Case Study: Convention Connection

Controversial Approach Boosts Conversion Rate by 455%

Business consultant Ariel Coro had a problem. He usually handled all of his copywriting projects in-house, but his copywriter had just learned she was pregnant and had decided to make motherhood her full-time job. As excited as he was for her, it also left him in a bit of a bind.

Ariel was managing the redesign of a client’s website, which was due to launch in less than a month. But not a word of copy had been written.

“What could we do?” explains Ariel. “Elance and many of those sites are very scary since they’re like a box of chocolates. And we had been burned in the past by low quality work, regardless of the price.”

He suddenly remembered a brief encounter with Cory Fossum of Fossum Creative at a marketing seminar in Los Angeles. He found his card and gave him a call.

“They were a little out of our price range,” Ariel recalls with a smile, “But I recommended Fossum Creative to my client anyhow since it would have been more expensive to miss our launch date for the website.”

With crunch time looming, Abby Alderman, lead copywriter at Fossum Creative,
buckled down and started to re-imagine the copy for the site. Not only was the
original site difficult to navigate, but the copy was minimal and did little to convey the power of the service. To top it off, it lacked a distinct voice or any indication that it had been written with the target audience in mind.

So Abby set out to remedy the situation by infusing a giant dose of personality into the copy, and ensuring that visitors knew how to navigate the site and take
advantage of the Convention Connection service. Convinced they had hit a home run, Fossum Creative turned the project in to the client.

But Ariel didn’t share their enthusiasm. In fact, he was downright skeptical.

“There was something different about it,” he says. “It was conversational, informal, and inviting. My first reaction was that it would bomb, since our client’s customers are pretty serious people. Boy was I wrong!”

When the site went live several days later, it started converting 455% more than the old site had done in the same time period the year before. The phone started to ring off the hook at Convention Connection and Ariel was a hero in the eyes of his client.

“I know that a crucial part of the website’s success was the copy that Fossum
Creative developed for us,” says Ariel now. “Writing copy is not easy. They just make it look like it is.”