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Copywriting Makeover:
Making An Emotional Connection
Part 1 of 2
By
Karon
Thackston © 2004
One statistic shows that over 80% of all buying decisions are emotional.
That means your copywriting should be, too. This is something I firmly believe
in and have preached for most of my copywriting career. However, all too
often, I find people skipping the vital step of making an emotional connection
with their customers. That can be a tragic, and costly, mistake.
That's why I was excited when I had the opportunity to rewrite the homepage
copy for a vacation cruise service. While the copy they used previously gave
all the details and got them a good number of bookings, it just didn't have
what it takes to make me start daydreaming about my next cruise. It didn't.
but it was about to!
The Problems
The previous copy on the Cruise Vacation Center home
page faced a couple of challenges. (You can view the original copy at this
link:
http://www.copywritingcourse.com/CruiseVacationCenter-Original.pdf.)
The copy was very company-oriented instead of customer-oriented. It talked
about who Cruise Vacation Center (CVC) is, why the visitor should buy from
them, and some wonderful benefits CVC offers its clients including excellent
bargain rates and extra discounts. However, all the verbiage was geared
toward the company. The customer was left out.
The home page copy also lacked emotion. It was very matter-of-fact. In addition
to making visitors aware of the wonderful prices and deals CVC offered, I
wanted to create a vision for the site visitors. I wanted to give them what
they needed in order to float off into a daydream about fabulous ports-of-call;
warm, gentle breezes; and thrilling adventures.
While I was painting a picture of the vacation of a lifetime, I also had
to be sure to include a vital fact. CVC's business plan was set up to be
most affordable for the customer when s/he booked online. Without sounding
rude, I had to do everything in my power to get the site visitor to book
their cruise vacation while at the site. This was an extremely important
issue and a point that needed to be woven throughout the copy.
Lastly, the page had to uphold Cruise Vacation Center's excellent search
engine rankings. They were ranked at the top of several major engines, and
the rewritten copy couldn't jeopardize their positioning.
The Solutions
The first step was, without question, to woo the site
visitors with delightful fantasies about their next vacation. My goal was
to conjure up all sorts
of visions in the minds of Cruise Vacation Center's visitors. I wanted
the visitors to be dreaming of exotic places with lots of fun things to
do,
interesting sights to see, and 24/7 access to gourmet meals that rival
any five-star restaurant. I wanted their blood pressure to drop 10 points
just
from reading about the onboard staff of hundreds who would pamper them
with VIP treatment. After reading this copy, I wanted them ready to leave
on vacation
today! However, I also had to persuade them to book online rather than
calling CVC's office.
During the rewrite, I had to carefully plan the use of their primary
keyphrase, "cruise vacation," so as not to disrupt their most reliable
source of business. the search engines. After all, there is a delicate
balance between pleasing
the search engines and appealing to site visitors.
If I leaned too much toward the search engine side of the equation, the
conversion ratio of the home page would suffer. In other words, Cruise Vacation
Center would get lots of visitors, but few of them would book cruises.
If I leaned too much toward the customer side of the equation, CVC's rankings
would plummet, and they would need to find a new way to drive qualified traffic
to their site. As is normally the case with SEO copywriting, balance was
going to be vital.
In the conclusion to this two-part series, you'll see how I handled the rewrite
and what the end results of all the work were. Curious to see the new copy?
You'll find it on CVC's site: You can see the new copy on CVC's site at
http://www.cruisevacationcenter.com.
You can read Part 2 here
About the Author:
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