George Lois and William Bernbach would launch what they thought was an eye-catching, revenue-generating ad into the real and hope for the best. Now we continually improve what we do to make sure we achieve our objective.
A copywriter doesn't just write words, we get under the skin of our audience to provoke or change behaviour, sometimes even culture.
I've given up listening to subjective opinions or being restricted to systems or platforms. I'm not interested in hypothesising what's we think might grab attention, engage or interest people. And I really could not give a shit what other websites do - just because Barclays (or whoever) does it, doesn't mean it works.
Let's test it.
A/B testing
This involves the control (what's already existing or safe option) being put up against the test version (perhaps different headings or images) to a good enough size sample (around 2,000 usually does it), you can see which one wins.
Multi-variant testing (MVT)
As the title suggests, it's using multi-variants of the same page. You could have six different images or five different CTAs or maybe even four different page designs all together. This gives you a lot more flexibility to test different types of creative and different elements of the page.
User testing labs
My personal (and a lot of UXers) favourite, you build a prelive page or journey or a high-fidelity prototype and get your target segment to work through a test scenario, talking through their thinking.
You get so much insight. You see where their eyes fall on the page, which elements they pick out, if they can navigate to the right places, which bits they understand, what they think will happen next. In an ideal world, all digital journeys and websites will go through this before anything is ever built.
This doesn't mean that everything you ever write should be put into a metaphorical Colosseum for a gladiatorial showdown against the copy you were adamant wouldn't work.
Essentially, you should use your experience and knowledge to produce the best copy. That's why your employers hire you, so they should trust your judgement.
Of course, you'll still have conversion rates, traffic and click-throughs as a good indication of how your copy is performing, so it's not like you can publish willy-nilly and never get any qualitative feedback.
The main thing is to not take it personally. It's by no means perfect. You need to take into account the time of day, the day of the week, time of the year and external factors, etc. And if your hypothesis that you so vehemently championed fails, just put it down to experience or a lack of insight into the actual (not target) demographic.
