something doesn’t have a color, ask what is it doing on the page? What is its function? If you don’t get an answer or if the answer is not satisfactory, edit that shit out! (I had this idea as I was watching Momoko’s course; it was not mentioned in any lesson)

Lesson 8: Conversion-focused formatting & Layout

The lesson starts with laying out basic visual principles that affect the performance of our copy.

We learn how the position, the relative size of elements, and the order of each piece of copy matters.

You design copy in a certain order and if a designer messes with that order, your reader will get these messages completely out of order and the flow of the page won’t make sense to them.

A brand like Airbnb can dramatically reduce the amount of persuasive copy on their home pages, landing pages, and other conversion elements because their product awareness is quite high; almost every internet user who can afford to pay for Airbnb on the planet knows what AirBnB is.

This may not be true for every brand.

In this lesson, Momoko draws on her design experience to give us two whole lists, one about basic typographical principles to not ruin your conversion elements and a second one with techniques to avoid a “wall of text”.

Why is wireframing/prototyping necessary?

1. Design isn’t separate from the persuasive copy. Copy and Design are two sides of the same coin of persuasion. Also, great copy can become useless if it’s modified by the designer without the copywriter’s approval/input.
2. It gives you a sense of how the whitespaces and readability of the text will look like on the final page.
3. It gives you a sense of how actual copy will perform and integrate with the rest of the online asset ecosystem. You get to see the copy in the final flow where the user clicks it; you get to see it “in action”.

Momoko also tells us about 3 different prototyping tools: Balsamiq, Figma, and Sketch. Of these, Balsamiq is not recommended because it is quite limited. She has also included full demos of Figma (Windows + Mac + Web) and Sketch (Mac only).

Lesson 9: Petdoors.com Home Page Performance

Lessons on optimizing copy from the live run of Petdoors.com home page.

In the first-run, they got promising results but not fully as per expectations.

Then a small tweak was made.

Through heatmap analysis, they found out that the drop off was happening during the motivational, life-changing copy. That bit of motivational copy was not clicking with comparison shoppers. So, they removed it.

Takeaways from this lesson:

• Don’t give up when something doesn’t work, keep optimizing.
• Considering product awareness of the customer is so important to the whole copy process.

Lesson 10: The Quiz

This is the first course in this mini degree which required me to take a quiz to complete it and move to the next course. This 23-question quiz was not at all easy but it wasn’t tough either. If you love conversion, UX, and have some basic design sensibilities, this should be your worthy opponent.

The quiz requires 90% to pass and that’s why it can feel tougher than it actually is.

If you cannot make it 90% in any of your attempts — and you have unlimited attempts — you will have to wait 6 hours to attempt it again.

I score 78% on the first attempt and decided to finish writing this review before taking my next attempt. I have copied the correct answers in my notes, reviewed the wrong answers, looked up my notes, and guessed the right answers. I think I should pass on the second attempt.

The Roadmap

This is basically the section of your membership that helps you program your own path through the huge universe of CXL Institute courses. It’s a good overview of exactly how much you have progressed through your selected course.

Here is how mine looks like for the Conversion Optimization mini degree.

Note that this is not a single course, it’s a full degree education with multiple courses to take in sequence.

Also, I have only 5 more weeks to finish the rest of the degree. It’s going to be an uphill battle for me if I don’t want to pay for yearly access to it. :D