Convert! Convert! Get Copy That Converts!

What’s conversion copy? How do you “get copy that converts"?

In the business world, convert = make the sale, get the email, gain the donation, get them to join. The pandemonium sounds like, “Create a website that converts! Get conversion worthy copy! Write copy that converts! Convert! Convert!”

In the pandemonium, the creator/writer/DIYwriter gets hyper focused on “converting” and “making the sale” and winds up producing something that feels forced and gimmicky.

But, convert! Convert!

Listen. The way to convert someone (hint, it’s an actual person you seek to convert) resides in the definition of the word itself.

CONVERT:

cause to change

in form,

character,

or function.

When you keep in mind that conversion takes place within living, breathing people, the question becomes how do you create “change in form, character, or function” within?

Feel These Words: The key to conversion is genuine connection. Decisions to buy, donate, join are made emotionally, not intellectually. So to create action, to convert someone, you’ve gotta appeal to their hearts, not their heads, my friends.

The question becomes how?

Let me show you an example.

Some time back, I was invited to a business luncheon put on by the City Rescue Mission. Business casual, semi-swanky, we gathered in a large room on the campus of a regional university. Lovely food and keynote speakers, check.

Plenty of suits at podium talking statements about the City Rescue Mission’s mission, programs, funding. “And let’s be sure to dig deep into our hearts today and give freely to keep providing.” Their appeals to my rational mind, I rationally heard. I wonder if there will be a soup course … clap, clap, smile, nod

then he took the stage.

Fumbling. Nervous at the podium, he said, “Hi. My name is Joe, and I was homeless. My mom still is, she’s still abusing, and none of us have heard from my Dad in a while.”

This man, this slight boy really, all of let’s say 22, continued on to explain how his family had become homeless. The alcohol, the angry landlords, the streets.

He talked about hacks he’d learned to survive, his daily minutiae that had become his only known and norm -- he’d been homeless by age 13, when he started drinking with his mother. Heroin came later.

Joe’s voice shook, and he had to pause every so often to fight back emotion, as he shared that the City Rescue Mission not just changed his life but saved his life. How they built up his spirit with warmth and goodness and provided him resources he never dreamed to dream about.

He stood at that podium as the first in his family to ever have attended college, and Joe stood as a newly accepted freshman at Saginaw Valley State University after earning a 4.0 from local Delta College!