Better Copy Starts With Listening to Your Customers

John Jantsch (00:01.656)

So what if the copy on your website seems fine, but the real problem is that you wrote it before you ever talked to a customer?

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Joanna Wiebe. She’s the founder of Copy Hackers and the person a lot of copywriters call the original conversion copywriters. She spent 15 years teaching companies like AWS and Cowanley to write copy that sells instead of copy that just sounds nice. We’re going to talk about her new book, The Copy Selling System: Right to Sell with Secret Formula for

maximizing revenue. So Joe, welcome back to the show.

Jo! (00:43.121)

Thank you for having me back. What a delight.

John Jantsch (00:44.782)

All right. Did you write the the title and the subtitle to your book?

Jo! (00:48.975)

No, I did not. that was my publisher. So I don’t really talk about the secret formula from any things, but they do. but nonetheless, it is a bit of a formula. yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (00:57.166)

Okay, I was gonna beat you up over that a little bit, so I’m glad we got that out of the air because I was like, well, that’s probably kind of some of the hypey stuff you’re not really into. So

Jo! (01:09.083)

Don’t really do. Yeah. This was the least hypey one of all of them. I was like, okay, fine, we can do that.

John Jantsch (01:16.92)

So a big part of your system talks about, you know, thorough research. And I I don’t think anybody would disagree with that at all. I mean, getting voice of customer, and I mean, the more you can understand their fears and you know what drives them and all that kind of good stuff. But you know, a lot of business owners, especially small businesses, make up a lot of my my audience, don’t have the resources, the know-how, the time, maybe to do the right amount of research. So, how does, you know.

What is what is the amount or what is the approach that could get you just enough?

Jo! (01:50.491)

Well, it doesn’t have to be like a big ongoing job. What we recommend is two things. You need to interview about seven of your customers, and if time and money are really tight here.

then make sure they’re your most ideal customers. All we’re doing with research is trying to learn how to clone our best customers. And the way to clone them is to know what’s going on in their head and throw it on the page so everybody else who’s like them sees it when they’re on the page. Cool. That’s it. So you don’t have you interview seven customers, make them your best, the ones you most want more of.

And if you’re like, I only have two of those, fine, interview those two. Don’t worry about the other five. Don’t interview. Bad data is worse than no data. Get rid of anybody like you don’t want voice of customer from customers you don’t want. and the other one is thank you page surveys. We’ve been preaching this forever. so back when I was at conversion rate experts, which was at the time the largest conversion and most trusted conversion rate agency on the planet, this was 15 years ago.

when I was there, I worked on a special project on what the best sort of survey questions are to get the best voice of customer data out of your clients. I’ve since refined that further and further. The best question to ask, and you don’t have to ask it live, you can ask it in a type form, is what was going on in your life that brought you to blank today? You fill in the blank. You fill in the blank with either a very

Clear, like verb, what was going on in your life that brought you to sign up today, to start a trial today, to book an appointment today, or with an outcome. What was going on in your life that brought you to start thinking about losing weight today? Or book a call about your sales team today. Don’t mess with this wording. That don’t spend time on it. You don’t need to spend time on this. I already spent time for you. Just take that exact language.

John Jantsch (03:34.542)

Mm.

Jo! (03:56.337)

Put it in typeform, open up your typeform. You probably have a typeform account. If you don’t, there’s a free one you can use. Put that question in there with a long answer box below it. Not, people don’t fill that in. People fill that in. You want the raw voice of customer data. Then you embed that, that one question. You can duplicate it depending on because you’ll want to separate data across different people who are coming in at different times. So you’ve got this one core question.

And then you look for all of your confirmation pages that you have in your business. and so that could be an appointment booking page. Cool. They just booked an appointment. Where do you land them after they book the appointment? That’s where you want to put it. If you’re like, I land them in whatever Calendly built. No, put a new landing page together where you embed that one question, give them room. They will answer it. It’s a seducible moment, and that is the moment when they’ve just said yes to you for something.

John Jantsch (04:41.261)

Yeah.

Jo! (04:51.684)

We worry that we should back away now. Like, no, what if they regret this? No, lean in. They’re excited. They just said yes. They’re making progress. Embed that on Calendly, like or on the landing page after someone’s booked on a a lead gen. Some they just opted in to get a report, they just did some other thing. You’ve got lead gen out there. Yeah, exactly. Now you’ve got a confirmation page, embed that thing in there. Then very simple zap.

John Jantsch (05:12.322)

Signed up for a webinar. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jo! (05:20.75)

Make sure or I think you can even do this natively in typeform right now. Send those answers to different Slack channels. So create different Slack channels. That’s VOC New Webinar Leads. VOC New Trial Starts. VOC and then just pop their or pipe their answers right in there. Every time you go into Slack, I point over here because Slack is always open on this monitor from me. So every time I see a VOC channel light up, I can go in and look.

There’s obviously better ways to do this as well, like to automate making sure your team sees it as well. So putting it into a spreadsheet, you can do both, but it can be automated. You can do this fast in very little time.

John Jantsch (05:57.455)

Yeah, and I I I suspect people underestimate the value of having somebody who does take that action, sort of also psychologically kind of, you know, making that that micro move that that’s actually going to make them more engaged. So those people who do actually answer that and you’re not actually asking for their are you getting their information at that? No, you they you’ve already got their information. It’s not really connected to who that person is. It’s it’s sort of random anonymous data, right?

Jo! (06:17.956)

No, no. Yep.

Jo! (06:24.58)

Yeah, you don’t and people will be like, well, I’m just gonna also pipe in this, that, and the other thing. Fine. Who cares? That’s not the point. The point isn’t Jim from Colorado thinks this. It’s our prospect thinks this. Cool. Great. Yeah, exactly. That’s what we’re working with with voice of customer data. I’m not trying to get you to a point a point where you’re like everything’s super targeted and segmented and Jim only sees messages that Jim needs to see. I’m talking about like real marketing. We’re really doing the job here. You’re just trying to acquire the best information you have.

John Jantsch (06:34.626)

Yeah. Yeah. And somebody else probably does too then. Right.

Jo! (06:54.384)

about your best possible leads and customers.

John Jantsch (06:56.524)

You know, one of the things over the years that we’ve struggled with a little bit is when because we have done that for 30 years. We’ve interviewed clients and and that we use for their core messaging because a lot of times they know the problem you solve better than you do, and they’re actually more willing to identify it. whereas a lot of businesses are, you know, it’s like that’s it. We call them back on time, that’s what they’re excited about. And it’s like, well, you know, that’s the thing they’re not getting from somebody else.

Jo! (07:12.356)

Mm-hmm.

Jo! (07:22.799)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (07:23.574)

And they’re a little bit afraid to like lead with that because it seems so pedestrian. Do you fight that sometimes? Like voice of customers sometimes is a little raw.

Jo! (07:28.101)

Hmm.

Jo! (07:32.065)

yeah, voice of customer is rarely what the marketers want to put out. It’s not sexy, no. It’s like real language, and they’re like, can we make it sound better? Why? Like for what purpose? Who are you trying to impress here? You know what’s impressive? Getting more customers. Let’s do that. Let’s just use their exact language. You can worry about how your brand sounds once you have money.

John Jantsch (07:36.063)

It doesn’t sound cool.

John Jantsch (07:43.182)

Yeah.

Jo! (07:55.995)

First you need to get your business up and running and growing. And so don’t worry about don’t worry about making it sound good. That sounds like marketing. You know what people do to marketing? Tune that out. Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:56.954)

Mm.

John Jantsch (08:04.398)

So you your book actually ends with the word system, the title does. So is there an easy way for you to kind of sketch out like what the message matrix and the system and all that is without without you having to like talk for twenty-five minutes or reveal the whole book, right?

Jo! (08:10.725)

Mm-hmm.

Jo! (08:20.088)

Open the book like here. so yeah, so the copy selling system, one it’s intentionally called copy selling, not copy writing. Stop thinking about it as writing, just stop. now we’re copy selling. Okay, good. So how do we actually move people to make good decisions that are a yes in our favor using the words on the page? And it often doesn’t start with the words on the page, so it starts with there’s

Multiple parts to it, but the actual copy selling system begins with constraint identification. Where what is the bottleneck in your business and your growth particularly? So I don’t talk product, I talk about like we’re marketing now, we’re trying to get people to say yes and very focused on growth and performance marketing. Where is the constraint right now? And you can go even narrower. Where’s the constraint in our email marketing? Let’s say you are an email marketing manager or that’s what you do in a small business. Where’s the constraint in our email marketing?

So we want to identify what that is, and then we want to implement ways to relieve that constraint. And that comes down to two parts. You’ve got a solution design based on the constraint. So that’s like a really clear, simple, straightforward document that you don’t fill in with AI. You sit down, it’s a page. You can do this. You sit down, you type in your thoughts on that constraint, on what the data is showing you.

And then you develop a solution to that constraint problem, which is here’s how we’re gonna solve it, and here’s how copy does and does not fit into that. So you’ve got that when there’s a copy solve here, when you’re like, okay, the constraint we’ve identified is we’re getting good leads onto our into our CRM, like they’re signing up, but after that first email, they’re not doing anything more. Like they open the first one and then they don’t open the second one, second one. Okay.

So the first email is probably presenting some form of constraint. We’ll go back and we’re gonna audit it and write that down in the solution design. What have we identified? it’s good, it’s targeted, they’ve opted in to say yes, and then why do they stop opening? Well, we could hypothesize that these three things were happening in that email. The from name was actually not a from name at all. It’s our email address, so it looks like it’s spam.

Jo! (10:36.672)

so we could fix that. That’s pretty good. the subject line, no one’s opening these emails. Okay, why aren’t they opening it? What could be going on? we’re using a spam word or something in it or something else, but we’re identifying the parts in the copy in this case that are busted or that are getting in the way. or they do open, they just don’t click through and they never come back. Okay, let’s read that email from the perspective of that prospect. What are we saying in there? What could possibly be causing that to happen?

Then when we’re coming to actually solving it, we reference voice of customer data, what we’ve just been talking about. So, but we don’t just want to like throw in random stuff. I know a lot of times we get really excited, like, I heard this really cool thing that a customer said, and I’m gonna use that language. Great, is it the right time to use that language? So we want to make sure we’re being systematic. We’re not just guessing. It’s so easy to guess, it’s also very expensive to guess. Far better for you to say.

Here is everything that our prospect needs to hear from us, the order they need to hear it in. And that’s what we call a message matrix. That’s where we’re taking old school ideas, which are proven of how people move through a customer journey towards saying yes to you, which is less about user experience and in this case more about the messages that they’re seeing. So they start in unaware and then they move through four key stages of awareness, which every copywriter in the room is already like, got it, know it.

They are problem aware, solution or category aware, product aware, and then most aware. And a purchase happens in late product and through most aware. So that’s where we want to get people. The message matrix is like, okay, we want to get them to product aware and to most aware. How? Good, good question. We want to move them through the stages that get them there. So you don’t just drop them in and go.

I’m pretty sure all of our leads know about like their problems and like the challenges in the category and why everything else sucks, right? We can just tell them our value prop and then that’s good. No, that’s bad. That’s why you’re not converting very well. So that’s okay though. It’s okay that you made that assumption. You didn’t know about the stages of awareness. So let’s back up. Let’s back up to the problem going on in their lives that brought them to us, which is why we asked that question. so what is that problem? Not problems with your software. A lot of people hear that and go like, yeah, our clients really complained about this. No, no, no.

Jo! (13:00.048)

Problems that they have in their lives or their business. We want to map that. That’s the message matrix. We take their voice of customer and we map that along this opening problem stage. Then and only once they’ve gone through all of that, so they feel their problems, they understand you’re on their side. Then and only then do we now get into category challenges. So you are a genius in your category. You know what sucks about the competition.

John Jantsch (13:02.166)

Right.

Jo! (13:28.666)

You know exactly why they su should switch to you. You know that you’ve just added this AI feature that is actually really good and everybody else’s is crappy AI and yours is real AI. You can do it so much better. They don’t know that. They don’t know the difference. Your job is to go, here’s the category landscape. Here’s what’s going on that you’ve probably interacted with, make it matter to them, and then move them through what’s challenging with the category, why it’s not their fault.

That this is going on. It’s the category’s fault. Look, look at all the crap that’s out there that you’re dealing with. So you’re on their side, you’re you’ve got empathy galore, you’re teaching them things they didn’t know in like a meaningful, useful way. And now they’re like, okay, so I have this bad problem, none of these solutions can solve it. What could I know what could our product? And then you get to get into that. So this is a more direct, like line by line, point-by-point system.

versus a very common thing with copywriting, which is just like, I read this great line. We should try something like that. and that’s where a lot of people go with their copywriting. God bless them, they mean well. They just didn’t know that that’s not the way to actually get results.

John Jantsch (14:32.31)

Mm.

John Jantsch (14:38.754)

You know, I’ve I’ve been preaching for a long time this idea of the customer journey, which, you know, goes beyond them saying yes. but you know, our job as marketers used to be to really guide that journey. And I feel like over the last five years we’ve lost control of that because how the buyer buys is what’s really changed the most. How has that impact what you teach then? Because, you know, especially in this age of AI, you know, there’s lots

Jo! (14:55.801)

Yeah. Yeah. Social. Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:08.408)

whole lot of research and and discovery going on that we don’t know about.

Jo! (15:11.801)

Yeah. So you’re just training AI on that same system, right? And that’s fair. You’re still posting all of the things, you’re just posting them in a way that AI can collect that information and use it. Good. That’s it. If ChatGPT needs to know what your message matrix is in order for ChatGPT to recommend you for the right ICP for you, then you should still just be writing all of the articles and pieces and producing that content where it matters, which is why YouTube is so great for getting your message out there.

John Jantsch (15:14.22)

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Jo! (15:41.056)

In a deliberate manner. So if we’re saying there’s a system to it, you have to go through these steps, not just randomly, but through these steps. Walk your customer through them. You know what’s really good for that? Video. You can’t skip for you can, but you can also control a bit of that. You can move people through the messages they need to see. Both customers like that, and who else likes it? ChatGPT loves YouTube. So

This is a place where you can start training AI on your message matrix, knowing that it’s more about AI, knowing what to say about you, than it is about you saying that thing about you on your website anymore. Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:20.654)

Does it does does it change the depth of information that people need to provide? it it feels like people are going in and asking such specific questions now, right? The like hundred word prompt, you know, as opposed to the, you know, category search. So do we need to have pricing and do we need to tell them exactly how it works? And do we need to be putting every customer review and every case study, you know, in words that that all these AI things? I mean, do we need to go deeper?

Jo! (16:30.393)

Mm. Yeah.

Jo! (16:35.321)

Yeah. Yeah.

Jo! (16:47.843)

Yeah, I mean, I this is a podcast about one book called The Copy Selling System, but another book to read with it is They Ask You Answer. It’s exactly the same thing that we’ve heard in They Ask You Answer for fifteen, twelve, fifteen years. it’s just, keep doing the things that you used to do that were long form content and long tail content as well. That’s it. Yep, yep, definitely.

John Jantsch (17:10.552)

Yep. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I kinda laugh about all the people freaking out about SEO right now. It’s like, you know, what what was what was actually good SEO is actually still good for for AI. Right.

Jo! (17:23.257)

Yep, yep. Not not the keyword stuffing. None of that stuff was ever good. You were just doing it because you didn’t know what else to do. But really having something to say and then saying it in detail. Keep doing that.

John Jantsch (17:37.017)

So let’s talk about the other side of AI. you know, certainly people are using it to create lots of content and lots of of web pages and stuff that they put you know everywhere. are there are there is there a good use for AI in in copy selling? and then I’ll let you just you know bat around the bad uses that you see as well.

Jo! (17:45.935)

Mm-hmm. Slop. Yes.

Jo! (17:57.722)

Yeah.

Jo! (18:02.369)

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. There is. I, you know, AI came to party and I think we should party. Like, let’s do this. But that means it has to come through for us too. We don’t just like blindly accept whatever it says. Like, stay active, stay involved. so we in the copy selling system, I mention explicitly like I’m not gonna walk you through how to prompt AI to do this stuff for you. By the time you’re reading this book, you already know how to make it do these things for you.

John Jantsch (18:09.459)

Yeah.

Jo! (18:29.609)

what I would like you to do is say, I’ve got all this voice of customer data out in the world. So people that I’m not actually speaking with, but who are out there and I should be listening to, but I can’t. You know who can? You know who’s really good at processing data? AI. So good. That’s a good use case. Get it to map your voice of customer data, which isn’t gonna be perfect, right? But again, we’re doing the best that we can. So obviously, AI can’t tell at this point.

John Jantsch (18:43.672)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jo! (18:59.295)

If it’s pulling a message from Reddit that’s kind of sorta from your ICP, if it really is or not, right? Like it’s not that good yet, but it’s something. So what we recommend is take, we have spreadsheets that are like the actual message matrix, like the real one you’re really gonna fill in. Grab that spreadsheet, throw it into ChatGPT or Claude. Claude’s actually really good for this as well. Or use the two together. You know what you use. Use that thing. and

Then get it to be to feed in and fill out your message matrix with clear voice of customer data. Just prompt it in such a way that you’re like, don’t make stuff up and don’t take what you’re hearing and summarize it. You’re only going to capture complete sections of voice of customer data, give it examples of what good is, what bad is. Like, I want this, I don’t want that. Are we clear?

and then have it fill that in, have it go through your Fathom notes. you’ve already got Fathom has all these all these integrations. So if you’re having sales calls, go and get AI to then say, here was interesting language. We’re gonna put it in your message matrix. This is where it belongs. And now, if it’s just a spreadsheet you have, which is what we recommend for your message matrix, you share that Google Sheet with your team. And when they’re writing an email that’s supposed to move a person from

John Jantsch (20:03.31)

Yeah.

Jo! (20:22.671)

High category aware to low product aware, like that’s what we would call beats on our message matrix. Let’s say you’re gonna move through six beats. They can go look at the message matrix that’s always being filled in by AI with new voice of customer data and use that to write the email that’s supposed to do that thing. But they write the email. Don’t let AI write that email. An email is not that hard to write. It’s and it’s worse if it sounds like AI wrote it and everybody.

John Jantsch (20:40.718)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:47.32)

Mm-hmm.

Jo! (20:52.285)

Everybody knows what AI copies sounds like right now. So it’s not and it’s not even I think it’s just like we’re all having like a visceral reaction to like, gross, you really couldn’t take the time to like actually send me an email. Why should I take the time to engage with your stuff at all then? So don’t let it write things, let it help you write better things.

John Jantsch (21:14.262)

You know, one of the things that I’ve I’ve noticed it too is is humans make mistakes in their writings. They do run on sentences, they they abbreviate things, they use slang, you know, and I don’t know that we’ll ever get AI to to figure, you know, out how to do that. And to me, that’s one of the most sort of easiest things to to actually, you know, spot and put into your writing. because people I I think good human writing is sounds like

Jo! (21:31.247)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:43.554)

human talking. and if you read some of the AI copy you were like, I would never speak like that.

Jo! (21:44.485)

Yeah.

Jo! (21:48.996)

No, I wouldn’t speak like that. And AI goes on endlessly. Like it just talks. And you’re just like, got it. Shorten that down now, please. And that’s just where you end up like, I think I’ve seen this with a lot of copywriters who’ve come to rely on AI as a partner in their work, which is good. but they get so like

John Jantsch (21:54.082)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:07.192)

Yeah.

Jo! (22:10.585)

brain dulled. Like I’m sure there’ll be a term that comes out soon around like how dull your brain feels when you’re reading through that thing that AI wrote for you and you’re like, forget it. I’ll just do it myself. Like I don’t even know what you’re talking about. How many times have I even today looked at Chat GPT and gone like, no, that’s not that’s not right. Don’t I don’t want that. and that’s what we go through, right? So and if you think you tell yourself like, but it’s gonna do a first draft and then I’ll make that better. Okay. Your email is like

John Jantsch (22:16.824)

Yeah.

Jo! (22:40.939)

A hundred words on a wordy day. We’re really going for about 60 words in that email that you’re supposed to send. You can write 60 words if you have voice of customer data sitting there that you can find a hook in and then you just know to use problem agitation solution or desire obstacle solution. If you and that’s easy, that’s covered. Read the book, listen to the book, it’s right there. You’ll know immediately. we don’t hide anything and say, go figure that out. You’ll know exactly what to do.

Then just do it. And then you’ve done it. And it sounds like a real person wrote it with real language. That’s actual voice of customer data embedded throughout it. So it really reads as real. It didn’t take you a long time. It was already the lazy way to write copy, just pulling in voice of customer data. Any lazier is gonna be shit. It just is.

John Jantsch (23:30.638)

I actually find it harder to edit than to just write it. Yeah, yeah. You find yourself contorting, you know, to try to make something stick or stay in there. you know the advice I give people all the time is I think we all still need to journal on paper with a pen.

Jo! (23:35.193)

Hard. It’s hard to edit AI. I just rewrite it. I’m like, forget it. I got it. Yeah. Yeah. Work. Yeah.

Jo! (23:48.389)

Mm, mm-hmm. I have a YouTube video that has about five hundred thousand views on how to think on paper. Cause people are dying to do that right now. Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (23:55.202)

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, Joe, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tate Marketing Podcast. Is there any place you’d invite people to count to find out about the copy selling system and connect with you?

Jo! (24:08.313)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, as mentioned, we’re very active on YouTube these days, so go subscribe and you’ll get lots of great videos there on this kind of stuff. Instagram as well is another good place, and of course there’s always copysellingbook.com.

John Jantsch (24:25.71)

Awesome. Well again. Appreciate you stopping by and may hopefully we’ll run into you soon one of these days out there on the road.

Jo! (24:29.429)

thank you.

Love it. Sounds good. Thank you so much.