[The Essentials] How to Increase Customer Response through Web Writing [Benefits Come First]

Traffic to my website is increasing, but I am not getting as many applications as expected. The other day I showed the site to a business-owner acquaintance, who said the writing and wording were not good.

I thought the website's writing was fine... What should I improve?

If that is what you are thinking, this article is for you.

Are You Pushing Your Product's Services, Features, and Announcements on People?

This is a common mistake.

Customers do not want your product's services themselves.

So what are customers looking for?

You may have heard the saying “If you are selling drills, sell the holes.”

Customers want the gains, value, and results they obtain by using a product or service.

In marketing terminology, this is called a benefit (a gain for the customer).

To Put It Bluntly: Just Write the Benefits

The urge to describe a product's or service's features comes from directing your message toward yourself (your company).

So make “you,” rather than yourself, the subject, and shape the message to answer the question, “What do I gain?”

Let's take a toothbrush as an example.

Going deeply into benefits may sound somewhat exaggerated, but humans instinctively seek to avoid loss and threats to life, so you can appeal to powerful motives for action (inquiries or purchases).

For identifying benefits, there is also the FAB formula.

Writing things out in F, A, B order helps articulate benefits effectively. I will not discuss it extensively here, but if you are interested, look into it.

What Fundamentally Motivates Humans?

First, accept the premise that humans are essentially no different from monkeys or chimpanzees.

The fundamental motives humans possess are organized in a book that serves as a bible for many practitioners of DRM (direct response marketing) and copywriting, “101 Psychological Techniques of Modern Advertising” (by Drew Eric Whitman), through its “Life-Force 8 (LF8)” framework.

In other words, connecting the “Life-Force 8 (LF8)” with your product's or service's benefits makes customers much more likely to act.

Improve the Headline First

When an ad gets a poor response, people tend to start improving the body text, but something else has higher priority.

The headline.

Changing just one line of headline often doubles or triples the response. 

The father of modern advertising, David Ogilvy, said, “The headline determines 80% of the outcome”. If the headline is poor, customers will not read any further.

Before changing the body text or wording, improve the headline.

• Bad example: Please taste our confectionery shop's latest masterpiece!
• Good example: Chocolate lovers, sink your teeth into a 3-kilogram Fudge Devil Volcano Pie. Absolutely free!

Source: “101 Psychological Techniques of Modern Advertising,” p.154

Adopt Writing Techniques from Advertising Professionals Who Know Psychology

Website writing (and web ads too) is, so to speak, “a salesperson on the screen”.

Salespeople directly affect a company's figures, and many companies invest time and effort in hiring and training them.

Yet in small businesses, the “salesperson on the screen” is often treated as a spare-time task or denied a substantial budget, unlike real salespeople.

Essentially, it is not taken very seriously.

If you want to increase applications through your website, I strongly recommend improving it using the know-how of advertising professionals with expertise in psychology, rather than trying to manage entirely your own way.

There is plenty of excellent professional know-how, but I particularly recommend “101 Psychological Techniques of Modern Advertising.”

It thoroughly explains the psychology behind the question “How do you get customers to act?” and this one book can help you handle all kinds of situations.