(Note: This article was originally published to JamieMcSloy.co.uk on September 20, 2019. I’m going through an old backup of the site, which has hundreds of posts that aren’t currently uploaded. As I’m working hard on updating the site – and releasing The Vault, letting these old posts be the daily posts for a while.)
Don’t Think Like A Robot
The biggest mistake I routinely see people make, in copywriting and outside of it, is assuming that there’s some sort of universal flow chart for human behaviour that leads to results.
The biggest reason this is a huge mistake isn’t that you’re reducing humans to a binary and limiting your life experiences. (Well, maybe it is…)
The biggest reason this is a mistake is because you lose out on opportunities that are there if you stop thinking like a robot.
In real life, there are dozens of examples of this; you ask a girl out to your local bar and she says, “no.” You assume that’s because she doesn’t like you. After all, if a girl likes you, she’ll go on a date with you.
This is thinking like a robot.
She might hate bars, and if you stepped out of the robot zone and thought, “maybe going somewhere else is the answer,” you might have got the date.
The same is true with copywriting and funnels and all the business stuff people talk about online.
“If you do this, then that.”
Predicted Behaviour
In direct response, you look to improve conversion rates.
A lot of this is predicated on typical behaviour; you know that a certain headline performs really well, and it gets a click-through rate of say, 10%.
Then you get a 10% conversion rate and so your overall rate is a conversion of 1% on cold traffic.
(These are oversimplified figures.)
You test that against a different offer which has a clickthrough of 30% but a slightly lower conversion rate of 5%.
Still, that’s 1.5% overall conversions.
And that’s what most of direct response marketing is about.
But…
Nobody Looks at the 99%
I read in an affiliate marketing book, and it’s something that’s not talked about in most places, that you should redirect traffic.
If you’re buying traffic and converting at say, 5%, that 95% is effectively wasted money.
You’ve spent it on traffic that isn’t converting. And most of us will try to get that 5% up to 6% because it adds 20% on to our profits at the end of the day.
And we don’t think about redirecting the traffic.
Getting the traffic is the hardest and/or most expensive part.
How Do These Things Even Relate?
This is an ill-formed post on something that was going to be something else, but mutated along the way.
There are two points to the above, and buying traffic is just the example:
- The robotic way of thinking in terms of online marketing advice means you concentrate on 1% or 2% increments at the expense of the vast majority
- If you want to significantly up your conversion rate, you need to stop thinking like a robot and understand that you’re better off getting different triggers entirely
Inflexibility and small-picture thinking leads to the above.