Clients like to feel they are getting their money’s worth when they pay you to improve on an existing web page.
This is true whether you are writing an online sales page, subscription page or some kind of content page.
In my experience, clients not only want you to completely rewrite the current control, but they also want you to base the new page on a totally new idea.
If you give them a variation on the current page or, heaven forbid, just make some tweaks to what they already have, they become very disappointed and will likely throw your draft back in your face.
From an online testing perspective, this is a foolish way to go.
If you really want to improve results, you’re better off making discrete, incremental changes to an existing page, testing it, and then seeing if the results are better or worse.
In other words, you work with a page that already performs well and then see if you can make it even better.
Certainly, there is a place for trying something absolutely new, based on an entirely different approach or idea.
That’s where your next big winner will likely come from.
But when you do that, you are taking a significant risk. It’s a shot in the dark. You have no idea how a completely new approach will perform. And based on my own experience over the years, these “new” approaches will fail more often than they win.
If your client is looking for a lift in performance, the best thing to do is to mix it up. Focus most of your attention on testing incremental changes to current best performers. Then, occasionally, try something completely new.
A reasonable starting point would be to put 80% of your effort into making small improvements to existing pages, and 20% of your effort into trying something completely new.
The trouble is, most companies I come across don’t want to do it this way at all.
They always want something completely and utterly new, based on a fresh and original idea. Every time.
This doesn’t make sense from a testing perspective.
So why do they do it?
Like I said at the outset, I think most of the time it’s because they want their money’s worth. If they are paying you to beat their current control, they want to feel you have put maximum effort into the job.
There is some ego at play there too. If a totally new page turns out to be a big winner, your client wants to be part of that big win.
It’s a rare and sophisticated client who will nod and smile when you come back with some minor tweaks to an existing page, and then pay you the same amount as he or she would for a complete rewrite.
How do I deal with this as a freelance writer and copywriter?
Mostly I go with the flow and give the client what he or she wants.
But once I get to know a client well enough, I’ll get into that conversation about taking the 80/20 approach.
And sometimes they’ll bite.
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As I read your words, am thinking one can still have a SOUL and write good or great copy (that converts).
This is very encouraging.