Geeks of my acquaintance often tolerate copy which is egregiously less-than-performant and/or overuse "Who could possibly know what works? Just A/B test it.", generally without doing the statistical significance math or understanding what that would do to operational cadence.
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An unreasonably useful exercise I sometimes do with colleagues: prior to reviewing copy, print out a copy of it. Say that you're going to read it together but, before you start, ask them what the copy is supposed to say. The answer is often WILDLY BETTER than the paper.
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"You mean most professionals can just extemporize better copy than most places ship?" Well another articulation would be that being steeped in a problem for days or weeks gives you a lot of unconscious understanding of it which the ritual of writing the copy didn't entirely tap.
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But I don't think most shipped copy is better than what anybody could scratchwrite, no.
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Hilarious experimental proof on this which I don't feel bad about quoting because I'll be the only one embarrassed: I was once giving a coding school a pro-bono lecture on A/B testing and used my home page for live coding exercise.
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Just to proceed with the exercise I said something to the effect of "I need a new headline here. Just shout something out; you're not going to beat the thing I've been iterating on for years but it will demonstrate the mechanics."
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I left the rest running for a few weeks, mostly by accident, and eventually sent the class a sheepish email congratulating them on beating my control by 10%.
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"This sounds curiously convenient and non-specific." I know, because I no longer run the business and therefore can't quote you the exact details, but trust me on pain of losing Internet karma: it actually happened substantially as described.
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End of conversation
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When entering a space where there isn’t a lot of good copy is to talk to people who have had the problem you are solving. Asking them to describe the problem and what it felt like in a “pain language call” gives you a customer’s exact viewpoint in their own words. It’s golden.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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