Here’s an oddly specific, yet potentially priceless, piece of random information you might be glad to learn.
From the book Ogilvy on Advertising:
“When you put your headline in quotes, you increase recall by an average of 28 per cent.”
More.
Even though it’s wisdom—possibly timeless wisdom—being shared by the great late David Ogilvy, I’m not simply reading it in a book, believing it at face value, writing about it in an email, and sharing it with you, hoping you believe it at face value as well and think more highly of me as a result.
Instead, I’ve been actively testing this odd—be honest, it does seem a bit weird, why would a few curly lines change anything about how people recall information?—piece of advice myself in one of my hobby projects. And I haven’t just been testing the headline of the sales page. No, no, I’ve been testing it on every single sub-headline as well.
You see, where bigger brands, are playing an entirely different game than you and I—a game of brand recognition and perception—I’m playing a more simple game. A more relaxing game I find as well. A game with only two possible outcomes:
Making the sale or not making the sale.
So increased recall isn’t that valuable to me—there’s an argument saying it matters for retargeting campaigns, but let’s not go there now. What is valuable to me is skimmability. After all, we know almost nobody actually reads a sales page. People quickly scroll through it, read the headlines, look for a section or two they care about, and immediately know whether they’ll buy the product or not.
If you don’t believe me, do some heatmap studies of your sales pages (or look up some recent studies) and you’ll see this phenomenon time and time again.
Anyway.
For my, not so, scientific experiment, my question was, “Does putting my subheadlines in quotes (presumably) increase skimmability, and increase my conversion rate?”
Turns out, it does.
Or at least, it might. While this small change improved my metrics, I have no scientifically accurate way of knowing whether the quotes were the actual reason, let alone a causal connection instead of merely a correlation (read: I can’t be arsed setting up a proper scientific experiment in a controlled environment so this will do).
So there you have it.
Try it out if you want, don’t try it out if you think it sounds like a bunch of majoring in the minors, which I won’t deny it might be.
That said, if you enjoy reading tips and tricks on creating better-converting sales pages, then you might want to check out my course, Sales Page Sorcery.
Click here for more information: https://alexvandromme.com/sorcery/