How do you use psychology to persuade in your copy?

One thing I like to do if there is time? Talk one-on-one with several people who represent the customer persona ... an informal, accumulated focus group. Often you'll gain insights that are not apparent in a surface-level review where your own worldview, experiences, and biases may muddy your understanding of true motivations and real pain points.

One of the most effective ways to improve marketing copy is to talk about the reader's pains, then make a promise how you can solve those — with the product you're selling. Do not talk about yourself, or how great the product is. Talk about the reader and how they feel about the problem — that will make people connect with the copy on the emotional level. Obviously, you need to connect with the right people – the ones who are a perfect fit for your product. And the only way to do that is to understand who they are, what they're trying to do when this Big Painful Problem happens, and how they're dealing with it without your solution. That's when you're able to position your product as a logical, no-brainer solution.

If you choose to do one-on-ones, focus groups, and surveys with customers, you can tap responses for social proof as well as customer feedback. You can then follow up with brand-evangelist customers for detailed, powerful case studies and testimonials.

One should naturally hesitate to assume that "psychology" could be used to ensure persuasive copy. If the brain were that simple, the nature of the mind and thought would be more deeply understood. One might even say that psychology would cease to be a science. However, we all have brains and are therefore subject to psychological processes. Fundamentally, we know there are fears, motivations, desires, fantasies, questions and conclusions, all of which influence our lives. So, the effective writer can draw from the internal resources of the mind to capitalize upon those fears and motivations. In the process a writer could ponder the question, "What is the most important outcome of this fear or other emotion?" The answer will reveal a path.

Humans are looking for ways to reduce risk all the time, whether we notice it or not. When choosing a solution to a problem—especially an expensive one—seeing that something has already worked for other people like you is the psychological green flag. It shows that the risk of picking that solution over the others is minimal.

Marketers have over-used scarcity on the web to the point where people are skeptical of every "limited offer" they're shown. And rightfully so. The only way to make scarcity work in your copy is to justify why exactly scarcity is a thing for your product. Make it easy to understand why it's not a made-up timer or limit. Make it clear that the offer will not be available again until much later—when it's going to be too late for the reader.

Be wary of split-testing copy without having a proper sample size. The less significant a change is, the bigger audience you're going to need to arrive at a statistically significant result—assuming the change impacts the outcome at all. A much better play is to do some qualitative research. Show your copy to someone from the target audience–e.g. a past customer—and ask them if it's clear what you're selling, do they care, and if they would buy it at the spot. For high-value B2B products, you might want to use a service like Wynter to get anonymous feedback from vetted professionals in a specific niche or vertical.

Keep track of copy you have released to see how well it performs after you publish it. If it performs particularly well, create a framework for your copy and repeat the process to see if you get the same results. If you come across copy from other writers that is performing well, you can keep a copy of it in a "swipe file" so you can reference it later for inspiration. Having an organised swipe file can help give you a boost on days when you struggle to write.