No one can accuse ecommerce copywriter Chris Orzechowski of mimicking others. In an era of image-heavy emails, he prefers plain text. Amid the Facebook-Google advertising juggernaut, he likes X.
Orzechowski is an 11-year writer and marketer, first as a freelancer and then, in 2020, at Orzy, the agency he founded. In our recent conversation, he addressed his keys to successful product copy, frustration with Meta, and migration to X Ads.
The entire audio of our discussion is embedded below. The transcript is condensed and edited for clarity.
Eric Bandholz: What do you do?
Chris Orzechowski: I’m a copywriter and an email and retention marketer. I help ecommerce brands craft better messaging to grow revenue and scale their businesses. I founded an agency called Orzy Media in 2020. Before that I was a freelancer for seven years.
I’ve worked with many direct-to-consumer companies. Over the past 11 years, I have written for Carnivore Snax, Perennial Pastures Ranch, Rich Dad Poor Dad, and Filippo Loreti.
I specialize in copy-heavy plain text and story-driven emails that differ from traditional poster-style versions. That’s my signature style. I started getting into X Ads out of necessity when I was having issues with Facebook.
We’re a small team at Orzy, a boutique. We like to go deep with our clients. Good copy will have a story and vivid descriptions, which I call dimensionalization. When folks read the product description, they don’t care about the features. They care about how it will improve their lives.
There are millions of ecommerce stores. How can a single store stand out? The marketing, the copy, the voice, and the personality will help win consumers’ mindshare. To improve copy, you have to be curious.
Part of it is immersing yourself in the industries you work in and seeing what everyone else is doing.
Bandholz: Orzy manages clients’ ad campaigns. You’re doing well with X Ads.
Orzechowski: I was initially skeptical. For a long time, people have said not to waste time on Twitter. That was pre-Elon. The platform was wonky back then, but it’s since improved.
I got started on X because I was frustrated with Meta. I got locked out of my account for over a year. I couldn’t talk to anyone at Facebook support. I opened a new account, but still had trouble. I decided to explore other avenues and zeroed in on X. I noticed some brands’ ads were getting 10 million or more impressions.
HexClad, Ridge Wallet, and other big DTC brands were running ads on X. I thought, “These are big, successful companies. The people running these ads are not idiots. There’s a reason they’re doing it.”
I started experimenting with a few campaigns. They were cheap. Some had 38-cent CPMs and 25-cent CPCs.
I started experimenting with my book, the lead magnet for my services. I was getting leads. It’s just taking a piece of content, adding some targeting parameters, and then expanding the number of impressions. Now I manage X campaigns for several clients. They work pretty well. There’s some nuance. It’s different from Meta.
Meta has many data points. They know who your people are. However, the downside is that brands get capped out with the amount they can spend. They can’t push it any higher in a profitable way. With X, you have more room to run because you can choose the targeting parameters. It’s like Google Ads or direct-mail list rental back in the day. You can create similar list universes within the targeting parameters of X.
Bandholz: On X, is it better to build on keywords, content, or demographics?
Orzechowski: It’s a bit of all three. Demographics are big. We layer on the keywords and the follower lookalikes. We choose 10 to 30 profiles, and X will generate a lookalike audience based on the profiles’ followers.
Finding good follower lookalikes, where you can get many people, is critical. You want at least a few hundred thousand, if not a million, within your targeting pool. Unless you’re a higher-end B2B SaaS company and have just 5,000 potential customers. Then you might want to target some smaller, high-end profiles.
X Ads has a feature called Optimized Targeting. It uses data from a campaign and its targeting parameters and then expands and tests it on different pockets of users.
An easy way for brands to get started on X is to roll out a successful campaign from Meta. Static ads on X tend to get more impressions. We’ve made video work, too. A good video demonstrates the product and describes it in an attention-grabbing manner.
Bandholz: Where can folks follow you?
Orzechowski: My agency is Orzy.co. “The Moat,” my book for growing brands, is on Amazon. I’m @chrisorzy on X. I’m also on LinkedIn.
