STEPHEN J. CARTER | Direct Response Copywriter

In this post I outline a NEW approach to the marketing and design of your info-products which I think has the potential to double or triple the conversion rate on your front end offer.

I suspect that if you are talented enough you can probably do even better than 2-3 times improvement.

At any rate, this is a tactic for the most ambitious marketers to think about. It is not something I would characterize as a cakewalk.

I will give you the basic theory, so you can decide whether this makes a lick of sense to you or not.

Then I will describe the implementation side of it (the way I approach this), so you can see how you might go about it.

Theory Of Precision Productization

The idea is simple enough. As the title of this post suggests, we are going to implement a precision info-product as our front end offer.

This differs from your standard info-product in that it is created on the fly right after the prospect agrees to purchase it and submits their payment.

The reason we create the product at this late point in the direct response cycle, instead of near the beginning of it (before we begin running ads to gather traffic), is that we want to collect information about the exact nature of the problem faced by the prospect (i.e. Jack’s problem, and not the problem of people like Jack).

We can perform this data collection with a quiz, or a survey, or some other application that provides us with an up-to-date snapshot of our would-be buyer’s predicament.

Obviously, we can use this collected information to write a precision sales letter on the thank you page (some people use the term personalized where I use the term precision, but it’s the same idea). How we go about this depends on what we regard as our biggest lever for upping the conversion rate. So for example:

Collier tells us that when we make our sales pitch we want to begin with the conversation going on in the mind of our prospect. Precision copywriting is an extension of this idea, carried out in real time.

You might be doing this to some extent already – e.g. segmentation, or the ASK Method approach to funneling prospects to the sales message and solution most appropriate to their immediate needs.

We know this usually works better than to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to crafting the offer. But here we want to go a step further.

In addition to our on-the-fly precision sales letter we can also create the precision product at the same time – or at least figure out what it will contain, so that we can describe it in our letter.

Why would we do this?

Why bother to create a precision product, which we do after first analyzing the data collected from our quiz before assembling the final product a few seconds later, when instead we could just create 3-5 related products beforehand and direct our prospect to the one best suited to helping them?

It comes down to personalization – being able to dial into the exact needs of the prospect.

Let’s suppose I have a (woefully underpowered) 6-question quiz where each question can be answered by selecting from one of three multiple choice answers.

How many ways can the prospect respond to the quiz? It’s 3 to the power of 6, or 729 different ways.

You cannot build this many product variations ahead of time so that you might “precisely” respond to your prospect’s needs (let alone build the number of variations required to cover all possible outcomes of a more realistic/complex data-gathering application).

But you can write software to assemble a product based on the answers to 6 questions. Or if needed, 6 times that number of questions.

It’s not trivial, but it’s not like you need to develop an AI-level algorithm to handle the job. It’s a series of IF/ELSE statements.

Is it worth doing this? To be able to tell your prospect that you have analyzed their problem, come up with a solution customized to their exact situation, and then materialize it in front of them so they can see you are serious?

I don’t know. That’s for you to figure out. I can see how some solution providers might look at this and see all kinds of possibilities opening up in front of them.

But I can also see a much larger number of product creators discount the approach as too involved, too risky, not necessary, yeah that’s just plain nutty.

I am not out to convince anyone of the value of this approach.

It either strikes you as a conversion-boosting tactic that will eventually be used by some savvy marketers to edge out their competition and scale while at the same time they make their business immune to reverse engineering, or it strikes you as fanciful.

A precision info-product is a little like one of those dehydrated boulders sold by the Acme Company. By itself it is a light-weight problem fixer. But you add a few drops of water (user info) and it transforms into an 800-pound answer to your prospect’s most pressing issue.

OK, but if we are going to build out an “on the fly” approach wouldn’t this be better handled by an AI? Train a model on our expert problem-solving approach and have the AI compile a solution based on the prospect’s input…

In principle I agree. This sounds great.

However the output, for all practical purposes, is going to be unpredictable. Also the integrity of the advice offered cannot be checked by a human before it is provided to the customer. So how will you be able to trust your AI to properly represent you in all scenarios?

There is also the matter of whether your market would prefer a solution from an AI or a real human expert. I am guessing the expert is likely to be preferred in the long run, but I could be wrong. Who knows where AI will be 5 years from now.

The non-AI precision approach is not as “clever” as AI, but what it does have going for it is that its output is completely predictable and the quality is guaranteed to be expert-level (supposing of course that you have expert-level knowledge to provide).

Implementation Of Your Precision Product

I am just going to describe for you the simplest practical implementation of this approach to precision productization.

It is the one I use. You could come up with smarter designs using other formats – video, audio, membership site content… (if you had the budget for it, I am sure you could do it).

My approach is just to create a PDF, or a series of them, as the product to create on the fly and make immediately available to the customer.

I run a quiz, gather the information from the prospect, then use the data to assemble the PDF and write it to file where it can be downloaded.

Conceptually, very straightforward.

Here’s how you turn the idea into actual software that does the job (at least, this is what I do).

For the PDF construction you will need a basic library which furnishes you with drawing primitives. This allows you to: write text, draw lines (circles, polygons, etc), insert images. I use something I found on github more than a decade ago (it is so old and outdated that I will refrain from naming it). So, nothing too fancy required here.

You will need to develop a simple markup language so that you can develop your product as a series of plain text content-filled “templates” which can be parsed and converted into a PDF document by calls to your PDF construction library. I use the PHP-based templating system Smarty for this part of it.

You will need to develop a parser which can read the templates, figure out what is being requested from the markup, and appropriately format the content for transcription by your PDF generation tool. This parser does things like add headers and footers, add a table of contents, put images in the right places, make links clickable, and stuff like that. It also includes or discard various elements based on what we know about how best to solve the prospect’s problem.

You will also need a basic assembly class that uses the prospect data lookup key to retrieve the data and feed it into each of the collection of template files needed to piece together the final product.

OK, so as I said at the beginning, this is a little involved. But if I can do it then so can your own developers.

If ambitious you can also apply this technique to improve the conversion rate on upsells/downsells, follow-on OTOs, and whatever else you have in the funnel or in your backend.

If you have any questions about this, let me know.

– Stephen (AKA Mr. Precision)

P.S. I do not have any clients who have used this approach, so I cannot tell you whether precision productization is as effective as I suspect it is. I have only recently developed it for my own use, and I have no results yet. So that is my disclaimer. Use this approach at your own peril 🙂

P.P.S. There are some other things you can do here that I think may further improve your odds of getting the sale (these are things I do).

You can craft the product name on the fly so that it includes the primary benefit. Maybe even add the prospect’s name while you are at it:

Let’s call this precision titling.

Can you do more?

How about you create your product image on the fly too. One that uses pixel-precision artwork which includes the just-devised product name.

This will help make the offering much more tangible, which is important for something that we are whipping out of thin air.

You guessed it, I call this precision visualization.

In practice, you are not going to be able to make your titles and product images endlessly variable.

Instead you are going to look for a few variations which encapsulate the main types of problems to be solved, and you are going to reserve the precision part of the process for actually dialing in the solution and presenting it inside the product (and making a big deal on the sales page about how you were able to do this for the benefit of the prospect).

Even then you are going to focus on the “big levers”, but leave yourself the option of fine-tuning the solution where and when you think it makes sense to do so.