How to use (and let) customer reviews to write your sales page
After taking Marie Forleo and Laura Belgray’s online copywriting class, The Copy Cure (everyone who writes should take it, even if it’s just the free training), I decided to put what I have learned into use and came up with a passion project: writing a long-form sales page.
Project
COPYWRITING FOR ESL is a fictional online writing course for non-native English speaker who would love to write more naturally and conversationally like a native English speaker.
(Being a non-native English speaker myself, this imposter syndrome of “not able to write well” has been my biggest fear. That’s why I’d love to join a class like “Copywriting for ESL” if there’s ever a course like this.)
Writing Process
- Identified the target audience, or the ICA (Ideal Customer Avatar).
“If you try to sell to everyone, you sell to no one.”
2. Researched and collected online reviews from Amazon, Goodreads, Reddit, and Upwork to grasp the tone and language the audience use.
3. Organized the reviews and tagged them into different categories like #problem, #desire, #feeling, #painpoint, etc.
4. Used the Problem, Agitation, Solution, Why, Try, Buy framework to organize the flow of the sales page.
Ideal Customer Avatar
The first thing is to come up with an ideal customer that you want to sell your product or service to.
It’s so much easier to write when you have a person in mind. Write as if you were talking to this person.
Online Reviews Research
In order to understand what language the target audience use, I went on Amazon, Goodreads, Reddit, and Upwork to look for reviews, pain points and desires.
I searched book reviews and discussions around English writing books, ESL books, and methods/struggles for ESL learners, and used different tags (eg. pain points, problems, solution, desire, etc) to categorize all the comments.
The tip here is to look for 3–4 stars or the ones that are long and descriptive because most of those comments include both pros and cons of the product. Skip the 5-stars or 1-star reviews with a one-line comment like “This book is a game changer. I learned a lot!” or “Yikes, I learned nothing.”
I used Airstory to capture the comments that I found useful, and added tags to each comment so I could quickly organize them when I wrote the sales page.
And,
The more the reviews you collect, the less you have to write. (Because your ideal customers have written the copy for you ;)
“The best copy is in your customer’s head”
After the research, I compiled all the notes and organized them into Problem, Agitation, Solution, Why, Try, Buy sections.
* I wasn’t able to upload the entire sales page image(maybe it’s too long), so I broke it down into different sections as the following.
Problem- What they’re struggling
Agitation- What/how they feel
Solution- Their dream/desired solution
Introducing- What we offer
Why- Why us
Try-Testimonials
Buy-Action you want people to take
*If you’d like to see what it looks like when all the sections are combined, click here.
Ta-da! It’s done. What do you think?
The best way to capture customer voice is, of course, to actually talk to your ideal customer, but online review is another golden source to gain insight.
What other tips do you use to understand the language your customers use? Let me know in the comments.
Thanks for reading! I would love to hear your comment, feedback, or if you just want to say Hi 😊
You can reach me on LinkedIn, Portfolio, or the comment below.
