Simple Copywriting Tips & Research That Generate Online Traffic

Copywriting is vital for every e-commerce operation out there. However, people don’t talk about copywriting other than product description for some reason. It has various uses from value propositions, microcopy, Facebook ads, and promotional emails. E-commerce businesses rely on copywriting to capture attention and convert visitors into buyers.

Many companies don’t, however, conduct thorough copywriting research when creating their content. So we here at DropshipUS thought we would list down our copywriter tips for you so that you can create genuinely engaging content. The goal for us is to ensure you can craft persuasive copy and improve conversions. So let’s begin!

Defining Your Audience

One of the first copywriter tips we want to talk about is defining your audience. Finding out audience and segment insights will give you valuable information about what people like and how you should write your copies. There are four main segments you need to explore to define your audience. Here they are:

Abandoned Carts: Understanding why people abandon carts will help you write copies. Cart abandonment has been normalized for some reason, but remember that it isn’t normal. Understanding pre-conversion friction like anxieties, fears, frustrations, ETC. will help you tackle the problems with poignant copies.

New Customers: When you start exploring new customers, you will see more of that pre-conversion friction. Find out why they are not buying from you but are buying from your competitors. Understand what they find frustrating about your checkout process. All these things will help you better define your value proposition, which will help you better optimize your copies.

Repeat Customers: Exploring this segment will help you understand which products pair well, understand the buying cycle, and find what the customer lifecycle looks like.

Inactive Customers: When exploring this segment, you will understand the lifetime value and retention cycle for customers. You can then use it to optimize your copies and edit your paid ad spend plans. Mainly you will find how many times they bought from you and why they stopped buying from you, along with what else you could have done to bring them back.

Here the segments we wrote about are all generic and could be applied to any e-commerce stores out there. However, you can discover new segments according to your specific business. You can make audience segments based on product categories and based on “the last bought from” timelines.

Setting your goals is vital when you are exploring your audience for copywriting research. To find out which questions you want to be answered and then work backward from there.

You Need Qualitative Research

When you know what you want and understand what your audience you need can start your research. Qualitative research takes in customer opinions and helps you design your copies accordingly. You can even incorporate the feedback right into your copy as well. There are four main ways you can conduct thorough qualitative research for your business. They are:

• Internal interviews
• Customer interviews
• Surveys
• Testimonial/review mining

Now that you know what to do, let’s talk about these aspects in a little more detail. So let’s talk about how you can conduct thorough qualitative copywriting research.

Conduct Internal Interviews

You might think that the first step to research might be talking to your audience, but that isn’t the case at all. The first step to doing some thorough copywriting research is to ask your sales and support team about what they face regularly. If you want to ask your audience insightful questions, you have to know what they have been asking. Some of the questions you may want to find out from your sales and support staff are:

• What are the most frequently asked questions by visitors?
• What are the visitors frustrated about?
• What are the visitors looking to solve when visiting your website?
• What benefits do the visitors want when visiting the website?
• What are the most common objections you get from people when buying things from you?
• How do you present the questions correctly when talking to them?

When asking these questions, you should go over your support logs. Depending on the volume, you may need to go over the last 3–6 months of records. Ensure you highlight all the recurring questions, pains, benefits, objections, frustrations, and any other pertinent information. Remember that you have to talk to all the people in the front-lines to understand all you need about your customers, and then and only then can you move on to conducting surveys.

Conducting Surveys

The right survey can tell you a lot about your audience and give you immense insights into understanding how you can build your business. There are two types of surveys, one is on-site surveys, and the other is customer surveys.

Both of these will help you understand the initial purchase decision, and this is why you must incorporate them into your copywriting research. When designing your surveys, you should follow a few best practices. They are as follows:

When asking questions, less is more: Do you know what you do when taking online surveys yourself? If you do, then using that as a barometer for your surveys will help you create the perfect surveys. As a general rule of thumb, we suggest you go with 3–5 questions for customer surveys and 1–2 questions for on-site surveys.

Yes/no and multiple-choice questions don’t offer much insight: While yes and no or multiple-choice questions provide quantitative values, you need more than that. Remember, you are conducting copywriting research, so you need to hear the voice of the customer. This is why you need open-ended questions because they offer greater insight into the customer’s mind.

However, your audience might not trust you enough to provide you with valuable insights. So you may want to try the “foot in the door” method where you ask yes/no questions followed by an open-ended question. When you do that, your audience may be obligated to answer the questions.

Don’t Let Your Bias Set In: We are all a little biased, and you always have to be aware of it and don’t let it set into the surveys you create. There are a few biases you need to look out for:

• Experimenter Bias- This is where you unknowingly communicate what you expect the results to be through a leading question.
• Confirmation Bias- This is where you interpret the data you gathered and translate it according to your existing beliefs or hypothesis while ignoring data that informs otherwise.
• Curse of Knowledge- When you know something well, it becomes hard to relate to other people’s problems. For example, you may find it hard to connect to customers who discover your site’s UI because you are used to it.
• Selection bias- This means you conduct a survey and use a representative sample, proper randomization can’t be achieved like this, and the result you get won’t be accurate.

Now eliminating all the biases might be impossible, but you can mitigate the biases so that the results are not corrupted. Take preventative measures and start creating your surveys accordingly.

Relevancy Reigns Supreme: When you have defined your audience and segments, you will have a better understanding of what is relevant, and that is vital to your surveys. You need to know how to ask the right question to the right person at the right time.

Keeping Things Simple: Remember you want raw answers meaning you don’t want your audience to think about your questions. When phrasing your question, it’s always better to keep things simple. Create short sentences, eliminate jargon, and focus on clarity.

Sample Size Matters: Selection bias can be damaging to your survey, and if you have a small sample size, you will never be able to get the right results that will help you build your business. You cannot merely work with 20–25 responses to your surveys, especially if they are from only one product category. Typically, you will need at least 250 responses from different categories if you want the survey results to identify trends and patterns accurately.

You have to keep open rates and response rates in mind: when designing your surveys, you have to make sure the audience has an incentive to open the survey. Let them know you are asking this because you want to improve their experience. Also, make sure it’s not a long process as well.

Customer Interviews

If you are only starting your business, you know it will take a long time to generate 250 responses to your questions. However, that doesn’t mean you start asking yes/no questions. You have to make sure you only invest time talking to people who can offer you the right information. Stay within the segments that will help you generate valuable insights.

Segments like purchases, purchase frequency, demographics, and others like this will help you find the right sort of customers to interview. Customer interviews are a hybrid of user testing and surveys. So when conducting copywriter research using the old “who, what, when, where, why, and how” questions still work like a charm.

Contextual inquiry is imperative to understand what your customers feel about your business, so using tools like Skype or Google Hangouts will help your cause. Remember to record the interviews so that you don’t have to worry about taking notes during the interview.

Once you are done with the interview, you can analyze the data, organize, and cluster responses into your spreadsheet. Don’t worry if you are not great at customer interviews. It takes time, and you will get there the more you do it. As you do more interviews, you will understand how best to communicate with different types of people and ask poignant questions.

Mining Testimonials & Reviews

Third-party sites are filled with testimonials, reviews, and complaints, and it can be valuable for copywriting. If you are looking for tips as a copywriter, you should go and mine for insights on these third-party sites because the feedback you will find here is usually unsolicited, meaning they are less biased.

When you tap into the customer’s voice from these sites, you will be able to make your copies stronger and more persuasive. A simple Google search can tell you a lot about what people think about your business. However, you may not find much information if you are a new business.

But if you are a dropshipping business, you can efficiently research the product and get your copywriting tips from the reviews. You can also search for reviews on Facebook, Twitter, online creative/craft groups, and different forums because they are places people talk about locally. So make sure you take all of these into account when doing copywriting research.

Identifying Patterns

You spent so much time gathering so much data from your users and audience. All the data you collected now rests within your well-organized spreadsheets. The next step for your copywriting research is to understand what all the data is saying, and for that, you need to identify the patterns within the data. Make sure you check for words and phrases that pop up often.

Also, look out for objections, products, benefits, questions, pain points, points of friction on the site, and other things that get repeated in the data every so often. You are doing this because you are trying to understand how the segment speaks but be careful not to let your bias creep in. Once you are done identifying the data and understanding what your audience is telling you, you can create persuasive copies for your growth strategies.

Understanding The Importance & Creating The Wireframe

When you are writing a data-informed, customer-driven copy for a product page or your ads campaign, you need to find out which messages you need to prioritize. We are giving you copywriter tips that will help you generate copies that convert, meaning we understood what you needed from us.

What this means is that we did our own copywriting research and found out what our audience meaning You wanted to know about the most. This is precisely what you have to do. You need to read the data you have collected and find frequent pain points or benefits or questions that pop up frequently.

These are the things you should be prioritizing when creating your copies if you want them to start converting. When you have derived a concept from your data, the next step is to create a wireframe for the content. A wireframe is basically a plan of action, and when you have that, all you need to do is get to work and create fantastic copies for your business.

Copywriter Tips That Work

So there you have it, that’s all the tips you need to create highly engaging copies that convert. Remember that you have to conduct thorough copywriting research to find the right approach when creating a strategy for copies that work.

However, all that effort will never see any results if you have a website that isn’t up to the task. That is where our team at DropshipUSA can help you. We build highly engaging websites with innovative designs and features for dropshipping entrepreneurs.

So if you want to talk about designing a website that sells, then get in touch, or if you have any copywriting tips for us, then feel free to drop them in the comments below or hit us up on our socials. And with that being said, we arrive at the end. We will come back with something new for you soon. Until then, see ya!

Originally posted in: https://dropshipusa.io/blogs/news/copywriting-tips-and-research-that-generate-online-traffic