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Money Words: Copy That Drives Revenue with Joanna Wiebe – Transcript
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- Joanna Wiebe explains how careful word choices can influence conversion rates and help websites make or lose money.
- Using words like pay or pricing on a pricing page treats the product as a cost center instead of focusing on value.
- Joanna Wiebe highlights the U rule and using the exact words of customers as effective make money words in copywriting.
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but it's true people don't care about you they only care about themselves really bluntly stated it's the absolute truth though when you're writing copy when you're reviewing whatever AI writes for you keep that in mind they only care about themselves hey so yeah we're going from really strategic with April's amazing talk to very execution Focus the
words you're putting on the page in your email things like that the words chat GPT may be putting in your emails and things like that but hopefully you are not just sending them out blindly um because there's a lot of stuff you can do to make them perform a lot better before you hit send on those emails or hit publish on that page or whatever that might be so we're going to talk about money words words that help you
make money and words that may cause you to lose money both of those sides we're going to focus a little more on the lose money ones those are some quick wins that you might get in fact you might even look at this I know there's not room for your laptop to be out on your lap um but on your phone maybe um bring your own website up and really start looking through your site for these opportunities to just make tweaks very
simple tweaks to the words that you're using um but in order for you to even care to do that to take out your phone and look at your own website and take out your laptop and open your CRM is start making changes just we have to first kind of align on whether words are even powerful like what do words do like I'm rattling off words I'm not selecting each word deliberately right now when you're writing your emails on your
website you're probably not selecting each word very deliberately should you bother to do words really matter people have made decisions a lot of the time right you're just kind of like nudging them but I would argue having read a lot so I'm doing this talk um pulling together just years of research on word choice on syntax on nerdy nerdy things about words and how they get people to
make decisions or not make decisions and so I've come across a lot of interesting studies and so let's kind of get on board with whether words matter or not so let's say outside of marketing let's say let's go to healthcare words having to do with Healthcare which of I'm going to give you a little pop quiz a couple of them so audience engagement is encouraged it's a little quiet over on this side maybe but I'm listening to
everybody so between these two let's say let's say you are somebody who is you and your partner have decided to go for IVF IVF you need assistance with fertility issues okay fine so you go to do this it's $20,000 to get one round of this done which of these two is 4.6 times more likely to get you support for insurance coverage so when people were asked which of these two terms which are
coming up they're not there yet which of these two terms is more likely to get support for insurance coverage infertility disability or infertility condition which one is more likely to get insurance to cover it any idea disability make it a disability now insurance covers it how we talk about it though not as disability who is that
good for insurance companies not for the people okay it's not political I'm not being political about that but it's a real money word it's a real money word if you work at an insurance company you're going to want to make sure people are saying condition not disability which of these is most likely to result in twice the cooperation among players the community game or the Wall Street game if I sat you down and said you're playing the Community game or
you're playing the Wall Street game which one is going to make you want to be more Cooperative with others you can say it we're all friends here the community game right you're with the community in fact 70% of participants were Cooperative in the community game and only 30% were in the Wall Street game so naming your products matters which of these help lead to the
legalization of marijuana in Oregon and California there's no war on plant medicine right no there's a War on Drugs not on plant medicine and one more which of these is most likely to result in fewer hotel bookings look just at the title of these two side by side nice place or nice place spelled wrong
fewer hotel bookings if you have more than two typos in a hotel review sign 22,000 I think it was reviews or studied and that led significantly to fewer bookings for the hotel just because of review left by some Rando hotels are hiring people to go in and fix their typos now because of stuff like this so
words do help us make decisions deliberate choice of words can help us either make more money and if we do it wrong it can make us lose money let's start with some lose money words number one okay I'm not going to just throw it at you but this is going to probably appear on your pricing page or if you're in e-commerce it will be in your product detail page so we're all familiar with
optimizing if you're in growth at all you're likely optimizing in some way on your pricing table if you're in SAS even if that is Enterprise um or in e-commerce on your product detail page so you've probably heard about doing things on your pricing page or your again e-commerce product page if a price is very big like it's $2,500 or $7,000 to buy your laser printer or whatever you should make it physically smaller on
the page there's studies on that use just below prices like $99.97 instead of $10 to raise average revenue per user you should uh lead with the most expensive tier to get more users in you should lead with the least expensive tier and when using tier discounts like buy two get 20% off buy three get 25% off you want to minimize increments between thresholds okay these aren't money words these are just ways to help
people say yes on your pricing page but my real question is in SAS in particular why are we dedicating an entire page on our site to reminding people about the money they're going to spend with us this is like randomly pulled from tabs I had open many tabs open and you can see that in all of them there's one in particular that's tell me
that I'm going to spend money with you Ora leads with it pricing pricing we have across SAS all across SAS pricing wherever you go you can find pricing and if you do click mapping you will see that people click on the pricing tab in your nav all the time without clicking on tour or features or any of the other stuff they're going straight for how much does this cost me and we're telling them this is going to cost you money
without having an Roi page or anything anything else in our nav either to like balance that out so lose money word number one is pay and anything to do with it and people are using this all over your sites particularly again on pricing pages so our recommendation is called uh it's a depletion of assets sweep so you don't want people to come to your site and think of you as a place where they lose
money of course not right we think oh but they understand it's an exchange of value it's actually not when you say things like pay price money when you show your currency symbol even I know you have to but we have to remember what that is as a signal to people words actually matter the words we're accidentally choosing or throwing on our site absolutely do matter so there's been studies on this and if you talk to
people in sales they'll be quick to tell you like just like let's not let's not talk too much let's not use words like money or cost or this is what you'll pay and I'm not switch to investment I'm not saying anything like that like there's lots of ways you can get around that but we do want to reduce the emphasis on our prices and there was a recent test uh experiment that was shared in the Harvard Business Review around avoiding emphasizing prices for SAS in particular so that people don't feel pressure to
use your product and then don't end up using it then cancel really quickly so this is all over the place a bad word to use is price pay anything like that now we do need need people to find our prices right so that's important we have to keep that label in our nav but we have to reduce the sense that there's like this this cost center so if you were on your own website and you went to
your own pricing page you might see a headline that looks a lot like this digital ocean again nothing against the people behind some of these websites I'm going to follow up as examples they're just randomly selected examples and they're always the same this is the entire above the fold for the pricing page simple predictable pricing couldn't be any bigger the word pricing on there then I'll read you might able to see that always know what you'll pay with
monthly caps and flat pricing 21% of the words in this hero section are turning this product into a cost center they are saying you're going to spend money here without any sense of the value there's no value proposition there's nothing like that 14 words in this hero CA aside three of them are words like pay or pricing also side note like you don't
have to say pricing in your H1 this is like we don't say homepage we don't say product page you don't have to say pricing in your H1 so what can we do instead though here's an example again randomly chosen podia pricing this is their control on the left and then you optimize it so instead what's the offer start free podia grows with you it's good now I know what the offer is I'm on
the pricing page I know we're going to be talking about money but you're making it more about like what's in it for me which is basic um switching from pay yearly to yearly plan very small tweaks right but we're pulling out the words that make people feel weird about it switch from buy now to get it now really straightforward stuff convertkit does a very good job of this a lot of websites
do good job of this just not enough and I would wager possibly not yours lose money word number two all right we're going to show you two side by side A and B and you guess it's hard to say because we're not doing a proper experiment here but you guess at which one you're more likely to remember the details of option A maximize team productivity with the
world's fastest shared inbox this is a feature for intercom this is cross head for that feature or B maximize team productivity decision- making and efficiency with the world's fastest shared inbox which one might stand a chance as sticking a or b a why shorter how hey how much shorter like what what's
shorter about it what's really going on there it's a little more disciplined it's removed a word that I argue is a big lose money word and it is all over your site all over the word and think of it this way every time you use the word and in your copy you have to be okay with losing a conversion that means you have to actually be okay with it at least one conversion that you're going to lose
because of it this goes back to Old marketing the marketing that we like to forget and move on from but it's so foundational there's this concept called interference this goes honestly back to like the n 1930s interference kind of makes sense when you just hear it this is when we're talking about your ability to retain information is hindered every time you add something new in so every time you add the word and or or or a
comma every time you're like I'm not sure which adjective to use let's use both just choose one is the idea now here's a classic interference study so if I were to say to you X feature does y shared inbox does this one thing cool then I say what does it do chances are good you're going to have a pretty easy time answering it and this was an actual experiment done in