Joanna Wiebe: How Every Customer Interaction Can be Improved With a Framework

From first contact with prospects, through customer onboarding and ensuring customer success, your customer journey can be improved at every level with the right framework. Prospects become customers and customers become power users faster with the right words.

Joanna shares proven frameworks you can apply today that help your customers navigate the journey from first contact through to ensuring your customer churn is the lowest in your industry. Using case studies from companies she’s worked with, including Hubspot, Intercom, Canva, Teamwork, Shopify and more, you’ll understand how your copy can make the difference between OK and great.

You will learn: where you find your messages and know if they’re good enough; why confirmation pages and messages are a killer opportunity; how to use effective messaging to onboard customers effectively and help them stay productive, engaged, long term customers. 

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Transcript

Joanna Wiebe

Hello. Oh, nice. Are we feeling happy? Happy? Yes? Okay, good. That’s actually important for lots of reasons, but for my talk in particular. It’s important to know how people are feeling when they are about to receive a message.

So for example, between these two messages, how do we know which one is more likely to resonate with the person reading them? Which one do you think might? Do you think it’s really important to know first, what just happened to bring them there, right? What’s going on in their lives that was going on just before they saw our message?

So what’s going on if someone searches something like alternatives to Active Campaign, what’s going on? What do you think is probably going on for them? Why does someone search for an alternative to a brand name? (Audience answers) Probably, yes. Okay, so alternatives to, alternatives to whatever, right.

If my husband were to search alternatives to Joanna, which obviously would never happen. But if he were to do that, you know what’s going on for him? Maybe he’s like, I’m tired of her full name. Why won’t you just answer to Jo? Or maybe she, maybe he’s, he’s kind of rolling with not being really happy with me in that moment, which obviously would also never happen.

So alternatives to something, typically, we have a feeling when we’re searching that maybe it’s something really functional, really literal, the price of the thing that we are searching for an alternative to is just not right for us. We were just on a demo looking into Zoom info, found out it was $20,000 or, like, I need an alternative to Zoom info. Maybe there’s an inconvenient element to it, right? So I really like Active Campaign, but it doesn’t integrate with Zoom info, or, of course, the more common one is there’s just a high level of frustration, usually, right? And we don’t know. But these are hypotheses we have to make when we’re in marketing, what’s actually going on for people. So this is really important for us to know when we’re putting a message on a page, a persuasive message that actually matches the emotion of the person who is looking at that is most convincing. It’s more convincing than you trying to force them into an emotion, for example. So if we’re happy, if we’re so happy when we land on a page, what is more likely to convince happy dancing man between these two messages:

A. Thrill everyone at work with the latest version of our Banana App; or
B. Increase your team’s productivity with the latest version of our Banana App.

A or B? It is not a trick question. A. There’s a room full of people, and I heard one.

A, no, it’s obviously A, whoever said B, I’m just kidding. It’s A right? Of course. Then this wasn’t a test. This is just something that we can know because we understand that if a person feels a certain way and we match the way that they feel, then they’re more likely to respond well to that.

So if Chris, who I couldn’t find an angry face for him. So if angry Chris is searching for alternatives to Jo, and he comes across these two options, which one is more likely to resonate for him?

The second one. Trick question, this would never happen. Ok.

So if a user is frustrated with Active Campaign, which of these is more convincing likely in a room full of people who know this information, they searched alternatives to Active Campaign. Which one is more likely to really hit home? Which of them. B. And which one will you never see on a page ever? B. Right, like no one has the cojones to use it. And there are reasons. There are reasons for that. I get it. I get it. But I do want us to expand and start thinking of things a little differently.

So if I want to convince you to stick around with me for the next 50 minutes and 45 seconds. It will help me to know if you are happy or not, which is why I asked you that in the beginning. Because when you’re happy, you are actually more receptive to messages as well even a weak argument. So the happier you are, the less pressure there is on my argument today.

Frameworks along the Path to Purchase

We are going to talk about frameworks along the path to purchasing. Now, what do I mean by frameworks? Frameworks, in particular, we’re talking about copywriting frameworks, which really means persuasion frameworks. The whole idea with copywriting is to get somebody to say yes to your offer or your ask, and a framework is a really basic algorithm. I don’t speak algorithms, so I read about them, and I know that that’s true for frameworks, and it’s also true for algorithms. So it’s a really, really simple way of looking at a problem that we have to solve and reducing the amount of things that we put into solving that problem. Okay, ooh, to answer the question, Where do I even start? And then what?

Who starts writing their home page, their activation emails, their confirmation page, any in product message and knows exactly where to start? I got this. It’s done. You’re like, yeah, I start at chat GPT. No, you don’t. No. Can help. Don’t go there first. Okay, so this will help us fill that blank page. Get started filling the page with things that are not just random guesses, as well. So let’s put guessing to bet. And then we’re talking about the path to purchase, right? There are different things that people are going to hit. It is not a linear path, but we know that there are different things that people are going to do. We’re not going to talk about the whole before purchase thing when they’re just becoming aware of you. Sorry. We are going to talk about before purchase but not the early awareness stage.

These are the frameworks that we are going to cover across your home page, your pricing page, activation emails and confirmation page. Okay, does everybody have these things? Yes, ish, okay, good. All right, and that’ll bring us to the point of purchase. Great. Become paying customers. Awesome. Love it. These are the frameworks that we’re going to use in case you want a single shot while I open my water bottle, because I’m going to need this.

Okay, we’re going to walk through each one of these. This is like workshop style. You’re really going to know exactly what to do with these and where to put them. Now, this is what we’re actually trying to do on that path. We’re trying to remove uncertainty.

Has anybody read Way of the Wolf? It’s embarrassing. I know because, like, Jordan Belfort wrote it, and if you saw a Wolf of Wall Street, you’re like, you’re not actually reading his stuff, are you? I did. I read it.

It’s about the straight line selling concept, which is really, really interesting. Copy is your online sales person. So if you’re writing copy, you should definitely be aware of how to sell. So straight line selling is really just this concept of, there’s no real objections going all over the place. We’re just trying to move people directly along a path, a simple path to the point of purchase. Don’t get distracted by all the things along the way. Let’s just focus them with the right messages that remove uncertainty.

People avoid buying because they’re uncertain, uncertain of your brand, uncertain of themselves, uncertain of what their team will think. All of that.

We just want to remove uncertainty to get them to full certainty by the end. And that’s what these persuasion frameworks are there to do. That’s why we use them. Okay, now I’m not going to give, in some cases, I won’t give exact examples of what we have done. Like this is the this is the home page I wrote for this person, but rather, what you’re going to see is the takeaways from clients we’ve worked with like this. And this is just in the software space. We also, of course, work with e-commerce and things like that. But these are brands that we have applied this exact stuff to, not all at once, not all the time, but this is what’s what you’re going to see is what we’ve done for them.

Persuasion Frameworks

Okay, but first, because we’re talking about copywriting/persuasion frameworks, it’s really tactical, really going to get into it, which means we won’t be covering some of the key things that that I normally talk about, which are VOC – voice of customer data. This is where messages should come from. Today we’re just going to talk about the frameworks and where you put those messages that you’re getting from your customers and your leads. But we’re not going to talk enough at all really about VOC a little bit about it.

VOC: Voice of Customer

So quick crash course in voice of customer data. This is where your messages are supposed to come from, not from your boardroom, not from guessing. You can use chat GPT to help you analyze voice of customer data, but you don’t avoid listening to your customer and then just writing whatever you feel like. So how do we use voice of customer data when we are writing copy?

Two things you got your what and your how, the what is your message? This is going to come from frequently used phrases like wow. More than half the CTOs in our sales demos have mentioned that they want to see data to show how one engineering team is performing versus another. Okay, that’s that’s what to say. That’s not necessarily copy that you will absolutely put on the page. That’s what you’re going to hear that a lot. You’ll be like, Okay, this is a thing. We’ve talked about, this thing, but then the other half is the how, and that’s where we find unexpected phrases. And this is where most people stop, they’re like, I don’t I don’t want to do the unexpected phrases. I want to do the things that sound good when I’m talking to this other person in my organization, or all the people in my organization, where we all agree this sounds good, which should be a sign that it’s bad. If we all agree it’s it sounds good. So this is the kind of thing that we’re looking for. You’re listening. You’re talking about your customers. It’s like this one guy said, Is my phoenix team producing 2.5 times the code or 10%? That’s real voice of customer data. That’s what they actually said. We don’t have to modify it. We can use it as it is. And if it sounds too specific, your customer is not a marketer, so they don’t care that you got too specific with it if it resonates with them, and if it comes from Voice of Customer data, we can hypothesize that it may resonate with them because you are not your customer. Okay, so we take something like that and we use it as our copy.

Hook

Next up of these three things is your hook. What’s a hook? Anybody marketers in the room or in business. An attention getter? Yeah. People land somewhere and they have a choice to stay or to go. We hook them so that they stay and keep reading. Now, a good way to know if you have a hook, and a good way to find your hook is to complete this phrase with your sentence. Sorry, the transitions are coming out really pixely. I never thought it was possible, but if you write anything and it completes that line, I never thought it was possible, but then you may have a hook on your hands. So let’s try that.

I never thought it was possible, but make a living selling your crochet creations. I mean, kind of Yeah. Like, have you seen crochet creations? By the way, that’s toilet paper. And this one, there’s like, a whole thing. People are weird. They love weird things. But then they’re actually so I’m like, okay, yeah, it’s hard to believe that you could, you know, make a living selling crochet creations like that. But then there’s also, so I, like, was searching for, like, I thought there’d be really obvious bad ones. There are really good ones. You guys like, Look someone made that for their friend. Look at that. What’s that kid doing? That kid is rocking that at school. So, yeah, okay. So side note, there are cool things that you can do, but the point here is, I never thought it was possible, but if it completes that phrase, then you are likely to be in a space where you are capturing your prospects attention. So let’s try it on a couple sites.

I never thought it was possible, but making commerce better for everyone. Do we think we have a hook on our hands? No, but you’re Shopify, right? So you’re like, we could really just say like, hi, and now we’re like, okay, they click the button. It worked. Okay, let’s try it with a different brand, brand new. This I just found on Product Hunt a week ago, grow faster with positional. I should hope, not right, like I would hope that is possible with that. So, what’s interesting is, when you keep reading it, and this is a thing most of us have just like, buried the lead, like our hook is just further down, we were scared to say it as like, the big words, so you start growing scale your inbound marketing and SEO strategy. No, that’s not good with the tools that optimize for results. No, not vanity metrics. The interesting part comes at the very end. End there. I never thought it was possible, but then you can say something about killing vanity metrics anyway, so that’s interesting. You can probably find your hook somewhere else on the page.

I never thought it was possible, but build meaningful connections with fellow entrepreneurs you would never otherwise meet. Yeah, right. All right, not bad. So we can get there. It happens. It’s possible.

All right, that brings us to the third one, before we get into our frameworks, and that is problems. This should not surprise anyone. People buy solutions to problems. Yes, we know this, right? Does this Who is this new to? Who’s like what? Nobody, right? But do we put it on our page? Do we say what their problem is? Do you explicitly state their problem and the many ways that it manifests in their lives? Sorry. (pharmaceuticals) Pharmaceuticals, that’s true. While you’re like distracted by them shopping for nectarines or something. Okay, cool. So that’s it. We don’t I’m going to say more than that. It’s just that. It so I don’t have examples for you. It just is okay.

Homepage: Desire-Obstacle-Solution

So now let’s get into these frameworks. We’re going to start with your home page. And this uses a framework called DOS – desire, obstacle, solution. Okay, I’ll show you some examples as well of how we’re going to use that.

So before we get too deeply into it, we first have to establish if, like, there’s even a problem with home pages. Maybe your home page is dope. Maybe all home pages are actually awesome. So is there anything objectively wrong with this? That? How about that? We could all come up with ideas. They are okay, but like this is normal. This like a whole group of really smart people came up with all of this stuff and approved it. So it’s normal.

Is there anything wrong with these? That’s the same product, Jo.

No, three different ones. What’s that? Yeah, yeah. I mean, and then the point here really is, yeah, we could say all sorts of things about it, but they got published. They’re live. It’s pretty normal. It’s pretty standard fare. No one was shocked by anything they just saw.

What’s interesting to me is the massively missed opportunity that is jumping quickly into your solution. They’re telling you your solution now they’re asked. They’re saying in such a way that they’re like, Oh no, this is about them. This is what they want. They want those things. So we’re going to put that in as our headline and ta da, jobs done, boss, but they are talking about the solution first. And what do we know? People buy solutions to problems, right? Okay, so great. So why are we jumping straight into the solution? Which of these two frameworks begins with the solution? Yeah, it’s not a trick question either. None. They don’t. They don’t, but neither of them do, right?

These are not made up on the fly frameworks, either. These are long standing persuasion frameworks that have been using in high converting copy since the beginning, since like they laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play like really old school John Caple stuff for any real copywriter nerds in the room. Desire-Obstacle-Solution, Problem-Agitation-Solution. You have to get someone ready to hear about your solution. Just because they searched for you, just because they landed on your site, does not mean that they are there actively processing all the things that they need to solve. Not at all. They’re trying to avoid in most cases. So we’ve got solutions here. You can create, manage host and promote branded events across all industries and job types.

So it’s a solution to what, what’s my problem? What brought me there? What’s my desire? Is my desire to create manage host and promote branded events across all industries and job types? I woke up thinking about it actually.

People love to forget their problems. Our job is to remind them. This is the part that gets edited out. This is the part that your copywriter, if you have one, is like, Oh God, please don’t edit this out.

And then it comes back, gone, and you’re like, I need a new job. That’s fine. So that doesn’t mean we always have to start with their problem, though we know that people also, if they’re happy, whatever their emotion is, whatever their mood is, what they’re feeling is we want to match that as best we can. And sometimes, unless they’ve searched alternative two, sometimes they are coming to us just hoping that things are going to get better for them. So we can start with their desire. What is the thing that they want? Obstacle? What’s getting in the way of that? Why aren’t they there yet? What’s happening? Usually the solution they’re currently using, and then how to get it out of the way. That’s your solution.

Now we can talk about you, but only once we’ve talked about them a lot. So much that your brand name is only like a logo up at the top. It’s not appearing anywhere. Your features aren’t anywhere yet. None of that is anywhere yet, not on your home page. So let’s reverse engineer.

The path to get to this solution line this is the solution. You will have effortless video creation without boundaries. So what’s going on there? What are the two parts? We’ve got effortless, video creation, without boundaries. Okay. For me to desire effortless video creation, what’s probably going on for me in my life? You have effort full video production. What else?

That’s on the boundary side. Effortless? You don’t know what to do. There’s what’s the effort? Like real world things like, what’s going on for you? Does anybody create videos? Yeah.

So things like, current video creation is hard, right? So, okay, fine, not creating video right now, but I’m worried that it would be hard. I have enough effort full that was typo stuff in my job that I can’t add in any more effort, too much effort, and more like that.

Then on the boundary side. Okay, so I’ve got that’s what’s going on for me with effort. Now, what about the boundaries? Why? Why do I need a boundary free video creation solution? Things that I have aren’t causing boundaries, right? So what do I have? My current video editor is limited. Maybe it doesn’t have the integrations that I need, okay? What else my current video editor makes me create new projects when all I want to do is hit a button to repurpose one video for multiple channels sizes. My current video editor sets boundaries like export limits. Okay, so this is, these are things that are actually going to agitate a person enough that they go looking for a solution, like this one.

Okay, now how? What would I need to do? What would motivate me to want to eliminate that? So why am I not willing to live in this world anymore? What? Why do why? Why would I want to get rid of these things? Let’s eliminate them. Okay, got other things right? Let’s bring up the new ones just half a sec while it catches up. Okay, so this is us going back to what the real desire is. I need to be able to produce with less effort in my video marketing job, for example, if it’s actually easy, I can finally get my music out there on Tiktok and Instagram. I can add video production to my skill set and possibly build a whole business out of it, because my boss, boss is breathing down my neck about all the different videos we need in our content strategy. So if I can produce more videos, let’s say as much as four times the videos in the same amount of time that I can show up for project check ins with good news for once.

These are specific, real, lived experiences that people actually have. And the hardest part for marketers is like, well, but not all of them do. So I can’t just, like, choose one, so I have to simplify it down to just our solution. And this is where we want to use voice of customer data, like we’re not going to talk about, but that’s where it comes from. So this is what we do with what we’ve just done the work we have just done – desire, obstacle solution.

We choose one of the desires. We’re always experimenting. We’re always trying things, right? We choose one. Wow, your whole team by producing four times the video in the same amount of time. That might be something. And it also completes the phrase, I never thought it was possible.

But then comes obstacle, all those problems that they listed. We just push them at them. We make them feel that pain again. They want to forget. We must remind them.

And then we can get into the solution. Get effortless, video creation without boundaries, and we may find that it’s also too soon for the solution. Phrase that way there might be more we have to say, but for the purposes of sharing this with you, that’s what we do. Okay. So now we can change that into wow your team by producing four times the video and the times time it takes to do one today. Old, clunky software is what’s keeping you from being the fastest producer in your crew. You need to move recording to editing fast, to switch aspect ratios with a click and get AI to assist. Now you can get AI powered. We threw that in their video creation without boundaries.

I know it’s longer, I know. I know everyone’s like, cool, Jo, it’s long, yeah, I know, I know. But look at what the old one was.

And also there might be different VOC right, where there might be other things we can say that come off as shorter and still do that job really well. But in comparison between the two, where the first one wasn’t really saying much, it’s asking me to do a lot of work – to remember why I want this and to make sense of it. And in most cases, let’s be honest, people are just ignoring that headline that has nothing to do with them, versus social job of wowing my team by producing four times the video, my boss is no longer like frustrated with me. That’s good. And then we break into more detail, and that’s desire, obstacle solution.

The desire is what we lead with, match where they’re at, what they want. Tell them what’s getting in their way, and that is how we prepare them for the solution. Now, if you’re like, No, no, but cool, it really is too long, you can still edit that down. That’s just for demonstration purposes. You can edit it down, just don’t lose the framework. Don’t edit it down to oh, this solution line is great. Let’s make that our headline. No desire obstacle solution. And there are other ways that you can do it. We did this for a brand called Lemon, where we went really heavy on voice, but still followed desire, obstacle solution – the thing you want, what’s getting in the way, how we solve it? Home Page, hero, done and dusted.

Pricing Page: Goal-Present-Value

All right, which brings us to our pricing page is up next. Who actively works on their pricing page? Okay? That’s like seven people. On your pricing page? Who doesn’t have a pricing page? Okay, a few people, okay, but the rest of us do. Okay. Pricing pages are my absolute favorite. I love them. There’s so much opportunity. What we want to do on our pricing page is use this framework. Goal, present, value. Anybody read the book Gap Selling? Couple. It’s such a good book, put it on Audible and read it or listen to it on the plane home, it’s great.

Gap Selling – the idea here is, again, we’re in sales when we are writing copy in our pricing page, even if it’s drive to book a demo, drive to trial, whatever it is. If you have a pricing page, it behooves you to work on it, because it’s a major site of possible conversion. Okay, so the idea with Gap Selling is this, you’ve got the goal state, the thing that your prospect wants, then you have the present state, where they are today, and then the gap is what we try to expand for them when we’re actually like selling one to one, make that gap seem big, hard to cross without your solution, and that’s where your value comes in there. Okay, now, knowing that this is what you do in sales and knowing that your pricing page is a sales tool, what do we do with that? Oh, wait, yeah, first we have to talk about this.

Just take a look. Does anything stand out to you here? The word pricing just just keeps showing up. It’s just pricing everywhere. It’s just why? Because people care about pricing, right? Have you ever been in a sales call where they started by saying, Hey, here’s our price? No, no. And I get that we have to, like, put this in our nav. But how many people are really ready to see your price by the time they click on your pricing page? Right? So I’m not saying to change your nav label copy. I’m not saying that, but we need to be aware that when we just drop people straight into pricing, that can be very negatively affecting our conversion rate. Do you want to be able to control conversations around your price, even if it’s $9 per user per month? So this is what I recommend you do. This is what we do.

Try a depletion of asset sweep across your site, especially on your pricing page. What the hell is a depletion of asset sweep? Just like it sounds you go through your copy, and any word that sounds like I’m going to get poorer, goes away.

Mark, no, I love it. I love it. That’s cool.

Okay, so words like pay, money, what else have we got? Dollars, dollars, any equivalent currency symbols, which are always the largest thing you see on a pricing page by cost. These things go on and on. It doesn’t mean you don’t actually talk about your price. You just don’t have to throw it in front of them all the time. It doesn’t have to be the thing that you talk about all the time on your pricing page.

So let’s take a look at this.

This is a very common pricing page. It’s actually better than the average, because it doesn’t just say pricing in the H1 it’s Simple, Predictable Pricing. But let’s take a closer look at it. 21% of the words in this hero tell me that you are coming from my wallet. We have pricing, pay, pricing. So 14 words in this hero, 14 words, three of them are very clearly about spending money. Has the person arriving at this page already understood how great your value is, that you can be sure no matter what price is on there, they’re gonna be like, Oh, okay, we can make that work. Probably not. No, no, you haven’t done you don’t know. It’s one of the most quick things in your nav. And how is it converting?

Also, does your home page say home in the headline? Does it? Oh god, does it? Hope not. You don’t have to put the word pricing in your H1 what I see when I see people SaaS brands with pricing in their H1 is nobody knows what to put on this page. So we’re all just trying to get you down to the pricing table and hope that our buttons the right color so that you will move forward with it. We don’t have to talk about money all the time. Your job is to help me, in most cases, help me to make more money, not spend all the money. So why are you talking to me about all of the money I have to spend with you? Cool? Gonna grow your business. That’s awesome. You don’t have to talk to me about it all the time, though.

So here’s another example. And these examples I’m giving are from representative sites, by the way, and we know there are good people behind them. This is really common. Podia pricing, yeah, no, I figured, because I landed on the page called pricing, pick your plan today or get your free account. You can change plans at any time. Okay, so just the one pricing up there, but then we have in the things you’re going to click pay and pay, pay monthly, pay yearly. And then down below we have buy now, which you’re actually even not going to buy now, you’re going to go into a trial. You’re not even going to spend, sorry, spend any money at this point. So what are we doing for those who are working on pricing pages and for those who aren’t? Probably looks a lot like this. Instead, we want to try actually reminding people of our value on the page. Run your entire digital business from one space. Better. This is our goal. This is the thing that our prospect wants to do. They’re tired of trying to integrate everything. They’re tired of using all the tools. So we have their goal, and then we have the present this is establishing that gap, right?

Instead of signing into dozen a dozen accounts and struggling to integrate them, which is the present state. Now you can grow your small business into a scalable force of etc, behind one login by choosing podia today. This is the value. You sidestep the cost of switching later and avoid a potential loss of revenue along the way. We said nothing on the last page. We said absolutely nothing on I’m going to go back. I’m going to spend the time going back, on this. This is nothing. That’s like words shaped error. It’s nothing. It’s not what anybody needs to see. This is actually going to be something that may stand a chance of connecting with your prospect, reminding them of where they’re at and the problems that they have, and then showing them that the value is here to act now. You don’t have to say, spend a lot of money. Give us your money. Not at all.

Okay, moving through that one last time. Those are the two side by side, just as a reminder. Cool. Now I know we’ve only got 21 minutes. Yeah, this is long, sorry. So what about the actual site of conversion on the pricing page? The pricing table. Okay, let’s take a look at this. Which option do you think the business wants the prospect to choose? Which one? Premium? Why?

Right, it’s doing all the things. It’s giving all the signals. Okay. Now let’s pause for a second. Let’s look at this.

Does anybody know this study Cialdini? Which of these is easier to understand? These are two signs. A, B, left in a park where people were taking out too much petrified wood. They were like emptying the forest.

A. Please leave petrified wood in the park.
B. Please don’t remove petrified wood from the park.

One on the left is easier, or one on the right is easier? Left is easier to understand cool and which one resulted in more people leaving wood in the park? The right. The confusing one did, the one that was like, what I don’t it’s a double negative. I don’t know what it so it’s harder to process. So we are busy trying to make things easy for our prospect, including things we don’t want them to do. So we’ve got, please leave petrified wood in the park easier. I can disagree with you no and walk on please don’t remove petrified wood from the park. And there is a percentage of people who are like, Huh? I don’t know what it means, so I’m just going to drop this wood right here, right now. That’s it.

Now, with that in mind, which of these options is the easiest? Do you think is the easiest to understand without thinking? I know what basic is. Sometimes I don’t mind being basic. Premium, okay, and business, okay? I don’t think I’m business because I’m never business, right? So basic is the easiest one to understand. Now, which one’s easier to understand? Now, there’s a movie now called Elemental. Matt was saying something about Elemental. This is not a word that I use regularly, so when I was like, Oh, just do Elemental. I didn’t know people actually use it. It’s a hard word. It’s harder than basic. Okay, so we can do little things. Matt already said this, the things that work are most often counter intuitive. They’re different from what we think. Try the different thing that’s simply because we are these silly little lizards just trying to make sense of our world really, really quickly. That’s what we can do. Okay? So we can help people with with our copy.

Activation Emails: Problem-Agitation-Solution

All right, we are down to activation emails. Who actively monitors their activation or onboarding emails? Yeah, okay, good, awesome. What are activation? What do you? How do you know what to put in an activation email? In any of the emails that come early on when a new user has just signed up for your solution. Where does that come from? How do you know? We’re going to find out. We’re absolutely going to find out here, and I’ll ask Mark about something else afterward.

But what we have when we first get people to sign up for our solution is a seducible moment. We’re familiar with seducible moments. Its concept been around for a long, long time. People have just said yes to you. That’s huge. They said yes to starting to work with your solution. That’s amazing. So you’re like, they’re all happy, they’re excited. Things are cool, things are going great. And then along comes this, like email, and suddenly it’s a little less exciting, and it feels a little more like work, like your life is ending. Like, why do I have to sit here and read this email? I just want the outcome that I was promised with that copy that said I could do it. So what do we we want to change this. We want to make sure that people are getting good activation emails that bring them back to the joy of it, right? And that doesn’t mean being joyful necessarily, but we want to make sure that they don’t have this thought going on. And activation emails are supposed to do that. All of your emails are really supposed to do that. They have to do that because activation rates are not 100%. We have a lot of work to do in our activation emails. We have a lot of work to do in our product as well, of course, but I can’t do anything about product. I’m a marketer, so I have to work on the email, and we can do that now.

Wistia example

This is an example from Wistia. We did this big activation flow optimization for them a long time ago, not a long time ago, a bit ago, and we’re going to be talking about that in this workshop on Wednesday. I don’t know if any seats are still available in it, but if you want to go through that, we are going to do exactly that and talk through how to get high performing onboarding and activation emails.

Get Prime example

Okay, so once you’ve welcomed them with a message that makes them happy, that initial email, now we have to do the work of actually getting them to go back to the product. So we’re going to talk through not the Wistia emails, but this solution called Get Prime and the emails that we did for them. There where there were big challenges that they were trying to solve with this solution, which was meant to measure engineers. So, this is the email. I’m going to read, the opening to you.

Pull Requests gathering dust? that’s the subject line. Unresolved PRS mean code is dying on the vine. It’s the end of a sprint, and your team seems to have hit a bottleneck. You aren’t sure what or who’s causing the bottleneck, but you know it’s a costly problem to have, and it keeps happening, so you need to address it. But what do you do? You don’t want to assume. You don’t want to start down the path of coaching your team as a whole to up their game. There’s a reason the project has stalled, and you need to know what that reason is. If you’re going to resolve it and prevent repeat occurrences. What if you could see what’s going on under the hood of your engineering team? What if you could show your engineers exactly what’s causing bottlenecks so you can work together to fix it? Data about your engineers lets you predict and prevent bottlenecks.

Okay. This is problem, agitation, solution. The middle part there where we were telling the story of what that looks like in your life, that’s the part that everybody tends to want to cut. It’s taking too much time. It’s doing a lot. That’s the part where the actual work is happening, though, for your prospect, problem is what drove them to you, agitation, eye level examples. So we as marketers like to keep it at high level. You got to bring it down to eye level. Make me see it, help me see it and feel it. Because remember, I want to ignore my problems as much as I possibly can. Our job is to bring that problem to life for them. So they’re like, Okay, fine, book a call, book a call.

And then, of course, how to end the problem? So problem, agitation. There’s a lot there. There’s supposed to be a lot there. It’s an email. It’s one to one. You can do more with email than you may be doing.

And then solution. Now, how we got there.  We have put off talking about Voc long enough it is. It’s my heart. It’s where I go again and again. Here’s how we get to a place where we can write emails that use problem agitation solution with voice of customer data in them. Does anybody use Gong? Chorus? Chorus, OK, all right. I like Chorus, too. I prefer it. OK, cool. Let’s talk after, okay.

So I spend about 20 hours going through demo call recordings, at least 20 hours going through them, manually watching them. Yes, you can get some sort of AI to do this, but I want to be in there. I want to know what the words are. I want to see the people reacting or not reacting to a message, asking a question, a certain way of asking it, all of that kind of stuff. Sit there and observe them. This is the job. It’s a good job as well, because you will learn a lot that you can tell your prospect again and again.

So we’re going to go through, listen, make tons of notes, not clever notes. It doesn’t have to be fancy. There’s no other like spreadsheet to use. It’s just listen and write things down. Put it in quotation marks if the person said it. Put it in all caps, if it’s an insight that you’ve got do whatever it takes for you to then go and be able to organize that date, that voice of customer data across multiple sales calls. So when you are listening, there is, it’s not a spreadsheet, but there’s like a table you can fill in when you’re doing this work of listening to people talk about their problems and what they want solved. And that’s just like look for patterns. This is where you will find out what should go in your emails. Look for patterns.

So in this case, there’s a CTO of Asana on a sales call. The CTO unresolved pull request came up first. This is the first challenge a good salesperson will make sure that the call runs well as well. And then there was this question of like, codes dying on the vine and that sort of thing. So we fill that in for everybody. Summarized messages. We’re keeping the voice of customer itself, the actual copy that we can refer to later. But this is just to figure out what to say. And then we look for patterns, really straightforward stuff here, right? If someone keeps saying unresolved pull requests, when are they saying it? How important is it? Okay, it’s coming up a lot. Every single person said it or something like it, and it’s coming up early in the flow. This could be 2020, points wide, by the way. It doesn’t sound like it just goes to five.

So our takeaway messages about unresolved pull requests come up early in demos for our leads. Great, the good leads, they likely then need to appear early in the email flow. This is a no brainer, right? It just doesn’t happen. Then we keep going through, okay, remote work struggle, struggles. Okay, well, only about half of our leads were talking about the struggles of remote work, but two of them talked about it really early on. So maybe there’s an opportunity here for segmentation, for this sort of person. What else can we learn about these sorts of people and segment them out? Or even have somebody just send a manual one? One email for this particular type of person.

Then out of that, we use problem, agitation, solution, again and again to write these emails, to drive them to book, a demo, book, a call, do whatever the next step is that we want them to take. I’m not going to read these. Don’t worry. I’m not going to read through all of them, but they all use problem agitation solution, the patterns in sales demos, which most of us have recordings of today and just have to sit down with. Those are what drive, what goes inside that activation campaign, what it’s all about. So here’s what the emails are. Here’s the order to put them in – problem, agitation, solution. Drop their messages right in those parts exactly what people are saying. Voila, you got yourself an email, and that is it. So, and I mean exactly what they’re saying.

Marketers love to summarize, stop it. So we have things like code is dying on the vine. That might be something that is obvious to engineers, that obviously, we don’t want code dying on the vine, but we have to say it, say the actual words, and then that matches what your prospect is thinking in the words that they are using. You aren’t sure what or who is causing the bottleneck that came directly from it. What’s going on under the hood of your engineering team that’s directly from it. Someone on your team commits 300 plus lines of code at once directly from it.

Confirmation Page: Match-Tease-Trigger

Okay, wrapping up with the last one, which is a confirmation page. Does anybody have thank you pages, confirmation pages that they’re using? Yeah? For what? Okay, so for a lead magnet, yeah, okay, using them in product. When someone clicks an activation email, where do they go? Usually, back to product, right? How do you feel about that? Good? It’s a good experience? Yeah? Everybody’s happy? You can tell my tone. yeah? No?

Okay, so confirmation pages are dramatically under used. We work on life cycle emails for brands, and it’s always a fight to get it not to drive right back to product. God, I don’t know why you can build a landing page and then that landing page just drives them into product. I don’t understand. But there’s, like, this reluctance. So let’s try to get over it. We want to add pages that bridge the gap between your email, the thing that where you just problem, agitation, solution. They’re stoked, they’re ready for the solution. And then you, like, drop them into, like, the dashboard, which doesn’t have the solution in it. So we want an interstitial page. Try this. Try this. Because why not?

Okay, there has never been a case ever where I’ve been like, No, we don’t need to tell the people anymore, just drop them wherever you feel like, dropping them in the product. We want to add that page. Okay, so this is what it normally looks like. You’ve got an email and then your product. We need to add in this page. If I’m not making that clear, you can do so much with this page to get your user more ready for things. So these pages can do a ton of heavy lifting.

Here is one thing that you should test. We can reframe upgrading and paying. We all want them to upgrade. We all want them to pay. We’re scared to say it. We don’t know how to do it. So we just like hope and then hope for the best, right? We can reframe that whole, the whole idea, so people don’t feel sold to as much. Any, any history buffs in the room? Anybody who loves Napoleon? Napoleon. I don’t know people love weird things, so maybe. I hope not, because I’m going to butcher this story.

But, so Napoleon’s out fighting. There’s a fight going on, a battle, a war, and they have these areas called batteries. Those are the places where like battles happen. Some are really deadly. Some are less deadly. So it’s like an area that you man. Okay, so there’s this one particularly dangerous zone right about there. And of course, the highway to it is there. We’ve got ourselves a danger zone. Nobody wants, nobody wants to be set up in the danger zone. Nobody. They’re like everybody who goes there dies. I’m not doing it. I’ll go here. I’ll go here. I’ll manage people, even I’ll go over here and do that. So what does Napoleon, the great copywriter, you didn’t know that, but it’s true, says, let’s put some strategic copy over at this danger zone. What should we do? What if we, like, reframed the danger zone? What if instead, we called it this – Battery of the men without fear. It was manned from that point on, everybody died. But it had people there the whole time from that point on.

Okay, so what can we do? We can qualify. We can actually sort of get our users to feel like they’re qualified for an upgrade. They may eventually qualify for the upgrade. We want to get them jacked about that, basically. And this is how – match, tease, trigger.

Okay, if you are using confirmation pages, then on the confirmation page for a thing that you just asked a person to do. You can put a really quick video, which might sound like, what, but video sales letters work gangbusters, and this is just a very short video sales letter where you’re going to tease future unlocks and upgrades. So you know what the future upgrade is that you want them to want. We’re just going to get them ready for it by helping them understand how they can qualify for it.

Match. You just did this thing. Cool. You just did this very cool thing. You can also do this other thing, and here’s how you’ll know when it’s time to do that thing. Match what they did, tease that next cool thing they could do and help them know when they will qualify for that thing. This is a very short script using match-trigger, tease or tease-trigger. They can go both ways, but this is match-tease-trigger.

Hey, you just added your first team member to your account, which means you can start sharing tasks with them, assigning goals, hitting deadlines or matching and check this out as you start using product name, more chances are good that you’ll want to start connecting rewards to task completions. Okay, we’re teasing something here. Brands like these guys asked us to build in this exact feature, and we did, and here’s how you’ll know when it’s time for your company to activate it, after the third project is completed.

Cool, when your team has used a vanji to finish three projects, not just tasks, but projects, we’re really qualifying them here, you’ll know you’re in a great place to activate rewards. We will even reach out to you to let you know the time has come. And then here’s the outcome of that. So it’s not desperately trying to, like, sell them into this rewards thing. It’s saying, one day you might be ready for this, and when that happens, we’ll be here for you. And here’s how to know when that happens. Qualify for the upgrade. It’s really simple. Copy can do this to pre sell people on a thing.

That is the end of the frameworks. Here they are one last view, and we’ve got three minutes for questions.

Joanna Wiebe

Joanna, founder of Copyhackers, is on a mission to help 5,000 copywriters make $1million per year. (Each). For nearly 2 decades, Joanna has helped small businesses and ginormous companies write effective, high-converting web copy, increase sign-ups, paid conversions & upgrades. 

She’s from a family of seven kids and now lives in Kelowna, BC where she de-stresses by writing fiction and going on wine tours near her house. She adores Latin, grammar and general word-geekiness.

She believes:

• Your copy is what turns browsers into buyers
• You can write your own high-converting web copy
• You just need a little guidance to get you there

More from Joanna.

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