with Lianna Patch
In this episode originally recorded live for a virtual audience at The Future of Ecommerce, we talk with conversion copywriter Lianna Patch about how to improve your store's copywriting and maybe even add a dash of humor.
TAKEAWAYS:
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
3/15/2022
Kurt Elster: All right. Today, in this episode, we’re recording this one live for Ecom Tech, right? They are our hosts today, which I greatly appreciate, so thanks to The Future of Ecommerce for featuring this podcast episode at their event. I greatly appreciate it. I’m Kurt Elster. Some of you may know me as:
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: … host of The Unofficial Shopify Podcast and Shopify expert and enthusiast for many years, and I am joined today by a wonderful conversion copywriter named Lianna Patch. Lianna, thank you for joining us. I hear you’re gonna teach us today about writing better copy.
Lianna Patch: I hope so. We’ll find out. You know, I think the more I repeat the same things over and over again, the more people seem to finally get them, so I’ll try that again.
Kurt Elster: You know, around the time that you get sick of repeating yourself, that’s when you’ll start to make an impact.
Lianna Patch: Yep.
Kurt Elster: That’s what I think we’ve all discovered the hard way about the internet.
Lianna Patch: We’re there. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And you know, until then it just feels like you’re shouting into the void. Copywriting is one of those things that I don’t think gets a fair shake because in developing websites where our key metric is conversion rate as a measure of how much traffic can we get to buy here, the thing that always makes the most impact, makes the biggest difference on a site is copywriting, is your product descriptions, and your headlines, and your messaging, and your positioning, and yet that’s the thing that no one ever asks me about.
Lianna Patch: Really?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. They’re always like, “Oh, what app should I get?” You know, people look for the silver bullet, the quick fix, when the core successful thing is the copy. Because the web is like 98% text and the rest is spam emails, right? And so, copy I don’t think gets a fair shake, but you sounded surprised by it. Why do you think copywriting… What’s the importance here? Why should we care?
Lianna Patch: Okay. To me, like what could be a quicker fix than changing your copy? That’s ignoring the work that goes on in the background to get to know your customers, figure out your messaging, what’s gonna resonate with them, but from the technical standpoint, copying and replacing… Copy pasting your new copy into the product page, so easy.
Kurt Elster: It is. It’s not a technical thing. But at the same… I think ultimately it’s homework, right? You said, “Hey,” you’re like, “You’re ignoring the backend of it.” Or yeah, the behind-the-scenes stuff, which is getting to know the customer. And that’s the important part. If you don’t know who you’re talking to, it’s tough to persuade them. And so, getting to know your customer and understanding their pains, and problems, and the benefits they get out of your product, and then… So, that’s research. That’s homework.
Now, I gotta go write the copy. Oh, that’s homework, too. I’m done with school. I did my time, man. I don’t want to go back. And so, I think that’s the resistance to it, where it’s like, “Hey, can I just get an app? Or maybe if we just had better videos.” They want that quick fix. But you’re right, it’s not that tough. I don’t have to be technical to be able to change copy on my Shopify store.
Lianna Patch: Yeah. I would also say like why does it feel like homework to do something that will absolutely move the needle for conversions and connect back to that all-hail-our-revenue-numbers metric?
Kurt Elster: Well, and I think if it does feel like homework, maybe you’re doing something wrong. I think especially early on, people tend to try and… They’re like, “Well, this is professional writing, so I have to write professionally,” when really that does you a disservice. You should be writing in a natural, authentic voice, I think. You tell me.
Lianna Patch: Yes. You are correct. It’s so much easier to just write the way that we talk, and it works better, but I think especially if you grew up in America, being told that like a paragraph has five pieces, and there’s an intro sentence, and three body copy sentences, and a conclusion sentence, and every sentence needs a noun, a verb, and a direct object, that does feel like homework. Absolutely.
Kurt Elster: All right, so this is a off-color joke, but a gentleman named Michael Jamin, who is a screenwriter and who wrote on like King of the Hill, and Beavis and Butthead, he’s very funny.
Lianna Patch: He’s great.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Paraphrasing him, he’d say like what does a story have, or what does a paragraph have? And you’d go… He’s setting you up. And you go, “Oh, a beginning, a middle, end.” At which point he would yell, “So does a piece of shit because that’s what you just wrote.” Yeah. And he’s not wrong. Getting lost in the technical definition of a paragraph is how you make soggy copy that doesn’t convert.
Lianna Patch: Yeah. And I would just hazard a guess that store owners, a lot of store owners don’t have a lot of practice sitting down and just writing until they get to the good part and then cutting off the top.
Kurt Elster: Oh.
Lianna Patch: Still thinking about a piece of shit, thinking about cutting off the top of a piece of shit, but that could be it, you know? Pinch off that turd.
Kurt Elster: I really derailed you there. All right. Well, all right, let’s return to that, and make sure I do, but your title is conversion copywriter, correct?
Lianna Patch: Yes.
Kurt Elster: What is the difference between a copywriter, a direct response copywriter, which I think is what we would traditionally think of, at least in the advertising world for this, and conversion copywriter?
Lianna Patch: A copywriter sits down every time to reinvent the wheel and be creative and is just like casting wildly about. A direct response copywriter is a douchebag. And a conversion copywriter is using qualitative user research to inform messaging and not start from a blank page.
Kurt Elster: You know, I thought your definition of copywriter was derisive, but then you got to direct response copywriter.
Lianna Patch: I know. I’m such an ass.
Kurt Elster: All right, so conversion copywriter, walk me through that again. You said using… there were some fancy words in there that weren’t d-bag.
Lianna Patch: Qualitative user research.
Kurt Elster: That sounds important.
Lianna Patch: Yes. So, anywhere that you have an open-ended spot for your customers to give their feedback, or their thoughts, that’s gonna be valuable intel. Your reviews are obviously a great source of this. Your support chat requests. Things that people say about you on social media. Questions they email the info at email address with. Collect all of those into a big old spreadsheet. Maybe sort them by where people are in the journey and then go through them, and especially with review mining, you start to see after a couple hundred reviews the same things coming up over and over again. The same way that people describe your products.
I just did this for a company that does period care and over and over, the reviews were like, “This is magic. This is wizardry. This is magic. This feels like magic.” And I was like, “Well, there’s the headline.”
Kurt Elster: Yeah. What could be better than your customers, your best customers, writing the copy for you? How could anything be more effective than that? And so, when you have… Starting out, it’s harder, but once you’ve got those product reviews, and those customer service logs, being able to go through that and pull out these key phrases over and over, wow. That is some powerful stuff.
Are there any tools you use to do that? Or is it just sit down and start reading through it with a highlighter?
Lianna Patch: I probably should use tools and I know that a few of my friends who are also conversion copywriters will do word clouds and sentiment analysis and things like that. I kind of prefer to just let things come up. I had an eleventh-grade teacher, my eleventh-grade English teacher who was like, “As you read, you’ll start to see a set of hands pointing out the most important things,” and she would give us quizzes on 70 pages of reading that were like, “What color were the pilgrims’ hats on page 17?” And you’re like, “Stephanie, what?” But that sort of trained me to keep an eye out for the things that are sticky and so when I’m going through reviews, I’ll just like, “Oh, I would never have described our product that way.” Take that whole chunk in context, bold it, use that as the headline, call that out in the testimonial, whatever it is.
Kurt Elster: I want to go back.
Lianna Patch: Okay.
Kurt Elster: You said you would venture a guess that most store owners have not ever had to sit down and write until they get to the good part. What is… That sounds interesting. What does it mean?
Lianna Patch: I think, and nobody’s immune to this, but I think when you’re sitting down to write, especially if it’s something that matters to you and you have all your head trash in the way, and some of that head trash is like how we’ve been trained to write, it’s just gonna take either a set amount of time or a bunch of sentences before you actually get to what you’re trying to say. And even I will sit down with a first draft and just type away, and get annoyed, and you have to leave it. You can’t just delete it. You can’t edit it. You leave it. And then ultimately I’ll get to a point where I’m like I’ll type out, “What am I trying to say,” or, “How would I say this to a five-year-old?” And just like the shortest sentence, the simplest words, what are you trying to say?
And if you can’t say it, then maybe your product sucks, but it probably doesn’t. It’s probably just the writing.
Kurt Elster: I think there’s an advantage to attempting copy editing. My initial draft of trying to write something will always be verbose and leaning academic, and I think it is… You see it and you go, “Well, this sounds smart. This is gonna impress somebody.” But then when you take it and really try and chop it down to how can I say the same thing in the simplest, most direct way possible, suddenly that version you realize is actually way more effective. Is that typically the case?
Lianna Patch: Yeah. And I also think… You know, we hear all the time like, “Oh, just take a break from it, come back, and look at it with fresh eyes.” That’s real. I’ll write something and I’ll come back to it a couple hours later and be like, “Oh, now I know how to say this better.”
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It sounds silly but it keeps rattling around in your head. And also, like resetting the context will also get you unstuck from the previous train of thought. And so, you really are looking at it with a fresh perspective, even if you just walked away from it for an hour and came back.
Lianna Patch: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And so, I think there’s a lot of value there, especially if you’re… You know when you’re getting frustrated and you’re banging your head against the wall. That’s when it’s time to just like, “All right, however far you got is how far you got. Walk away and come back to it.”
Lianna Patch: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: We’ve touched on some what I’m guess are like common mistakes you see, but what are some of the easily fixable mistakes you see that drive you nuts?
Lianna Patch: I’m having that moment where I’m like, “I’ve said this so many times, it can’t possibly be new.” Yes, it can. The we-we problem.
Kurt Elster: We-we problem?
Lianna Patch: Yes. Read through your copy and see how many times you say we, us, I, our-
Kurt Elster: Oh, I call this Iarrhea.
Lianna Patch: Oh my God. Amazing. Why are we so gross?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It’s just like, “I, I, I, I, I…” And it’s like look, the reader doesn’t care about you. They care about them.
Lianna Patch: Yeah. Why do we both go for toilet metaphors?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It’s really we’ve been quite immature this episode, Lianna.
Lianna Patch: I’m happy about it. Let’s return to our base selves and be who we were as kids. Okay, no. But it is such an impactful change to make, right? Just going through your copy. You don’t have to do any research. You don’t have to go down a rabbit hole if you use your reviews. Just go through and circle, hopefully with an erasable pen if you’re doing this on your laptop, I, we, our, us, and then see if you can flip it into second person. And then when you flip it into second person, you will start to notice sentences that don’t actually have an impact and can be cut or reworded. We believe that blah, blah, blah. You believe that? No, no, no, no, no. What do you want from this? What are we trying to say to you? What future are we trying to paint for you with that copy here?
Kurt Elster: You’re right. When you say you believe, suddenly like… Oh.
Lianna Patch: You believe.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Like you’re trying to Jedi mind trick them and it’s not gonna work.
Lianna Patch: Yeah. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: What else you got for me? Okay, so we got the we-we problem. Iarrhea.
Lianna Patch: Yes. It’s really boring, but I think formatting is often a problem.
Kurt Elster: Oh, I agree.
Lianna Patch: Yeah, so like design should support copy. How do we make this easier to read? There’s so many usability studies on web text, and email text, and how to make that easier to skim. So, use headers. Use lists of bullet points. Use big, giant buttons, and bolded links, and not just like single-word links that no one can tap on mobile. So, yeah, there’s like usability and formatting stuff. I personally, and this might be the next question you were gonna ask, but I personally like a dash of humor here and there depending on when it’s appropriate, and a lot of brands ask me like, “Okay, sure. We’ll use humor, but where?” And I think a really great place to do that is when you know the reader is coming up with an objection or maybe like has a question.
And that’s the perfect place for a little lighthearted parenthetical aside, where it’s like, “We know you’re wondering. Here’s the thing.” And it doesn’t have to be a ha-ha joke. It can just be sort of like a lighthearted, like, “We’re hearing you. We listen,” kind of thing.
Kurt Elster: So, it sounds like the answer to should I be funny, yes but.
Lianna Patch: Or is it yes and? That’s an improv joke.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I was gonna say a little improv joke there.
Lianna Patch: So sorry.
Kurt Elster: And now we’re not yes anding, because I just… Now, I’m overthinking it.
Lianna Patch: It’s true. You negated me.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You really… I dropped the ball on that one. I’m sorry.
Lianna Patch: It’s fine. We can pick it back up. That’s the beauty of improv.
Kurt Elster: So, should I be funny? Yes. But this seems like it’s… All right, a lot of people aren’t funny. And I suspect… My wife likes to say most men think they’re funny. Most men are not funny, right? And so, a lot of people think they’re funny but they’re not. And then now we’re gonna add copywriting into the mix? This seems like it is just you are setting yourself up for cringe. Save me from myself. How do I keep from going wrong here trying to be funny?
Lianna Patch: Take copywriting back out of the mix, because we already talked about it doesn’t have to be this whole separate thing that you put on a pedestal. It just has to be you talking to your customers, right? I would suggest that most people who say that they’re funny are less funny than they think, and there is research to support that, actually, but there’s so many more people, a much higher percentage of people who don’t think they’re funny, who actually are. And so, it’s more about examining your own sense of humor first, or your brand’s sense of humor, seeing where that overlaps with what your audience finds funny or relevant, and then making jokes about those topics, or referencing those shows, or comedians, or using those .gifs.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Sometimes when referring to it in copywriting, when we say funny, it really just means… I think a lot of times it means being authentic. People are using funny as a placeholder for just more natural language, like how people would talk conversationally. And so, it’s really easy. You’re right. Copywriting, you’re putting it on a pedestal. As soon as copywriting is involved, it’s just so easy to overthink everything until you just get yourself so stuck there’s no hope.
Lianna Patch: Yeah. I still do it too. And I also like to tell people humor is not an on-off switch. Being funny is not a binary. It’s a spectrum, right? So, just getting away from that corporate jargon over here, and like moving into warmer, friendlier language, then you get your little parenthetical asides, then you get your wink, wink, nudge, nudge humor, and then all the way over at this end there’s like Cards Against Humanity making Holocaust jokes and we don’t all have to go that far. No one can, in fact. No one should.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Cards goes hard. For sure. Pit Vipers is a good one. Chubbies Shorts I think is a good one for humor. There’s several brands that when I think of like, “All right, they have funny copywriting,” there’s several that come to mind. You know, and for the most part it’s not like ha-ha funny. It’s more just the fact that a brand is saying it immediately makes it novel and different. But if it was like a person were saying the same things that these brands were, you wouldn’t think twice about it.
Lianna Patch: Right. Yeah, it’s not necessarily ha-ha funny, but it’s irreverent. It’s weird. And interestingly enough, I just read this great book which I happen to have next to me, which is talking about the culture of comedy, and especially in advertising.
Kurt Elster: Oh, Ken Jennings.
Lianna Patch: Yeah, right? Jeopardy guy. Wrote a funny book. It’s really interesting. And he theorizes that we’ve reached peak funny, right? Everything is as funny as it’s gonna get. We’re just bombarded by funny ads and brands all the time, so I think there is now this rising resistance from brands because they don’t want to get into this already crowded tone space, where Chubbies, and Shinesty, and Cards are just battling it out for who’s the funniest, who has the weirdest promotions. So, there is resistance there, and I get it.
Kurt Elster: All right, so you’ve got Ken Jennings’ book. Are there any other resources I should be looking at?
Lianna Patch: Oh my God, yes. I actually, and this sounds like a plug, but it’s not. I have a free reading list of all the books that I personally like and got use out of about humor, and comedy, and the study of comedy, and comedy in advertising, and things like that, that I will happily send to listeners if they want, or to the host, or to you, or wherever it would be easiest for them to get that. But I think to return to your real question, the best resource is like self-examination. So, like next time you laugh at something, or next time you find an email really entertaining, or just see a subject line in your inbox and you’re like, “Ooh, I’m gonna open that,” pause. Ask why. What is it? How could we bottle that and apply it to our brand in a way that feels authentic?
Kurt Elster: A swipe file. I should start collecting the things that speak to me. And we know everything is a remix, right? We’re already at peak funny. And good artists copy, great artists steal. Build that swipe file and then once you take those things and translate them through your own brand, and vision, and into your voice, or like mix and match stuff, suddenly you have a unique work of art on the other end of it. And so, I love having… and especially for when you’re just like you know you have to write that weekly email, but you’re stuck, oh, I love having that swipe file out there.
Lianna Patch: Yeah. And I think for me at least, having an ever-growing, ever-present swipe file, and I think for most brands, it’s gonna do the same thing that that qualitative research mining will do, where if you get enough things, you’ll start to see like, “Oh, I like brands that make dad jokes, or I like brands that use funny CTA button copy.” You’ll start to notice the things that you’re personally attracted to and that you feel like you want to apply to your own stuff.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Sometimes it could be as simple as the micro copy, like just what is the label of this button? What is this headline? And that’s, I think, the real… The lower, easier effort stuff, where you can dip your toe into the water with it. I think sometimes if it’s a really… if you’re really resistant to it, if it scares you, just try screwing around with emoji. I think that’s like the easy… the cheat mode to get into trying to add some authentic humor. A well-placed, well-crafted emoji.
Lianna Patch: Yeah. That’s actually kind of… You’re reminding me of another mistake I could have mentioned, which is just turning on Shopify or Klaviyo’s default for confirmation emails, or footer copy, or whatever it is, and never looking at it again, and never thinking of it as an opportunity to build the relationship with customers. For me, that’s something that has minimal effort, outsized ROI, is when people look at that micro copy, or they read the unsubscribe language in your email footer, they’re like, “Oh, okay. Maybe I’ll stick around.” Like, “Oh, this is funny. Somebody paid attention to this. A human was here.” That’s what we want.
Kurt Elster: A human was here.
Lianna Patch: A human was here.
Kurt Elster: Wow. I think that’s really the golden takeaway is that it needs to look like a human wrote this. I mean, sometimes you get this stuff that’s so stilted, you’re like, “I think an AI did this.” I think somewhere there’s a JavaScript AI that just strung this together and we called it a day.
Lianna Patch: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Measuring the efficacy of my copy. Is there any way to do that? How would I go about it?
Lianna Patch: Obviously, it’s easiest, it’s most cut and dried if you can do like the true A-B test, so change nothing else on your product page, don’t run this during a holiday, all the normal rules you would follow to do a test and then just change the copy and see if add to cart conversions increase, or… Well, that’s the only thing we could really measure. Hopefully sales, but usually clicks on that button, right? But if you don’t have significant enough traffic to do tests like that, or you don’t have the team, or the capability, just make sure that your lines of communication with customers are open, so maybe like a live chat on your site, like, “Hey, did you understand what we were telling you on this page? Did you like it? Did it make you laugh? Rate your experience on our site as you’re leaving,” in a non-creepy bathroom kind of way. You know, that little thing that they have at airport bathrooms? How was it today?
Kurt Elster: I know. I’ve never… I’ve seen that thing and I’m like, “You know, I like the intent here but I’m not touching it.”
Lianna Patch: Exactly! It’s just another thing to touch.
Kurt Elster: It’s a button who lives in a bathroom. We’re not friends. Yeah, I like the idea. You’re right. For copy, split testing really lends itself very well to testing copy. It’s like one of the easiest things in the world to test. And part of my commitment to the importance of copywriting was to prove its value to a brand, a large client, I wrote a humorous version of a bestseller’s product description, and then we split tested it, and of course, the longer, humorous, better formatted one worked. Now, do I know specifically what aspect of it worked? No, because truly I made several changes here. This is not ideal split testing. But it worked. We had add to cart go up on that product. And then when we applied that same format to our top 10 bestsellers, we watched in a split test revenue go up, as well.
Lianna Patch: Nice.
Kurt Elster: So, we knew like okay, definitely there’s something here. And certainly, your audience and their expectations are going to be the judge here. Whether or not you think it’s funny kind of doesn’t matter, does it? It’s what the audience thinks.
Lianna Patch: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And that’s where, going back to the beginning, you said you gotta do that qualitative research and you gotta see how your customers talk and what they say about you. And that’s… You obviously gotta go back to the research, I think, for effective copy.
Lianna Patch: Yeah. And I feel like most store owners are paying attention and they are plugged in, and they do know what customers need to hear. But for some reason, when they sit down to write, just that wall comes down and they’re like, “I have to be a marketing person.”
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And that’s, again, I blame the school system.
Lianna Patch: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Let that stuff go. Just write. Just picture your one ideal customer that you love that’s like the VIP, you’ve got a relationship with them, and write for them. Oh, suddenly I can see… It’s like when you’re picturing writing to many, you picture it as like you’re giving a speech, and I think that’s where a lot of the problem comes in.
Lianna Patch: Joanna Wiebe calls it your one reader.
Kurt Elster: Your one reader.
Lianna Patch: Yeah. One message, one reader, one promise, one action that we ask them to do.
Kurt Elster: Joanna Wiebe. She’s a good resource.
Lianna Patch: She’s the best.
Kurt Elster: Are there others that come to mind?
Lianna Patch: People that are in my mastermind, which was Joanna’s original copywriter mastermind. Joel Klettke is a great teacher. He writes occasional emails, now he’s running Case Study Buddy.
Jen Havice wrote the book on customer research. It’s called Finding the Right Message. I think it’s on Amazon. Who else? Oh, Momoko Price. She is a very CRO, very data-driven copywriter. She has a course I think that’s out on Conversion XL that’s super, super in depth about how to write, how to message better using data.
Kurt Elster: Tons of great resources there. Where can we learn more about you? You have given us a wealth of information.
Lianna Patch: That’s good. Yeah. I tried. I’m on Twitter, @punchlinecopy. I’m at punchlinecopy.com, too.
Kurt Elster: You’re a good follow. I could unfollow everybody and leave 10. You’re in the 10.
Lianna Patch: Oh, this is so nice to know. I always say that when clients come to me through Twitter, it’s like okay, you’ve made it through the trial by fire. You know. You know who I am. Yeah, you know what this is. You know what you’re signing up for.
Kurt Elster: We’re coming to the end of our time together. There’s one key takeaway. What do you want people to do when they… When I go to a conference, I like to write down… I don’t want to take notes on everything someone said. I try to write down these are my action items. And ideally, from each talk I have just one. One thing I should go do. Tell them. Tell them what they should write down on their to-do list. Lianna says I have to… ?
Lianna Patch: Start thinking about what’s funny to me.
Kurt Elster: That helps. I need to get better about my swipe file, for sure. And I wish everyone would check their site for we-we and Iarrhea.
Lianna Patch: Also those. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Also those, as well. Lianna, thank you so much. This has been tremendously valuable. Lianna Patch, Punchline Copy.com is her site. Please check it out and do give her a follow on Twitter. You may or may not regret it. But if you’re in the latter camp, it’s gonna go pretty well for you.
Lianna Patch: Yeah. This was great. Thanks, Kurt.