How I use survey responses to write winning sales copy

I’ll be honest with you – I don’t have a perfect "step-by-step process" for taking survey feedback and writing sales copy with it.

I’d like to say that I do, but it’s partially an art-form and every product and sales page is different. The structure of my sales letters are similar these days (which I’ll talk about tomorrow) but the way I use 30-Second Survey responses to write my copy varies.

So I’m just going to spew out what I generally do with survey responses and show you what I’m looking for.

Here goes:

Like I said yesterday – I first go through survey responses and create 3 to 7 buckets (which then end up becoming my product ideas).

Next, I go through ALL the responses again and look for the most emotional responses. I don’t limit this search to the product buckets I’ve created.

Why? Because using the example from yesterday – if someone says their biggest problem is procrastination and time to work that could be one course on productivity. But what are they working on? "Building a solopreneur could be a different course. In other words, their response can be useful for the copy on either product’s sales page.

What I often do is copy/paste the more emotional responses in the same document below the product buckets.

(Again, I don’t do this every time. I’ll sometimes just read responses and bold the highly emotional ones.)

If I do want to be more methodical, I label them by "core feelings". "Core feelings" are a concept I learned from Brent Charleton (a copywriting-world famous executive coach) back in 2018.

There are 5 core feelings I’m looking for:

  1. Anger

  2. Fear

  3. Pain

  4. Shame

  5. Guilt

    Anger almost always goes hand-in-hand with Fear, so that’s one category and it’ll always be the biggest. Shame is the second biggest category I encounter. Pain isn’t expressed very often in your responses and same with Guilt. Although if I see a guilt-filled response, I treat it like gold.

    High-level, here’s what I’m going to do with responses later:

    I’m going to write a Lead (start of my sales letter including the headline and introductory body text) that includes:

  6. How they identify themselves

  7. What they’re struggling with

  8. And exactly the outcome they dream about

    Typically, the more emotional responses do a better job of describing what someone is struggling with.

    This isn’t always true, but the less emotional responses often do a better job of describing what a dream outcome looks like. Mainly, because those responses come from a more realistic frame of mind.

    Here’s an example of an "emotional" response. The person isn’t crying out for help or anything like that but you can feel some "feelings" here.

    Cues of emotional responses will often be things like CAPITALIZED letters, cussing and exclamation points.

    "My biggest struggle is that I HATE being in front of a camera and am more introverted when it comes to online business, and that I don’t feel like an expert in any particular category. I want to do the list building lifestyle like your business/Justin Goff and what he used to do. I also have problems with shiny object syndrome in all honesty."

    "I don’t feel like an expert" is a great example of the core feeling of shame. The person, whether they know it or not, is perceiving themself to be "smaller than all".

    If I was creating a product on "Building a solopreneur business", I have a tiny bit of ammunition for my Lead and what people struggle with. I could honestly start a sentence with, "If you don’t feel like an expert…"

    If I was creating a product on "Productivity" I’d lean towards using their language about "If you have problems with shiny object syndrome…".

    I’m telling you, copywriting can be as easy as I’ve described above… if you let it be.

The more responses you look through, the more you’ll pick up on the language of your customers. Then, you literally just say what they’ve said back to them and tell them that your product will fix it (And it should. Build good products and don’t sell crap).

I have one last thing I want to tell you about 30-Second Surveys and copywriting but I’ll save that for tomorrow.

Talk to you then!

– Derek