Hello. This is Devan Rome. Welcome to Part 4 of my 12-part series reviewing the concepts I’ve learned in CXL’s Digital Psychology and Persuasion Program. Here is a link to the course. In this series, I review the principles discussed and taught in the course. I also write about some of my opinions of the course. With that said and out of the way, I will now get on to this week (week 4’s) review of the course.
I am moving to Momoko Price’s Product Messaging course for this review. Let’s get the review started. I’m going to start with the “Conversion-Focused Formatting & Layout” video. This is lesson 8 of the course. The objectives for this lesson are the following: making sales copy easy to read and scale, leverage key design principles, and create actual-size, clickable prototypes that you can share with your clients or team. We start with the design factors that influence copy effectives.
She outlines a number of principles. That number of principles is 7. They are the position of your copy, the size of each piece of your copy, the order of your copy, the space and/or clutter of your copy, your copy’s typography, the directional cues in your copy, and the color contrast of your copy. Wow. Pretty cool. I’ve heard of many of these principles before, but this was a nice synthesis of some of the main, important principles of producing good copy. Hats off to Momoko Price.
When it comes to position, we’ve proven the importance of positioning with eye tracking studies. Size matters because of Fitt’s Law. Order matters because of visual hierarchy. Your designer and your copywriter should be aligned on copy. Space and noise matters because of Hick’s Law. The more options you have, the longer you will take to make the action. Further, you may not even have got to clicking that option. Airbnb does this very well. Clutter-free copy can work very well, especially if you’re a big and successful business. Typography matters because certain elements of your copy effect readability. High contrast fonts are easy to read. You should also keep line height in mind. She gives a few general guidelines for good copy. I will list them below.
You want the following 7 things for readable body copy:
- At least 16px
- At least 1.5-line height
- No more than 900 px wide (usually less)
- More than 3-4 lines per paragraph
- Avoid “light” font styles
- Maximize legibility with maximum contrast
- Change it up, break it up, and keep it fresh
This is a good synthesis. I will be sure to come back to this as a good reference when I’m working on body copy. Momoko Price then goes on to give us a few good guidelines for breaking up walls of text. The principles are as follows:
- Organize copy in “chunks”
- Use subhead lines
- Use ragged-right text alignment
- Switch up alignment of copy chunks
- Use (relevant) images & icons
- Use lists. For example, checklists, bullet lists, and ordered lists
She then recommends a good copy choice tool. This choice is type-scale.com. I will be sure to try this out. I am glad she recommended this tool. Directional cues matter because they influence what your user looks at. I think it makes it easier for your user as well. You don’t want to make your user think. Thinking takes effort. You may also want to consider directional cues. Contrast is important because it tells your audience what to look at. Wow. Not only am I getting typography recommendations, but graphic design recommendations. Momoko Price then gives a few guidelines for good contrast principles. They are as follows:
- Reserve high-color contrast for Call to action buttons and whatever the goal on your page is
- Use dark overlays on images to ensure copy on top is readable.
- Test the contrast of your page goal or call to action with the squint test
These are three very good tips to keep in mind when thinking about contrast. Airbnb does this well. Now, we’re going to talk about laying out copy. She recommends doing a wireframe. This is because your copy isn’t just going to stay in a Google Doc. Therefore, you ought to know how it will look on an actual page. Sometimes, copy in Google Docs does not look good in an actual design. Also, copy length and interactivities appeal is more easily assessed in a wireframe or prototype. She talks about some cool tool, like Balsamic, Sketch, and Figma. She shows a demo with Sketch. I personally like Figma more. I don’t think the entire tour of Sketch was necessary. She then moves onto a Figma demo. One benefit of Figma is that you can work on it in a browser, you don’t need to have a Mac to use it. It also has more collaborative features than Figma. It has the collaboration stuff built in. Much nice. Very wow. After the Figma review, she has a lesson recap. She recommends signing up for a trial of Figma. She says this help you speak the language of your designer. It seems that in the future, copywriters will likely need to be somewhat good with UI and/or UX design, and also the associated tools within those two domains. Just a quick review of today’s lesson. We learned the following main, three things:
- One: how to make sales copy easy to scan and read
- Key design principles that are related to good copywriting. It’s hard to have good copy without good design
- We also talked about how to create actual-sized, clickable prototypes of your page copy with some relatively easy design tools. I think I should start getting better at Figma. We are now going to talk about the Petdoors.com website. She goes through a prototype design. Apparently, they’re still using the home page design she recommended. These were some of the results:
- Over 400% increase in clicks on the main CTA
- 28% increase in cart entries
- Over 30% increase in e-commerce conversion rate
- And an approximately 12% increase in revenue. This was not necessarily significant, so they thought more about how they could optimize this more.
They did a survey analysis and then reflected on the results. Based on the survey and also heat maps, they decided to cut some things out and then make some more changes.
Here are the results for the new page:
- 106% increase in e-comm conversion rate
- Over 145% increase in revenue per user
- An a nearly 63% increase in website revenue.
Quite the conversion increase. Seems like her selection as an instructor was well-warranted!
