Copywriting: Data, Evidence, and Testimonials

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Persuasion Starts With Trust

To convince someone to buy a product or service, we first have to earn their trust, because people won't spend money if they don't believe what we're telling them (source: "Placing Trust at the Center of Your Internet Strategy," MIT Sloan Management Review).

One of the best ways to make our copy persuasive is to back up our claims with evidence and data that readers can verify for themselves.

For example, instead of simply claiming that a particular strategy increases sales, we can cite a credible study demonstrating its effectiveness and link directly to the original source, exactly as I do in my lessons whenever you see a statement accompanied by a "(source: ...)" reference.

How to Find Data and Evidence to Support Your Claims

You can search Google for research published by the world's leading universities or consult official data from major companies that supports your claims.

However, whenever you find a source, you must read it and make sure it actually supports what you're saying, because citing Harvard doesn't automatically make a statement true if the research doesn't prove it.

Not many people will open those links, but all it takes is one person discovering that you're linking to random sources just to pretend your claims are backed by evidence when they aren't, and your credibility is completely destroyed.

For example, if a study finds that a strategy works in most cases, we can't turn that finding into a promise that it will always work.

The source must fully support our claim, not merely be used to make it sound authoritative.

Since this is such an important step, I recommend using artificial intelligence and giving it the following prompt:

I'm going to give you a claim. 1. Search for sources that validate my claim in the following order: - Links to the world's leading business universities, such as Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and London Business School. - Links to billion-dollar companies and billionaire entrepreneurs or investors. - Verifiable actions and recommendations from the world's largest billion-dollar companies. - Verified data from billion-dollar companies. - Links to research by the most influential psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists in history who have taught at universities. 2. If I write "all" and a source says "most," that's fine. Don't be overly strict. Just make sure the main idea is supported. 3. Always provide links to primary sources, never third-party websites, and explain what each source says so I can understand how to use it in context. 4. Make sure none of the links you provide lead to a 404 error page. 5. At the end, recommend the best source from those you've found to support my entire claim and, if necessary, rewrite my statement to make it more accurate and consistent with what the sources actually say. 6. Here's the text: [...]

This prompt can save you a lot of time researching sources, but remember that artificial intelligence can make mistakes and even fabricate studies that don't exist, so you must always open the links it provides and read at least the section of each source that's supposed to support your claim.

If you can't find any reliable evidence, don't try to force the findings to prove you're right; instead, revise your statement or remove the claim you can't substantiate.

Case Studies and Testimonials

While credible research is essential for demonstrating that a particular principle works, case studies and testimonials are even better when we need to prove that our product or service has actually helped someone achieve a result (source: "What is Social Proof?," LinkedIn).

That's because readers can see the real experience of someone who was in a situation similar to their own.

For example, instead of claiming that our service helps businesses increase sales, we can present a real case study of a client who achieved a specific result thanks to our work.

Of course, we must be able to prove that the result is genuine and explain the timeframe in which it was achieved, without misleading readers into believing that every client can automatically achieve the same numbers.

The same applies to testimonials, which become credible only when readers can identify who wrote them and verify that they came from real customers.

We must never fabricate a testimonial or case study simply because we don't have one to show yet.

Besides being dishonest, doing so risks completely destroying our credibility the moment a potential customer discovers that we made everything up (which, thanks to the internet, happens routinely and doesn't take long), and fake commercial reviews are also illegal in some countries.

There's no need to invent spectacular results through elaborate storytelling either, because a simple testimonial describing a genuine improvement, even if it isn't extraordinary, is far more convincing than a review full of epic stories that ends up being both ridiculous and ineffective.

If we don't have any verifiable case studies or testimonials yet, we simply leave them out and wait until we've collected them from our first satisfied customers; in the meantime, we can demonstrate the validity of our claims through authoritative sources and publicly available data.