UX writing as a growth-engine
By: Tanzir Rahman
Tags: Ux Writing, User Experience, Copywriting, UX Design, Conversion

UX writing as a growth-engine

Better copy leads to more revenue

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

As product designers, we dedicate our lives to building products that customers truly want and need. We create user stories and conduct surveys in the hopes of finding that next insight that’ll lead us to developing the next groundbreaking product feature, only to find underwhelming response.

Sometimes, it’s not the feature that’s wrong — it’s the fact that customers are not aware of it and/or the funnel is not optimized. This is where UX writing comes in. We can communicate the value-proposition to our users by using better copy that fit their mental models. In such circumstances, good copy can be the deciding factor that dictates product success.

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“The software company BitTorrent had 50 employees working in the traditional departments of engineering, marketing and product development. This brought them good results until 2012, when their growth plateaued. The problem was that too many customers were using the basic, free version of their product. And despite making improvements to the premium, paid version, few people were making the upgrade. Things changed, however, when an innovative project-marketing manager (PMM) came aboard, created a growth team and sparked the kind of fresh perspective they needed. By looking at engineering issues from a marketing point of view, it became clear that the lack of upgrades wasn’t due to a quality issue. Most customers were simply unaware of the premium version and what it offered. Armed with this insight, the marketing and engineering teams joined forces to raise awareness by prominently promoting the premium version to users of the free version. As a result, upgrades skyrocketed, and revenue increased by 92 percent.” — Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown¹

By simply communicating the upgrade option to users, BitTorrent changed their growth trajectory. In mid-2018, I applied to a remote job as a content head for an American content marketing firm, the founders of which happened to be my university alumni. Their main service offering was writing copy for sales landing pages. Even though I didn’t get the job, the assignment they gave me in the second round was an experience as invaluable as any job I’ve held.

Here’s what I learned:

They typically wrote copy based on content goals; which are as follows:

Market Legitimacy: Creating content which shows that they are experts within a category.

Creating content which shows that they are experts within a category. Press Pitching: Crafting messaging and headlines which positions them as newsworthy or ‘worth-covering’.

Crafting messaging and headlines which positions them as newsworthy or ‘worth-covering’. Hard Selling (product pages): Content which exists to explicitly/directly make the case for the product and encourage a purchase.

Content which exists to explicitly/directly make the case for the product and encourage a purchase. Soft Selling (landing pages/convince pages from advertisements): Content which educates the user on a topic and subtly uses that to explain and make the case for a specific product they sell.

Market legitimacy, soft-selling and hard-selling content types were by far the most eye opening for me. They used language that prompted desire and trust for the brand in the reader’s mind. For example, the landing page for a cream that removes stretch marks would look like the following.

This is a short-form soft sell landing page.

Notice how the value-proposition is in the title and subtitle, and it’s creative: “Smooth, mark-free skin is in your future.” In the body text, they use adjectives and adverbs such as “clinically proven”, “highest-quality”, “most effective ingredients on the planet”, “guarantee” to demonstrate authority.

This strategy combined with providing educational / informational short-form or long-form content in Medium style formatting (i.e. breaking it up with titles and subtitles) leads to highest conversions.²

Copy such as this relies on the following user psychologies:

You’re reinforcing the readers that they’re making a great decision by considering your product.³

the readers that they’re making a great decision by considering your product.³ You’re winning their trust and removing their guards of risk aversion by demonstrating authority and providing assurances such as money back guarantee.³

by demonstrating authority and providing assurances such as money back guarantee.³ You’re telling them things like, “It has worked for others, it’ll work for you” to get them to believe you based on peer reviews .³

you based on .³ “Order now for a limited-time discount of $10” — you’re creating urgency and prompting the user’s instinct of loss aversion.³

How this applies to UX copywriting depends on your unique circumstances. But if BitTorrent can hack growth by better communicating with users, you can do it with better copy optimized for conversion.

Word of Caution:

The job of a sales/marketing copywriter might be vastly different from a UX writer who is writing microcopy to remove the pain-points of users, but when it comes to conversion — a microcopy crafted from the perspective of a sales/marketing copywriter will have the most impact. We’re still writing clear and concise microcopy, it’s just more enticing.

UX copy in products I’ve used:

I’ll give you examples of where I thought sales-centric UX copywriting mattered, in products that I’ve used and/or worked on.

The referral engine is the bread and butter of any product that wants to grow. A popular example of the success of the referral engine is Dropbox (of course, there’s many other such examples).

With referrals, Dropbox went from 100,000 to 4,000,000 users in 15 months. According to CEO Drew Houston, referrals increased signups by 60 percent, permanently. Referrals allowed Dropbox to bypass traditional ad spend ($233-$388 per customer for a $99 product).⁴ Following is what the Dropbox referral communication looked like.