High Converting Copy is Hiding in Your Reviews
Hello I’m Shane and welcome to another issue of The CRO Weekly where each week I explore how to build a high converting Ecommerce store. If you’re not subscribed, join 256 other smart folks by subscribing here:
Your reviews are a gold mine of customer research.
In between all of the ‘this is good’ type reviews you’ll get an essay written from a customer explaining their initial hesitations, how they overcame them, and what their favorite part of your product is.
While you can dig through your reviews for these insights (I do this for every project) there’s a way to analyze all of your reviews for great ideas in minutes.
How? You run a frequency analysis.
Which is just a fancy way of saying - let’s find the most common things people say in our reviews. I’m going to give you an example of this in action and then show you how to do it.
Looking at an example
For a brand that sells personal safety products I did a frequency analysis on their ~2,000 reviews. Interestingly enough, here’s the first thing I saw:
The exact phrase ‘I hope I never have to use it’ is repeated in 9 reviews! Then other variations of the same phrase are repeated dozens of times.
That may not seem like much but think about it. Only a fraction of customers leave a review. Of that fraction of customers, a meaningful percentage of them used almost the exact same phrase. This gives us a hint that this idea is on the mind of customers as they’re thinking about buying.
Let’s think about the phrase “I hope I never have to use it”.
People are buying something they hope they never have to use?
That’s definitely interesting. I took note of this and thought it should definitely be used in the copy on their site.
In the meantime, I shared the research with Susan Wenograd who handles all of their paid advertising (and does a damn good job at it). We never spoke about it but I recently asked her what some of their best performing ads were (another great way to get high converting website copy but that’s for another post).
She told me that an ad with the headline “We Created a Product We Hope You Never Have to Use” was their best performing ad for the month. Where did she get the idea? From digging through the research!
Of course the research only gets credit for sparking the idea, not the execution. But Susan took the idea, wrote a great headline and created a video to go with it and it turned into a top performing ad.
I know I know… this newsletter is about CRO not advertising. But the truth is that the quality of your traffic is going to have a massive impact on your conversion rate. Just ask anyone who’s ever tried to sell products to people that come in through their blog.
Initially the brand hated the idea of running that headline at first. They were basically like - why would we ever say that to people? But after some convincing Susan ran the test and once again we learn that listening to your customers wins out over personal opinions.
Here’s how to do this yourself
Doing this only takes 5 minutes. Go to your review tool of choice and export all of your reviews to a csv.
Load up google sheets, import the CSV, and copy every cell containing the review:
Head to this free Text Analyzer and paste in the reviews:
This will give you a list of any set of words used in the same order that appear in your reviews more than once. For example, if one review says ‘the smell is fantastic’ and another says ‘the smell is great’ this tool will tell you that ‘the smell is’ appears twice.
Go through this list and mark down anything that looks interesting. Then take the best ideas and run with them.
That’s all for today! If you enjoyed this piece, please do me a favor and let me know on Twitter: