Validating Copy and Improving Conversion Rates with Chris Silvestri

Chris Silvestri is the founder of Conversion Alchemy - an agency that helps B2B SaaS companies increase conversions by matching your copy with the conversation already happening in your customers' heads. In this episode, he shares:

• his process for matching a brand's website copy to the thoughts and expectations of their target audience
• How usability testing is a valuable tool for validating copy and improving conversion rates
• why one should consider using AI models to gain insights and inform copywriting decisions

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Previous guests include: Arvid Kahl of FeedbackPanda, Andrei Zinkevich of FullFunnel, Scott Van den Berg of Influencer Capital, Buster Franken of Fruitpunch AI, Valentin Radu of Omniconvert, Evelina Necula of Kinderpedia, Ionut Vlad of Tokinomo, Diana Florescu of MediaforGrowth, Irina Obushtarova of Recursive, Monika Paule of Caszyme, Yannick Veys of Hypefury, Laura Erdem of Dreamdata, and Pija Indriunaite of CityBee.

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Transcript

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Do we need to leave the tab open at the end? Is it the same as my system? can finish the upload so when I close the recording yeah just leave it open for a little while Okay. And, I guess one quick question before, or just one, one thing real quick. You had mentioned in your signup form that you could use some help with LinkedIn, audience awareness building or whatever. If you're interested, I know somebody who's really good with that. Her name is Clinta. I think she's let the weenie in, but she's really good at that. That's all she does. So if you, I can see your website and if you're interested in being introduced to her, I can make the introduction. Cool. Thank you. All right. Here we go. You ready? All right, Chris, welcome to the show. How you doing? Hey, Erik, thanks so much. Great to be here. Yeah, no, excited to have you. We're going to talk about copy and conversion writing. Here's some of the examples that you've done working with various clients. But before we do that, I want the audience to know a little bit about you. So I have some rapid fire questions for you. Just give me the first thing that pops into your head. Are you ready? Yeah, I'm not great with these, but let's go and see. Okay, fill in the blank. I grew up in this city and my favorite thing about this city was blank. this is easy. I grew up in Italy, Modena, and my favorite thing about that is food. Lasagne. I don't know if you saw this, but last week I think it was Slovakia playing Italy in the Euro cup and a lot of Slovakian fans had the dry spaghetti and they were breaking it in front of the Italian fans. Yeah. Yeah. man. That was funny. Okay. Next question for you. What is the best advice your mom or dad ever gave you? Probably from my dad, follow your passion, which, so my dad was a musician back in Italy. And that probably gave me some confidence in pursuing what I wanted to do rather than what like society kind of established for me. Good, good. All right, all right. Next question for you. What is the craziest thing you ever did either to save money or make money? Probably to save money, I can say as the first month that I moved to the UK, I found out this amazing place called Iceland, which if you tell any British person what that is, they kind of cringe, but it's basically one of those like supermarkets where they have everything frozen. So what I decided to do was, okay, I'm going to live for my first few months out of all this stuff, which basically it's one pound, one dollar meals. Everything frozen, lasagna frozen, everything frozen. So I stuffed my freezer with all that stuff. And I mean, it was, I realized that it's not super healthy maybe, but it allowed me to understand, okay, if like worst case scenario, I can live for one pound a day out of this stuff. Yeah, now I've never heard of that store. Man, I wonder if they have frozen lattes. Yeah, I was in London like I was there like two or three months ago and I got a latte and it was like five pounds. And for me, I was like, shit, that's like seven, eight dollars. You go broke if you get two lattes a day. man, I'm with you on that. I can buy a frozen dinner and take it back to the hotel and see if they can reheat it for me. and crazy thing like they even they even deliver stuff to your home. So if you if you don't want to carry your bag, boom, get stuff from the liver. All right. And it's called Iceland. Okay. All right. Good to know. Okay. Last rapid fire question for you. What is a, what is a meal that a partner, your partner, or maybe a good friend or somebody close to you really enjoys, but you, you hate it. You can't stand it. Hmm. Let me think about it a bit. Probably licorice. So licorice is probably the only thing that I hate. And yeah, my mom, she's from Holland. So she goes crazy for like licorice desserts, licorice like candies. And I hate it. Like it's the only thing that I cannot stand. I didn't know the Dutch like liquorice. Okay. Yeah. No, I'm with you, man. When I first had it, I'm like, who in the hell eats this crap? I mean, ugh, it's just that taste. It's, And did you try sambuca? So sambuca has the same kind of flavor, taste profile. And I ate it. No, no, the Dutch are not really well known for their cuisine. Mmm, no. That's true. Yeah. I mean, if it's going to be between the Italian, you know, meals versus the Dutch meals, I'll take a hundred percent. The Italian mills all day. Okay. Hey, let's talk a little bit about copywriting. What are some common mistakes that you see B2B companies make with their website copy and how do you address those mistakes? Yeah, so some of the main ones that come to mind are around their homepage copy, because that's the first thing that people see when they land on your website. And the biggest mistake that I see comes when it comes to writing your value proposition. So the first thing that you see on the page, typically the above the fold section, a lot of companies start with saying what they do, who they are, like mentioning their brand. A lot of time you see those like dynamic headlines with different words changing that no visitor actually waits enough time to be able to read all the variants. So that's not a great idea. But the main mistake that they make is that thinking that when people land on their website, they instantly want to know who the company is and what it does. And what I actually tell all of them, clients that I work with and what I try to do with their copy. It's basically the first thing that you should do on the homepage is to match what people are thinking when they land on the page. So because everyone lands on the page with, if they are your target clients, customers, they land on your homepage with expectations, with problems that they're thinking about, with goals that they want to achieve. Right. So, so that's the first thing that you should actually do on the page. which is match what they're thinking. Second, it's probably trying to speak to one single person on that homepage, rather than trying to match all the different personas that you are solving for, that you are helping. And you can do it like a lot of people would think has the homepage as kind of a landing page, which is a page where you send traffic to from ads from different sources that are typically more segmented. So you can speak to one single person on a landing page. When on the homepage, it's much better to try to speak to all the different types of decision makers, especially if you're in B2B, you know, you have buying committees. So you have to try and speak to the different pain points and you can do it because the homepage should actually be a place where they understand, okay, this is for me. You do it with... it this way, which is better, unique, different. And then the goal is to send them to individual pages that basically show them and explain how you solve their specific pain points or with the ultimate goal or signing up, converting. So that's the second one. How many were there or was it a number? I, I was thinking maybe a fun exercise here. I don't know if you've ever been to my website. I've got a website, b2bpodpros .com. If you want to check, check it out b2bpodpros .com. I'm basically, helping SaaS brands grow their, their reach by reaching new audiences through b2b podcasters, through b2b podcast advertising and sponsorships. And so. I'm wondering if you have any feedback for my headline copy. I think it speaks to the overall general, you know, population of visitors who are coming to my site, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe, you know, I don't want anybody to be confused. so let me know. I mean, grade me. Is it an, is it an, is it an A, a B, a C, a D, an F? I mean, feel free. You let me know. Be candid. What do you think? Okay, so I'm on it now looking at the homepage it says we help SAS marketers connect with their target audience via reputable B2B podcasters Raise awareness save 10 plus hours a week and generate high quality leads with our done for you podcast and campaign measurement service for SAS brands So I like it first thing I have to say that I like it that I understand what this is And, but at the same time, as I was mentioning before, you are also helping me with, like if I was your target audience, what I would be thinking was, I want to connect with these people. I want to reach the target audience. I'm still not sure how, so you basically connect the two factors, which is good. You know, sales marketers, probably the, the only thing that I would try to improve or test at least. would be rather than speaking from a we do X, Y, Z standpoint, just write the copy as if you were like literally writing their thought process. So you could basically just say, connect with your target audience via reputable B2B podcasters. So like simplest change that you can make. And then you could include the SaaS marketers if you wanted to help them identify with it in the sub head. So the main ones, the message is a bit clearer and more impactful. But yeah, I mean, overall, first impression, it's pretty clear. And also I like down the page that you have, there's a difference between the spray method and a strategic method. So you help me kind of understand, okay, this is the problem, help me understand it, how we contribute. So yeah, the other thing maybe. other piece of advice is since you are starting with the problem, like the difference between these two different approaches, one thing that you could test would be to start with the problem right up front in the headline rather than giving them the solution right away. So if you think that they need education on understanding the problem and the difference within these two approaches, maybe another approach that you can take for the page is to start with the problem at the top. and then introduce the solution after. Yeah, overall solid 7, 8 out of 10, I would say. If I can give you a rating. all right. I got my arms up like Rocky here. Now that's not even, that wasn't the first try. There's been many, many different iterations and different copy changes that I've made. So I've been at this for probably seven or eight months now. And it's good to hear a professional copywriter say that, hey, it's clear. I understand what it does. And that's the main thing that I'm going for. All right. All right. Great. Good, good, good. Okay. Now tell us about your research process. Like, are there any methods that you use to understand the psychology of the target audience when you're, when you're helping out a client? Mm -hmm. Yes. So a lot of what I do is also a combination of messaging strategy, conversion copywriting, and also UX design. So before going full -time on conversion copywriting, I worked for two years at a design branding agency, but also we later turned into a usability testing startup. So for people who don't know usability testing, there are a couple of platform platforms that do it, but you can do it also in person. It's basically having someone that it's typically in your target audience, looking at your copy, website, marketing materials, and basically recording their thought process as they look through it. They tell you, okay, this resonates. This, I'm not entirely clear on what this means. And you can basically understand why people might not be converting on your website by looking at these user testing. The thing is a lot of user testing, typically it's made for product design, so app design, right? So to understand how to improve the flow inside an app, to understand how people use the app to make it more user friendly. But there's also, with conversion copywriting, the side of user testing that's basically designed to help you understand how people think. what's their thought process as they read your copy. And so I worked at this agency and I've learned all that I needed to know about UX design. And I trying to integrate it into the copywriting work that I do. So a lot of my research involves in running these usability testing studies as well, but also all the common research methodologies that you see in copywriting. So I typically divide it into three, separate areas. So there's the internal research, which is when I interview my client, their team. So it's typically interviewing the founder, marketing, product teams, support and sales. So I try to have those conversations to understand what's happening inside. And also if everyone's aligned internally. And I might also jump into customer support chats just to see how they are interacting. with customers. Then the second area, it's the customer side of the equation, which I also divide into the prospect side. So people who are might be the target audience, but are still not customers and the customer side. So that you get the before and after picture of that transformation that needs to happen. And those can be customer interviews, surveys, reading, reviews. of the product or the service online and analyzing them for different themes, values that people list. The third area is the market side. So looking at competitors, looking at their messaging, positioning, what their claims are and what kind of messaging we should maybe steer clear of or maybe include as well if we see that it's important for the audience. And also looking at reviews of competitors. So looking at what people appreciate or don't like about competitor solutions. With these three, you basically get like a pretty accurate picture of the themes that you should include in the copy, what kind of pain points, motivations, desired outcomes that you need to address. And also how to lay out the copy, which is another important aspect that comes from that UX research, because I think it's not only the language they use, but also the flow, the visual hierarchy they use for the website that's important, how people consume the page, I think is as important as the messaging they use. So yeah, this is pretty much... Yeah, I was going to ask you about that because of your design background. I was wondering, is there a lot of research into, for example, the type of font that is actually used for the copy? Do you spend a lot of time on that? Does that matter? I don't spend a lot of time on the specific fonts just because my final product with my work, it's basically wireframes that are non -branded, non -designed. So I try to keep them as simple as possible so that my clients focus on the actual copy and the messaging that we use to understand it first before sending it to a designer. But I can say that if it's not the font that I pay attention to, it's the messaging and visual hierarchy. So it's important to follow the specific sequence of how people read and consume the copy, right? So if you have an H1 headline and then a subhead and then different crossheads, H3 with their own paragraphs, it's important that people read them the way that I designed them because that's where... what the research dictated. So yeah, that's probably the thing that I would pay attention to. It's not the fonts, it's the hierarchy and the priority. Okay, so you have your research methods. And let's say you now understand a little bit more about not just the brand, but from the founder perspective, also from the psychological standpoint of the target audience. How do you validate the copy? I mean, before you do a co -pick a campaign or after you launch a campaign, just to make sure that it's resonating with the audience. Like, can you share, maybe there's some different tools that you use or just what's your approach to this? Yeah, so there are a couple of tools. So you could test copy directly on the wireframe. So even before designing anything finalized, which is pretty good because it's not expensive and it's pretty fast. And the way you could do it would be to either have other interviews with your customer base. So like clearly having Zoom calls, basically with them, showing them the page and asking them questions on it and see how they... how they consume it. The other option, it's five second tests, which there are other, like some of those usability testing platforms allow you to do those, which is basically showing a certain audience, which you try to make as close as possible to your own target audience. You basically have them look at your value proposition. It's typically just a value proposition because it's focused on clarifying your main messaging. angle or positioning. So you show them the first headline that you have on the page, like the one we talked about for your website for five seconds. And after the five seconds, they basically have to close the page and tell you what they think and what they remember about that copy. So it gives you an idea of, okay, this was clear. Maybe this specific word is not clear enough. I need to understand, I need to adjust it. So that's another test that you could do before launching. There are, especially for B2B, it's quite hard to do usability testing because, you know, when you are writing to, you know, CFOs, CMOs or IT people, it's hard to find in those usability testing platforms, the audience that's as close as possible to them, just because these people are busy and they're not working on as testers on usability testing platforms. So there are a couple of specialized platform for this. One, it's Wynter, W -Y -N -T -E -R. And it's a pretty well -known platform in B2B because they recruit some of these B2B people to do these tests. The only downside is that it's quite expensive just because you have to pay some of those execs to do these tests. But... If you want to do one test every once in a while, it's pretty indicative and you don't need a lot of people to test. These are probably the main methods. Another one, which if you design the page and launch it live, then a quick test and you can start setting up. It's installing Hotjar. Hotjar is one of the platforms, but basically heatmaps. Those heatmaps that let you track and see where people click, how they move. page and you can also record actual recordings of people using the website. So with those, if you typically let it run for one or two weeks and you have substantial traffic or you can send some traffic to it for the test, you can basically start seeing how people consume the page, where they click, what they read typically because they hover with the mouse on specific pieces of copy. So you can get an idea of what they pay attention to at least. And yeah, so these are probably the main types of testing. One that I'm kind of experimenting with still, and it can be a hot take, but so far I found it pretty valuable, which is testing with AI. So people are starting to call this synthetic research. Another way that I call it, it's empathy engineering, which I'm also writing a bit about lately. It is basically, so imagine this, so AI models like TGPT or Gemini or cloud, all those language, large language models, they basically have been trained with all the human knowledge on the internet, right? So even posts on Reddit, where a lot of people write like very personal stuff. So these language models know a lot of stuff. So my thought process was, okay, these. kind of know how we humans think in a way. So what if I give them all the research that I conducted for my clients so that we basically restrict the field of information that they need to look at. And they also know more about the product, about the audience. And then with all that, I instruct the language model to impersonate my customer and think as if they were the customer, right? Basically, I have the AI wear my customer shoes. And then I basically just ask them questions. I show them the copy that I write and tell me what it thinks about it. So I've been trying with it, especially if you have models that you can feed a lot of information to, like a good one is Gemini 1 .5, which has a super large context window, which is like the amount of information that you can give it. And it's been working pretty well. I have to say I've been trying for some clients, a couple of different personas, and I've been trying to feed it like different types of alternatives, or headlines and copy. And the feedback that it actually gives me is pretty close to what an actual customer would tell me. So it's kind of like a bit of more indirect approach to writing copy because I don't have it write the copy for me yet. At least it's not as good. but it can inform the copy that you write because it's basically part of the research process. And it can also be a super cheap and fast way to test because you are not paying anything except the membership to the subscription to the AI and it gives you results instantly. Interesting, interesting. Now imagine, you're, let's just say you're a B2B marketer or you're working at a SaaS startup. There's only like maybe at the most three marketers on the team. You're, you've got a lot of different plates that you're juggling and you want to do some testing and you can only use one tool and you just don't have a lot of time to spend on that tool. Which tool would you recommend for that person? Yeah, so I would probably go first usability testing because it's probably the fastest one of realistic tools. If you can't interview your customers, if you have two to three weeks and already have customers, I would definitely go with just customer interviews because the qualitative insights that they give you, it's much worth the time and kind of the effort that it takes you. rather than sending surveys with a couple of short answers or check boxes. So customer interviews, I'll probably go with those. Second, usability testing. And third, if you don't even have customers and you're an early stage startup, then I would try the AI approach that I just walked through. Yeah, for the usability testing, which tool do you like? There is usertesting .com is the biggest one, but recently they are moving towards enterprise. So there's another one which is called the usability hub, but I think they changed name and now they are called something else. But if you search for usability hub, you should find it. There's another one that I've used. It's called user feel. And it's also pretty simple and not super expensive. So that's good. Good. All right. All right. You got it. All right. One last question for you. Can you give us some examples where you improve the conversion rates in the copy for a few different clients? Do you remember some of the copy that you changed, you know, before and after? Yeah. So there was one example. It was a platform for basically Instagram growth. And we didn't really only improve the copy. So we wrote the copy for the whole website, but they also had a super complex pricing structure. So they had, I know, eight different tiers and the plan names weren't really clear. They were also super redundant. So it basically imagine like you have eight tiers and basically from one tier to the other is basically the same increase in features numbers. So there wasn't really a reason for people to choose one or the other based on their needs pain points. So the big win of that project was also by doing that research that I walked you through was also understanding, okay, which... pricing tiers and plans would make more sense for people to use. And how do we message them, right? So throughout the copy. So we basically moved, I think from those eight tiers down to three with one that was kind of like an add -on or an upsell. So that was good. I think that increased conversion by itself by 10, 15%. And also, The biggest thing in messaging there was to turn that experience rather than... It was very transactional just because people were paying for increasing growth on those platforms. It was a mix of a service, a mix of AI. So it was very transactional. What we turned that into more with the messaging and copy was we understood that people... these kind of like wannabe influencers wanted to kind of have some guidance, be on a journey through to their growth as well and learn more about how to do it as well. So we basically turned that the copy into like a story, a journey that carried them through through their landing on the page and understanding the service and then understanding how that service moved them through that. the journey to becoming a potential influencer. So that's one, that was one of the big changes that we made. Okay. All right. All right. That the first one reminds me of the study where I think people were shopping in a grocery store and they had like 20 different samples of jam or jelly to try, but they were just overloaded with too many choices and they didn't really find one that they really enjoyed. Whereas another stand only had like three jams and people really, they found, I really like this jam. You know, the sample size was much smaller, but they found a lot more enjoyment from that. All right, Chris, listen, thanks so much for coming on to the show. Where can people learn more about you? Yeah, so I typically write on LinkedIn. I'm also on Twitter, but not so much lately and on my website conversionalchemy .net I have a newsletter where you can learn copywriting in five minutes a week and I also have a podcast if you are Especially if you are in B2B SaaS, that's my main audience, but you can also learn a lot from other copywriting pros SEOs marketers in general so That's a good resource if you want to. All right. I'll put links to his LinkedIn profile in the website, in the show notes. And for those listening, if you enjoyed this hit the subscribe button. That's how, that's how we grow. Tell others about it. And until next week, this is Eric signing off. Chris wish you a great trip back to Italy for the summer for vacation from the UK. And again, thanks for coming on and we'll chat later. Cheers. Eric, just later.