Conversion Copywriting Best Articles and Tutorials by Topic
Some of the best articles and tutorials about conversion copywriting. They cover the three phases involved in any copywriting project (research, writing, and testing). I’ll keep adding new resources so bookmark this page to keep it at hand.
Research and Discovery
The 5 Stages of Awareness
The 5 Types of Online Prospects, and How to Sell to Each of Them , written by Brian Clark, Copyblogger
The 5 stages of awareness applied to content marketing. Learn some of the strategies you can use to craft content for readers at different awareness levels.
How Long Should Your Pages Be?, written by Joanna Wiebe, Copyhackers
The 5 stages of awareness applied to copywriting. Use them to determine how long your copy needs to be. It should be as long as necessary to make the argument that will address the prospect in their state of awareness. Learn how to find your prospect’s state of awareness and use this information to write your sales pages.
The Key To Paid Traffic? Knowing Your Customer’s “Awareness Level”, written by Bradley Nickel, adbeat
The 5 stages of awareness applied to paid advertising campaigns. Knowing the awareness level of your market is one of the fundamental components of running a successful paid advertising. If you are going to launch a ppc campaign, read this first.
Five Ways To Flip Your Copywriting For Higher Conversion Rates, written by Brian Massey, Search Engine Land
The 5 stages of awareness applied to SEO. Learn how to use the 5 states of awareness to create a conversion-focused SEO landing page.
Voice of the Customer Research
Voice-of-Customer Copywriting Research: An Overview, written by Anna Bolton, Conversion Copy Co.
This is an excellent overview of the customer research process. If voice-of-customer sounds foreign to you, start here. Some things you’ll learn: What’s involved in voice-of-customer copy research, what type of research you need and what to look for, survey, interview, and comment mining tips, basics of competitor audits, how much research is enough, and writing copy research reports.
Use Voice-of-Customer Research to Boost Conversions , written by Jennifer Havice, CXL
Here you have three steps you can follow to turn what customers say into copy that converts. The case study is a must-read for anyone wanting to learn conversion copywriting. You’ll see how they used voice-of-customer research to optimize the Learn Visual Studio (LVS) homepage.
How to Use the Voice of the Customer to Write High-Converting Copy , a talk from Joanna Wiebe at CXL Live 2019She walks you step-by-step through how to turn VOC data from surveys, interviews and user tests into copy that your prospects will see themselves in.
Online Message Mining
EXACTLY How I Do Market Research for New Products, video from GrowthLab CEO Ramit Sethi (Video Duration: about 30 minutes)
Ramit Sethi explains how he researches a potential business market using Reddit, Buzzfeed, Google, Amazon reviews, and his Demand Matrix framework. By the end of this master class, you’ll know how to do market research for your idea, product, or service.
How to Write Copy with Amazon Review Mining, video tutorial from CopyHackers (Video Duration: about 18 minutes)
Joanna Wiebe, the original conversion copywriter, shows you how to do Amazon review mining to find the right messages for your copy. She uses a copywriting framework, PAS (Problem Agitation Solution) to illustrate what kind of message you need to look for.
How to Go from Blank Screen to High-Converting Copy, a webinar with Talia Wolf and Joel Klettke (Video Duration: about 60 minutes). You can also read the transcript and get the slides. They go over the 5 states of awareness, how to learn your customers’s state of awareness (onsite surveys, chat logs, customer surveys), what questions to ask, how to use copywriting frameworks and social proof to write your copy. Dont’ miss it!
On-Site Surveys
Survey questions 101: over 70 survey question examples + types of surveys and FAQs, Hotjar blog post
If you want to dive deeper into surveys, Hotjar (analytics and feedback tool) has an extensive blog post dedicated to them. Some of the topics you can learn: Understand what a good survey question is, types of survey questions, more than 70 survey questions examples, the dos and don’ts, and survey use cases to give you an idea of all the things you can do with surveys.
Website Surveys Guide, VWO (A/B testing tool) This guide gives you an overall view of website surveys. It will help you understand how website surveys work (designing the survey, choosing a tool, setting up the survey, and launching it), the type of campaigns you can run, the elements you need to include, and common mistakes made.
How To Use On-Site Surveys to Increase Conversions, written by Alex Birkett, CXL
The article explains how to design effective on-site surveys to remove friction and increase conversions – which questions you should ask, when to ask them, and how to get more people to respond. Includes examples of websites that have used data from on-site surveys to improve conversions.
Email Surveys
Workshop: How to use customer surveys to write high-converting copy, by Talia Wolf, Getuplift (Video Duration: about 1h). You can also read the transcript and get the slides.
In this workshop, you would learn how to use customer surveys to increase conversions, the different types of customer surveys you can run, how to analyze survey responses to uncover insights you can use to create better copy and design, and some questions for visitor and customer surveys.
6 Ways You’re Messing Up Customer Surveys (and How to Fix Them) , written by Alex Birkett, CXLThere is a good way and a bad way of doing surveys. If you want to avoid wasting time and money, read this article first. It shows you six common mistakes we can make when doing surveys and how to fix them.
How to Use Survey Data to Write a Long-Form Sales Page, video tutorial from CopyHackers (Video Duration: about 12 minutes)
You’ll love this tutorial! Anna Bolton, conversion copywriter, shares her step-by-step process for filling a sales page with VOC. In this live tutorial, you’ll see how Anna writes a long-form sales pages using survey data. The page is for Copyhackers’s course “10x Facebook Ads”.
How to analyze open-ended questions in 5 steps [template included], written by Louis Grenier, Hotjar
Open-ended questions are the best to know how your customers describe their experiences in their own voice. However, analyzing hundreds or even thousands of replies efficiently can be a nightmare.Here’s the system Hotjar uses to categorize and visually represent large volumes of qualitative data. Includes Hotjar’s open-ended question analysis template to make things easier for you.
One-On-One Interviews
How to Get Into Your Customers’ Heads with Customer Interviews (and Increase Conversions), written by Nikki Elbaz, GetupLift. Article + video (Duration: about 1h).
If you want to interview your customers like a pro, start with this article. You’ll learn how to identify the right people to talk to, set up your interviews (starting with the basics), how to ensure you get the best possible responses, and how to overcome some potential roadblocks. Lastly, you have a step-by-step process to organize the data you have gathered and tips to take action.
Customer Development for Startups: What I Learned Talking to 500 Customers in 4 Weeks, written by Alex Turnbull, Groove
Alex Turnbull is the CEO and Founder of Groove. He spent more than 100 hours talking to Groove customers to understand their experience as users. In this article, he goes over the process he followed to conduct 500 interviews in four weeks, the questions he asked, and how to act on the feedback you get. It’s a must-read for startup founders and for anyone who wants to learn how to do customer development right.
Every Conversion Copywriter Should Be Skilled at Interviewing, written by Daniel Burstein, Marketing Experiments
31 ideas for questions you can ask key people – company (and key partner)employees, customers, and customer-facing employees. Includes useful tips on how to conduct the interviews and the key information you need to listen for.
How to Listen: A Guide for Marketers Who Want to Know What Their Customers Want, written by Laura Lopuch, CopyHackers
Listening is as important as asking the right questions. When you listen to your customers, you can fix business problems with their feedback. This article is basically a masterclass in the art of listening and presents 8 ways to listen better to your customers.
Jobs-To-Be-Done
How to Use the Jobs-To-Be-Done Framework to Create Better Products Podcast (64 minutes) Alan Klement Author, When Coffee and Kale Compete
In this episode of EveryoneHatesMarketers.com, they pick up a product and go through a step-by-step method on how to identify a job and how to apply that to create and sell more products. You’ll learn what the Jobs-to-be-Done framework is, products that don’t have a Job-to-be-Done, the top 4 questions to ask your customers, and how to compile a data profile after every interview. The podcast provides the full transcript of this interview and several resources that will help you dive deeper into this topic.
The Ultimate Guide: Jobs to Be one Interviews for Customer Development (With Templates), written by Vassilena Valchanova
This guide provides you with knowledge and tools to apply the Job-to-be-done framework with confidence. It shows you the step-by-step process of running your own customer interviews based on it and applying the learnings effectively. You have the option to download the JTBD interview script, the worksheet Vassilena uses for insights collection, and the JTBD-enabled persona template.
Discover Your Value Proposition
Value Proposition Canvas Template, written by Peter J Thomson
The value proposition canvas guides startups into examining their customers’ experience. This canvas contains questions and sections that help you think about the end-customer experience.You can use this tool to map your existing value proposition, your competitors, and the proposition for any new products and services that you are considering building.
Using Message-Mining to Pinpoint a High-Converting Value Proposition for Your Product, written by Momoko Price, CXL
Most resources discussing value proposition creation rely on fill-in-the-blank frameworks. It’s refreshing to find an article that provides a different perspective. Here you’ll see how to create a value proposition through empirical, quantified research. Learn step-by-step how to define your UVP by extracting key insights from data you collect from surveys sent to your customers and web visitors.
Powerful Value Propositions: How to Optimize this Critical Marketing Element – and Lift Your Results, written by Anna Jacobson, Marketing Experiments.
If you are into conversion optimization, you are going to love this article. The material is from a Marketing Experiments workshop and presents several ways to significantly improve your value proposition. You can extract several lessons from the before and after case studies. The article also explains how you can apply the value proposition methodology to your own pages.
In a Commodity Market? Here’s How to Craft Your Value Proposition, written by Tommy Walker, CXL
A good read if you have so many competitors selling the same that it seems almost impossible to come up with a value proposition.Even in crowded markets, you can create a killer value proposition. The secret: change your mindset. Don’t sell the product, sell the customer experience.
Writing, Wireframing, and Editing
Writing Headlines
How to Write Attention Grabbing Headlines Using the Stealworthy 5S Framework, written by Prerna Malik, Content Bistro
Need some inspiration writing your headlines? Try Prerna’s 5S framework to write attention-grabbing headlines. This framework can also be used as a checklist so you can be sure your headline does the one job it’s supposed to do, grab the attention of your target audience.
How to Write Headlines for Beginner Copywriters, video tutorial from CopyHackers (Video Duration: about 15 minutes)
The best copywriters always write at least 50 versions of a headline. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to write headlines that work, and how to generate at least 50 different headlines before choosing one.
Website Headlines: 3 Formulas that Work for Homepages, written by Peep Laja, CXL
Writing a headline for your blog post is one thing. Writing a headline for your homepage and product pages is another. The latter needs to sell products. Peep Laja from CXL analyzed more than 500 headlines of successful online businesses and figured out which formulas work today. If you need to write a headline for your homepage, try one of these three formulas first.
Headline Formulas
22 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas that Work, written by Brian Clark, Copyblogger22 Headline formulas. Each formula has three examples.
102 Headline-Writing Formulas, written by Chris Garrett This is a direct access to a pdf with 102 fill-in-the blanks headline templates.
Copywriting Headlines That Sell (with Templates & Swipe File), written by Neville Medhora
Includes several methods to write copywriting headlines that are strictly designed to sell stuff and plenty of headline formulas.
51 Headline Formulas To Skyrocket Conversions (And Where To Use Them), written by Sarah Peterson, SumoIf you still need more headline formulas, check this article from Sumo. It also shows you ten places to use those headline formulas (Email Subject Lines, Content, Search Engine Metadata, Titles & Taglines, Sales Pages, Subheads, Email Optins, Ledes, Testimonials, Product Names)
Headeline Studies
100m Articles Analyzed: What You Need To Write The Best Headlines [2021] Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo analyzed a casual 100 million headlines and asked some of the industry leading marketing experts to give their thoughts on their findings. Find out about: The ideal headline length, The best numbers to use in headlines, How headlines have changed since 2017, Headline phrases that drive the most Twitter engagement, and more.
Features and Benefits
A Simple Trick to Turn Features Into Benefits (and Seduce Readers to Buy), written by Henneke, Enchanting MarketingBy reading this article, you’ll learn the difference between features and benefits, why you should include both in your sales copy, and how you can translate features into benefits.
Features vs. Benefits: Here’s the Difference & Why It Matters, written by Dan Shewan, WordStreamIn this article, you can learn how to use a feature-benefit matrix. This is a useful document that ensures your message is consistent and relevant. It can help you identify each benefit offered by your product’s features.
Bullet Points and Fascinations
Let’s do the twist! Written by Gary Halbert, The Gary Halbert Letter
A must-read if you want to sharpen your bullet point writing skills. The examples of how it’s done are pure gold. He shows you how to transform a fragment of text from an ad into a “teaser bullet.”
Fascinate, Tease & Shoot to Kill! How to Use Bullets for Better Results, written by Scott Martin, CrazyeggHere you’ll find some powerhouse examples of bullets, tips for using bullets to tease and fascinate, and seven specific types of bullets.
Bullet Point Secrets, written by Ben Settle
Ben Settle explains three techniques you can use to write high-converting bullet points: The Give-Away Bullet, Expansion Bullets, and “Can’t Be Done” Bullet. The examples he uses are swipe-file-worthy!
Writing powerful bullets and fascinations (core copywriting skill), written by Roy Furr, BTMS
Roy Furr explains his most powerful bullet-writing strategies for copywriters, starting with what bullets should (and should not) contain, how to give your bullets a rhythm, and some proven formulas.
Analyzing 7 Proven Bullet Formulas: Why They Work and How to Use Them, written by Csaba Borzasi, Game of Conversions
7 Proven bullet formulas that convert well in any industry and for any product. You’ll find an explanation of why they work, tips for using them, and a few examples of each one.
Testimonials
The Secret Life of Testimonials, written by Sean D’Souza, Copyblogger
D’Ouza explains how to make your testimonials more believable and powerful using “reverse testimonials” and “constructing testimonials” instead of getting them.
6 Questions to Ask for Powerful Testimonials, written by Sean D’Souza, Copyblogger
Construct testimonials instead of getting them. Construction means you’re using structure to get your testimonial. It’s an effective way to get testimonials that are specific and story-like. In this article, you’ll find out the 6 key questions you need to ask to construct a testimonial.
The Perfect Testimonial: How to Write Great Testimonials, written by Derek Halpern, Social Triggers
A testimonial can literally make or break a sale. “The Perfect Testimonial” framework helps you write great testimonials. You’ll learn the difference between bad and perfect and how to solicit these testimonials from your customers so you can quote them word for word.
How to Write Testimonials (Plus 10 Customer Testimonial Examples), written by Andy Crestodina
Every claim you make should be supported by evidence. Testimonials are an effective and easy way to do it. This is a complete guide for website testimonials. You’ll learn where to use them, how to get them, and how to write them. Includes several examples of what a good testimonial looks like.
Testimonials: How & Why to Get Them (+ Tons of Examples), written by Marie Dean, CXL
Testimonials impact conversion rates. Read this article if you are curious about what factors you need to consider to increase conversions via testimonials.
6 steps to creating testimonials that drive sales (and don’t suck), written by Hotjar Team This is an extensive guide about testimonials. The two parts of this guide that I think provide the most value are: How Hotjar harnessed customer objections to create great testimonials and the 6 steps to collect and display better testimonials.