Happy Sunday!
If you're reading this, I hope you’ve stayed hydrated, you got some real rest this weekend, and you have your product page open in another tab. You're going to need it today.
I used to work with an air purifier brand, and at one point we ran a copywriting exercise across the whole site. I won't name them, but it made all the difference. Not because we found some magic headline. Because it forced everyone in the room to answer a question nobody had asked in a while: why should a stranger want this?
When you spend every day on a product, you explain it the way your team talks about it. You know what the features mean and why they're worth paying for. Someone seeing your ad for the first time has none of that context, and the copy on your site was probably written by someone who had all of it.
Going back through the copy forces you to decide who you're talking to and what would make them care. Sometimes that gives you a different ad angle to test. Sometimes it helps someone who's scrolled past your product five times finally get why it might be for them. Either way, it's a new reason to buy, and that's the thing most brands run out of first.
Last Sunday I wrote about mining customer questions for creative assignments. Today is the writing itself. But, before we get into that...
Vendor of the Week
AfterShip — The post-purchase tracking tool every Shopify store needs.
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Brands use AfterShip to keep customers informed after checkout and AfterShip also helps you turn returns into exchanges instead of refunds, and resolve delivery problems before they become support tickets.
With AfterShip, brands keep about 50% of the revenue when a return becomes an exchange instead of a refund (huge for bottom-line). Their guide is built on 14 years of data and 11B+ shipments tracked.
Download the free checklist to make sure you’re ready for BFCM!
Why hasn't anyone fixed this?
Ecom brands typically lose a lot of money on their supply chain.
Warehouses, shipping fees, and tariffs are a big reason.
Another reason is the waiting. When your inventory is stuck on a ship or in customs for 10+ days, it’s common practice to pause ads until the warehouses are re-stocked.
That means weeks with no sales, and consumers who forget your brand even exists.
In a world where AI can literally make my breakfast (not literally, that would be cool), why hasn’t anyone solved this problem yet?
Oh yeah. Someone has.
Join me on Oct 22 to solve the supply chain problem. We’ll also talk about how to bring your product global without spending all your money on logistics.
Limited Supply
This past week on Limited Supply, I shared Andrew Silberstein's fireside chat from the Ecom Founders Q4 Summit. Andrew is the co-founder of Solawave, and a late shipment in Q4 2022 forced them to test buy one, get one free instead of a straight discount. CAC dropped by about $40 and revenue roughly doubled. He also gets into cart upsells, an email mistake that spiked unsubscribes, and why men are cheaper to reach on Meta right now.
Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Just search “Limited Supply” and look for the blue cover art.
10 ways to rethink the copy on your website
Write the brief before the headline
Most brands start with the headline. The headline is the last thing you should write.
Before any of the words, I want four answers. I wrote about this back in January 2023 and I still use it: APOB. Audience, Problem, Objections, Benefits. Say it once, then forget the acronym and just answer the questions.
Audience is a person in a buying situation, not a demographic. Who's considering this, and what's going on in their life when they'd use it? Problem is what that person wants to change... what are they trying to do today, and what's annoying about it? Objections are the reasons they'd hesitate before paying. Benefits are the useful consequences your product can actually back up, and the part most brands skip is the second half of that question: how can you show it?
Let me use a made-up example that's going to follow us through this whole email: a weekend bag. Not a real brand, just a bag. The audience is someone packing Friday morning for a trip that ends Sunday night. What they want to know is whether the bag holds their particular load and how easily they can get to everything once it's packed. Their concerns are probably fit (will my stuff actually go in?) and organization (will I be digging for my charger at the hotel?). Those are my working guesses, not customer research, and I'd mark them as guesses in the brief.
Now compare that to a brief that says "premium luggage for modern travelers." A writer can't do anything with that. There's no person and no situation, so there's no question to answer. With the first brief, I already know what the headline needs to prove and what the photo needs to show. The supporting copy almost writes itself.
Pick the reason someone should care
Once you have a few plausible benefits, you still have to choose which one leads. Your product probably has five good qualities. The opening of your ad or page gets one.
Back in 2023 I used Lundberg rice cakes as the example and I still think it's the clearest one. The generic version is something like "the best low-calorie rice cakes on the market." True, maybe. Also useless. Then you look at the occasions: a crunchy snack to throw in a gym bag before a workout, or something to pack for after school. Same product, two completely different reasons to consider it. Two different people suddenly recognize themselves.
Here's why this matters beyond the words. An angle changes the creative assignment. The pre-workout version tells the person making the ad to show the product in a gym bag. The after-school version tells them to show it going into a backpack. Now the designer has a situation to depict. Swap one adjective for another ("best" to "crunchiest") and nobody gets any direction at all.
Ask yourself what the reader should remember after the first screen. That's the angle. Supporting details come later, and picking one emphasis doesn't mean deleting the rest of the product.
Turn the feature into something they can picture
Everybody has heard "write benefits, not features." Almost nobody does the thinking underneath it.
A feature describes the product. The benefit is what that fact does in the customer's situation. The example I used years ago was a pan: "nonstick surface" versus "cook with less oil." One is a spec, the other is a scene in someone's kitchen. Specs still matter, especially when they back up the benefit. The job is explaining why the detail earns its space.
Back to the bag. Say the main compartment unzips on three sides. That's the feature. The consequence is "open the bag wide to see everything you packed." Now the shopper can picture it: the bag on the hotel bed, flapped open so nothing's buried at the bottom.
The move I use is to take a feature and finish the sentence "This matters because..." If the answer ends in something like "elevate your everyday," keep going until it names something concrete. And don't overreach in the other direction either. Opening a bag wider doesn't remove travel stress, it lets you see your stuff. Say that.
Write for what the visitor already knows
Before you write the opening paragraph, ask two things: what did this visitor just see, and what are they trying to find out now?
Someone who clicks an ad showing the bag open and packed has already seen the demonstration. Their next questions are probably dimensions and price. Someone who lands on the page while comparing weekend bags across six tabs has a different question: how is this one different from the others I'm looking at? Same page, two visitors, two different openings.
Traffic source gives you context. It tells you roughly what the person's been told, and it's still the most useful starting point you have, even though it won't tell you everything they know.
This is the part that's hardest to see from inside the company, because you've been living with the product too long. Terms that make total sense in your Slack ("tri-zip," "modular insert") mean nothing to a person who met your brand 11 seconds ago.
So annotate your opening paragraph. Which terms only make sense inside the business? And which sentence just repeats what the ad already established?
Keep the ad promise visible on the page
Good copy loses its value fast when the next page changes the subject.
Put the ad next to the top of the page, and add the popup if one fires on arrival. The wording can vary. The buying reason can't. And a popup should never introduce a second pitch at the exact moment someone is trying to check the first one.
Here's the bag again. The ad shows it being packed for a weekend. The visitor clicks and lands on a page headed "Designed for wherever life takes you." That headline gives them nothing to verify. They came to check whether a weekend fits, and the page just changed the topic to a lifestyle.
A more useful opening: "See how a weekend fits." The supporting line invites them to look at the packing demo and check the dimensions. The hero image shows the exact packing arrangement from the ad, not a different, prettier one. The evidence matters as much as the headline, because the headline is a claim and the image is the thing that lets a stranger evaluate it.
What I wouldn't do is imply everyone packs the same amount, or that the bag fits every airline's sizer. The point is to keep a specific promise visible and let the shopper decide whether it applies to them.
Answer the next question right next to the claim
Every claim creates a next question. "Room for your weekend" makes someone wonder about dimensions and how much is actually in the demo. "Easy to clean" makes someone wonder what cleaning actually involves. The copy should put those answers right next to the decision they affect.
In 2023 I used Cadence, the travel capsule brand, as the example. Their broad pitch was about upgrading how you transport your routine. The rewrite went straight at the travel objections: leakproof and TSA-friendly, so your skincare gets there without a mess. The second version is more useful because it answers the questions a traveler is already asking before they'll put a set of capsules in a carry-on.
Take your lead sentence and ask, "What would someone reasonably ask me next?" Then put the most useful answer in the supporting copy or beside the relevant choice. Some questions need a demonstration or a dimension. They can't be solved with a more confident adjective.
And please don't bury every important answer in an FAQ at the bottom of the page. An FAQ is fine for depth. The information someone needs to make a choice belongs next to the choice.
Pick proof that backs the actual promise
A five-star review is not automatically useful in every spot on the page. If the page leads with comfort and the review next to it raves about the packaging, that's a nice quote answering a question nobody asked. Pick evidence based on what the shopper is being asked to believe at that moment.
The check I run is simple. Read the headline, then read the proof next to it. Say out loud what the proof actually establishes. If the two don't connect, find better evidence or make the claim more accurate.
For the bag, the proof is a packing demonstration with a specific load, plus a real customer describing how they used it on a real trip. That's the type of evidence to go find, and it's worth more than a dozen generic five-star quotes.
Introduce the evidence with a caption that tells people what they're looking at. "Packed for 3 nights: 2 pairs of shoes, 4 shirts, toiletry kit, laptop" helps more than another line praising the bag. And when you excerpt a review, keep the context. One person's experience isn't a promise to everyone.
Make it work for skimmers
Read only the headings and the buttons. Can someone still understand the product and the main reason to buy it?
Most pages fail this test. "Thoughtfully designed." "Crafted for the journey." Those headings take up space without carrying information. For the bag, "Open it wide to see what you packed" tells the skimmer something even if they never read the paragraph below it, and the photo under it can show the opening.
Then look at it on a phone. Shorten the line that wraps awkwardly and break up the paragraph that reads like a wall. If someone needs to compare two things, give them a labeled comparison instead of a paragraph. Just don't trim a sentence so hard that it loses the explanation or an important condition.
Hunt for brand adjectives that could describe any competitor ("premium," "elevated") and replace one with a product fact or a concrete use. Keep your brand's personality in the phrasing where it helps. Every heading just has to earn its real estate.
Tell people what happens when they click
A few years ago I told people to never use "Buy Now" or "Learn more." I'm updating that.
The rule is simpler: the label should describe the useful action available at that moment. "Pick my color" works when the button opens the color selector. "See the packing demo" works when it opens the demo. And when the button adds the product to the cart, say that. A familiar label is fine. Cleverness alone doesn't make a button better.
Keep reassurance near the button when it helps someone decide, like an accurate delivery estimate or the actual return window. Don't let the reassurance replace clear purchase terms.
Read it aloud, then decide what you're testing
Read the revised copy out loud and cut anything you'd never say to a customer's face. Check that the buying reason you picked still comes through. Let sentence length vary... a complicated purchase might need a longer explanation, and that's fine.
Then name the change. Clarifying a feature is an edit for comprehension. Choosing a different buying occasion is a change in angle. Both are useful, but they answer different questions, and you should know which one you're asking.
Write a plain hypothesis. Something like: "We think showing the actual packing arrangement will help a shopper decide whether this bag fits their trip." Then decide what would support it. More clicks show interest. Completed new-customer purchases and what they cost show whether it's commercially useful.
One caution. If you swap the headline and the demo at the same time, you tested that combination. Don't credit the outcome to a single sentence. And a handful of orders doesn't settle the question. Give it enough volume to mean something before you call a winner.
That's all for this week!
Pick one product this week. Fill out the brief and rewrite the opening, then put it next to the ad sending people there. Show both to someone who doesn't work at your company and ask them what the product is for and why they'd consider it. Pay attention to where your explanation loses them, because that's where the next rewrite starts.
If you get stuck on a specific piece of copy, reply with it. I want to see what you're working on, and if this is useful I'm happy to keep going deeper on it.
It's Sunday night, so I hope you plan to get a full 9 hours of sleep tonight and have an incredible week. Q4 is on... drink some water, get a walk in, call a friend, take care of yourself.
I'll see you next Sunday. Same time, same place.
Nik