Write Your Way to 3.5x More Conversions: a Mini Masterclass in Conversion Copywriting | Joanna Wiebe (Copyhackers)

How to listen

In this episode of Subscription Heroes, host Scott Herf sits down with Joanna Wiebe, the original conversion copywriter and creator of Copy Hackers. They cover the role of AI in copywriting, what it really takes to convert leads into clients, and some of the most surprising tactics in conversion copywriting that work even when they shouldn't.

What Is Conversion Copywriting?

Scott: You have a real superpower here. Can you define conversion copywriting for people who may not be familiar with your work?

Joanna: Conversion copywriting is simply copy, or words, that gets the "yes." Whatever you're trying to get people to do, whether that's a purchase or a lead, conversion copywriting draws a more direct line to that outcome.

Scott: There are sometimes negative associations with writing copy that's designed to close. Have you run into that, and do you understand where it comes from?

Joanna: I think people associate persuasive copy with that one time they bought something they didn't really want. There's an ugliness around sales for some, and for good reasons in some cases, because people have abused it. But when I look at founders and marketers who want great results, there's still this fear of looking like a salesperson. They haven't actually seen copy work in a positive, non-manipulative way. By not being deliberate about moving people to a "yes," you're doing yourself and your potential customers a disservice. They came looking for something, and you're not giving it to them.

UX vs. Persuasion: A False Conflict

Scott: Do you think part of this reluctance comes from how hands-off and insular the tech industry has become, everyone copying what Apple or Google does?

Joanna: There's definitely a UX versus persuasion tension. Some people believe those two things shouldn't meet. But if you're truly user-centric, your job is to give users what they came for. People don't land on your website hoping nothing in their lives will change. They're looking for something better. If you have a solution, you owe it to them to connect them with it.

And on Apple, people always say they want to "do it like Apple." But go do a word count on any Apple product page. It's long. It always has been. They just distract you from that with interactive design and scrolling animations. They're not minimalist when it comes to copy.

The Power of Long-Form Copy and Storytelling

Scott: What about long-form, story-driven copy; the old sales letter style? Is that falling out of fashion?

Joanna: It's alive and well with companies that truly believe in their story. I've seen a denim brand that sends emails telling the full history of their fabric; where it came from, why it matters, and it keeps you reading all the way down. It's not endless, but it's rich. You finish reading feeling educated, proud of your purchase, like you're buying something with meaning. That's what belief in your product looks like on the page.

The brands that cut everything down to two words are often the ones where leadership doesn't really believe they have something remarkable to sell.

Joanna: When you believe in your product, you're willing to spend more words on it because you want people to be as excited as you are. The final approver on copy often has a crisis of confidence: "Nobody reads online, so let's keep it short." What they're really saying is: "We don't have anything cool enough for people to want to read about." You have to have leadership that genuinely believes in the brand.

Scott: You're also never really done telling your story. A great brand story can make customers into evangelists; they end up bringing it up in conversation, recommending you to friends just because you told them something compelling.

Scott: Let's take a little break to tell you about Churnkey. Now, I think Churnkey is awesome, but I am super biased because I'm a co-founder. But I love what we're doing for subscription companies. You might look at your churn numbers and think, "There's got to be a way to turn this around. There's got to be someone who can improve retention and help us track down why people are leaving our product." And that's why Churnkey's here.

Churnkey is the only platform that fixes every type of churn for you. We handle retention for customer-obsessed teams like Jasper, Fairdrop, AI Dungeon, and Castos. We lower cancellations by up to 42%, recover up to 89% of failed payments, and even increase customer LTV by 28%, and we do it with our user-friendly, customer-centric cancel flows, modern failed payment recovery, and AI-driven feedback analysis. So if you want to run a healthier subscription business, head to churnkey.com to get started.

The Wistia Email Test: 3.5x More Paid Conversions

Scott: You had a well-known project with Wistia back in 2017, rewriting their onboarding emails. There was skepticism it would work, but it did, right?

Joanna: Yes. Wistia had a three-part onboarding email sequence, and I worked on the third flow, the one closest to the purchase decision. Their control had eight emails; I wrote eight new ones. The key change was reorganizing them around stages of awareness, moving people from low product awareness through to being fully ready to buy. My emails were longer, but not dramatically so. The original might be two sentences; mine might be four.

The result was 3.5 times more paid conversions. Andrew Kaplan, their internal CRO at the time, ran the test; the significance and confidence levels were solid throughout.

Joanna: Chris Savage told me at an event a couple of years later: "My team hates those emails. We want to get rid of them, but we keep looking at the results and we can't." They eventually did replace them. And that happens a lot. Marketers often have an allergic reaction to copy that feels like it's working, like it's trying to convince them. Even if it sounds on-brand and performs exceptionally, if it feels persuasive, there's resistance.

Where to Find the Biggest Conversion Wins

Scott: For a B2B SaaS operator looking to improve conversion rates with copy, where do you usually find the most ROI?

Joanna: There are two foundational principles in direct-response copywriting that inform everything: "list, offer, copy" and the "rule of one": one reader, one offer, one big idea, one promise. The order matters: list comes first (who you're talking to), then offer (what you're actually giving them), then copy (how you express it). Copy is the third item in the sequence for a reason. It can only do so much if the list and offer aren't right.

Joanna: The number one way to make copy perform better is to start with a deep, clear understanding of who your reader is. That means real empathy, not "I'm in a rush" empathy, but "I'm here to solve a problem, can you help me?" empathy. And then work on your offer.

Offer doesn't mean a sale or a discount. It means: do people actually understand what's in your product? One of the Wistia emails had 22 bullet points listing everything the platform could do. The goal was to make people think, "Holy crap, this thing does a lot." Price, promotion, and product features all feed into it. If you can sit down every time you write and ask yourself, "What am I actually offering this person?", that's where big lifts come from.

Joanna: Copywriting is not just making your headlines sound awesome. The real leverage, the small hinge that swings giant bank vault doors, is the list and offer. If you can't control your traffic (the list), you can always do something about the offer. That's where I'd focus. It's the work that looks unglamorous but moves the numbers.

The Most Surprising Conversion Copywriting Tactics That Work

Scott: What's the most ridiculous tactic in conversion copywriting that works but really shouldn't?

Joanna: The number one thing that always shocks me isn't even copy, it's images. A photo of a woman will outperform a photo of a man in the hero section, every single time. I've tested it a lot. It shouldn't work, but it does.

On the copy side: put your headline in first person and in quotation marks. Do the same with your CTA button. It feels strange at first, is this allowed?, but it works. It likely taps into curiosity about other people, the suggestion of a dialogue, or the revelation of something personal.

Joanna: Another one: tapping into the idea of a secret. You don't even have to use the word "secret," but if you can suggest that someone is about to gain inside access to something, people respond intensely. And then there's extremely short copy. If your goal is just to get a click, stripping a page down to almost nothing will send click-through rates through the roof. There's nothing else to do but click. The catch is you'll need many more pages in your funnel to make it work. But yes, it works when it probably shouldn't.

AI as a Copywriting Sidekick

Scott: Let's talk about AI. Where do you see the line between the writer and the machine?

Joanna: I love AI for writing. When I first tried ChatGPT, I asked it to write the opening line of a novel about two boys who wake up on a deserted island. Twelve seconds later, it produced a line I genuinely wanted to read further. I was sold.

I now use it as a sidekick. What I appreciate is that there's no ego, unlike some junior writers who come in convinced they already know everything. I give it a prompt, it works with me, and it keeps improving as I guide it. If you use it to replace your brain entirely and you already hate writing, you'll get mediocre output. But if you're using it to offload tedious tasks, it's transformative.

Joanna: One great example: competitor messaging audits. I used ChatGPT to build a comparison table for three project management tools in seconds: features, differentiators, and positioning. Work that used to take hours of manual research. That's the kind of thing AI handles brilliantly.

You can also use it to generate problem lists for a specific audience. If I'm writing for a product that solves hyperhidrosis, I can ask it to list the ten most common problems people with that condition face, then drill into the seventh one for copy angles, and within minutes, I have a solid problem-agitation-solution outline. You still need to know the right questions to ask. But AI does the heavy lifting of synthesis.

Joanna: I'm not scared, I'm excited. Yes, maybe in a few years, AI will be so good that it eliminates the need for what I do. I can't control that. But right now, and for the foreseeable future, it's an incredibly powerful tool in the hands of someone who understands copywriting strategy. You still need to know why you're asking what you're asking.

Lessons From Building Copyhackers

Scott: Copy Hackers is now 12 years old. What's the most surprising thing you've learned from growing it?

Joanna: You don't need as many tactics as you think. My friend Matt Lerner talks about "sevens", anything performing at a seven out of ten will kill your business. You have to cut the sevens and double down on your eights, nines, and tens.

For Copyhackers, the things that reliably work are webinars and short-term promotions. Two of those a year, done well, and the business is healthy. The temptation is always to fill the gaps with new projects, build software, launch something new, but that's often just productive-looking make-work. Do the things that work, and protect your time.

Closing Question and Final Advice

Scott: What are you reading right now?

Joanna: There's a long-form article at clickminded.com about cutting sevens and focusing on what actually works in your business. I've forwarded it to everyone I know.

Scott: And closing out, if you have a high-octane tip you'd give listeners, about anything at all?

Joanna: Show up. I know it sounds dull, but the people who keep showing up are still here 12 years later and have become genuine authorities in their space. People who were entry-level coordinators when they first read my ebooks are now VPs of Growth at major organizations, and they come back to work with us because we were there then and we're still here now. It's the easiest thing in the world to stop showing up. Don't.

About Joanna

In this episode, I spoke with Joanna Wiebe, founder of Copyhackers and the “OG conversion copywriter.” Joanna is an incredible teacher through her great content and many courses, and she works with companies like Canva, Intuit, and MetaLab to up their conversion game.

Resources

Her company, Copyhackers: https://copyhackers.com
Joanna on Twitter: https://twitter.com/copyhackers
Joanna’s New Newsletter: https://joannawiebe.substack.com

About your host, Scott Hurff

Scott Hurff is a co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Churnkey. He was on the founding team of Tinder’s first acquisition, where he created some of the app’s most successful early revenue features. He was on the founding team of Casa, the world’s first consumer-friendly Bitcoin self-custody provider. O’Reilly published his book, Designing Products People Love, which Scott Berkun called “a thoughtful and charming guidebook for making great things.”

Brought to you by Churnkey

Subscription Heroes is powered by Churnkey, a platform that helps subscription companies improve customer retention and recover failed payments with customer-centric, user-friendly experiences. Churnkey lowers cancellations by up to 42%, recovers up to 89% of failed payments, and increases customer LTV by 28% for customers including Jasper, SavvyCal, Copy.ai and Castos.