Your sales copy is by far the most important element of your sales page because it is the principal device for convincing people to buy your product or service on the internet. If you get it wrong your sales will slump, no matter how much you invest in advertising and promotion, however if you can get it right, your online sales will skyrocket.
If your sales copy is not up to scratch your prospect will lose interest in your product or service and not realize how it could help them, or merely have a lack of interest in your dull, lifeless and un-engaging sales copy. Basically what I am trying to say is, if your sales copy is not up to scratch, most of your website readers will leave your site without buying your product or service.
This can have a negative effect on your conversion rate. It is therefore imperative that you get your sales copy right so this doesn’t happen. What I am about to teach you is how you can include the most superior copywriting principles in your sales copy that have been proven to increase conversion rates significantly and compel readers in to taking the desired action, which in your case will probably be to either be to buy your product or service or subscribe to your newsletter.
However, I want to clarify one thing before we get started.
That is, if you don’t research your target market before you begin to write your sales copy, you are destined to produce a low converting sales copy. I cannot stress how imperative it is that you fully understand the needs, desires and motivations of your target market before you start writing your sales copy. If you do not complete this critical step then you will fail to put across to them the fundamental motives that compel them to buy your product or service.
I would also like to eliminate the common belief that good sales copy can sell anything, because it can’t. You must warrant that your product offers an actual value to your prospective customer before you progress. If your product does have a real value, that’s great! Let’s continue. If it doesn’t, you need to go back to the drawing board. There is no point in try trying to sell a product with no real value.
Market Research
When conducting your market research, you should think about the following questions:
- What sex is your prospect?
- How old are they?
- How do they see themselves?
- How do others see them?
- What stage are they at in life?
- What would they like to change?
- What are their morals?
In order to answer these questions you could use the following sources:
- Online discussion forums
- Online articles
- Survey results
- Focus group results
- Other secondary research sources
For more accurate results, you could conduct some of your own primary research .
If you are selling a digital information product online, such as an eBook on how to burn fat or build muscle, you might consider visiting your local gym or health club to ask people what inspires them and motivates them to lose weight or become more muscular? Is it to attract people of the opposite sex? Is it to make them feel healthy? Is it to gain the feeling of supremacy or build up self esteem levels?
If you are able to identify the right motivations of the individual and put them across in your sales copy, you are more likely to draw their attention.
For example, if you discover that the major motive for men when trying to build a muscular physique is to attract women, you can base your sales copy around the fact that your eBook will help them to attain this goal.
If this is the case, you would sell them the ability to attract women, not the ability to build a muscular physique. It is important to keep your target customer in your mind at all times whilst forming your sales copy.
Now that you have discovered the wants and needs of your target market, it’s time to recognise the features and benefits of your product or service.
Product Research
Let’s look at how you can use your product to discover the true benefits that will be of real interest to your target market.
Ask yourself the following question:
- What are your products major features and benefits?
- What it your products unique selling point?
- Who is my competition?
- How is my product used?
- Who uses my product?
- What problems does my product solve?
- How does my product operate?
- Do you have any feedback about my product?
- How is your product delivered to the customer?
- What after-sales service do you offer?
- What guarantees do you offer with my product?
- What are you trying to get the prospect to do?
You should start to look at how the seven capital sins of human nature could help you to sell your product or service. These are:
- Vanity – One of the most simple and most powerful ways of convincing your reader into making a purchase is to flatter them and butter them up. You should make them feel important and praise their intelligence. Then you should imply that someone of their nature should really buy your product or service.
- Sloth – Humans are naturally an indolent species, generally speaking, and you can use this characteristic to your advantage. If you offer your prospect something that will save them time or effort when performing a task, they are more likely to get out their credit cards.
- Envy –If you inform your reader on how other people are benefiting from your product, they will soon follow suit. Testimonials and product reviews are a powerful way of adding credibility and establishing trust with your prospect as they help to demonstrate how other people are already benefiting from your product.
- Gluttony – If you can convince your customer that they will experience some sort of satisfaction or content when they consume your product, you’re on to a winner. You should drive this feeling of satisfaction forward in your sales copy and make your prospect aware of how you can help them to satisfy a passion of theirs.
- Lust – Similar to gluttony whereby, you can show your reader that your product or service satisfies a passion of theirs, you have a real selling point.
- Anger – It’s a fact that most people become aggravated or angry for many different reasons. If you are able to identify what makes them heated and find them a solution to this, then you should include it in your sales copy as it will have a positive effect on your sales.
- Avarice –People yearn for more in life, whether it’s more clothes, more holidays, more cars, more money, more attention, more self wellbeing or more respect. Playing on this can be really powerful because if you offer people more of what they want, they are likely to listen to what you have to say.
These seven capital sins of human nature are a very powerful tool in which you can play upon and can give you enormous potential to operate your prospects deep, unconscious emotional triggers. Decisions on whether you prospect is going to purchase your product are made on emotional grounds before the reader starts to rationalize purchasing your product.
Be sure to be delicate when presenting these seven capital sins in your sales copy. You won’t make many sales by telling your prospect they are greedy, lazy and vain.
Now that you understand your target market in detail and how your product or service’s benefits contest your target market’s needs desires, you have all the tools in place that will help you to start writing a high converting sales copy.
Writing Your Sales Copy
Headline
The headline is probably hardest most important element of your sales copy to get right.
When your reader first visits your web page, they have no dedication to your sales copy. They haven’t devoted any time to reading about your product and its benefits, and it is very likely that you won’t get them to if your headline doesn’t draw their attention in around 5 seconds. If you fail to write a headline that does this then you will most certainly lose your reader.
The headline of your sales piece is even more important in the online environment where individuals can move away at the click of a button. It is a well known fact that people skim when they surf the internet and there is no great physical feat necessary to move away from your sales page. It is a lot different from a physical direct mailing where they are troubled with the effort of screwing it up and tossing it in the rubbish bin.
To write a headline that gets the reader’s attention in such a short timeframe you need to exploit its benefits. Identify your products major benefit through the eyes of your target market and present this benefit your headline. Also, try to provoke curiosity in your headline by mentioning the key benefit of your product. Mentioning your product’s most important benefit in your headline is the by far the most effective way of getting the attention of your reader.
Opening Paragraph
Opening Paragraph
Your opening paragraph should continue flawlessly from the headline of your sales piece, as this develops your reader’s concentration and awareness, into a genuine interest in your product pr service.
To carry out this effectively you need to illustrate more of your products benefits. The beginning of your sales copy should be packed with benefits, more than the concluding part of your sales copy.
The reason for this is because once you have the reader’s emotional interest in your product by plentiful mention of your it’s benefits and the use of emotional language, you can then help the reader to rationalise their potential purchase later on. Your primary focus should be on the major benefits of your product or service. You should inform your reader of what your product can do for them, not what you are selling to them.
Body Copy
Your reader having an interest in a product is one thing, but having a desire to buy a product and the confidence to go ahead with the purchase is a completely different ball game.
The job of your body copy is to make the reader feel as though they don’t just want the product, they need it.
In order to build your readers desire for your product you need to make the copy have an impact on them whilst highlighting the benefits of your product throughout the bulk your sales copy.
You can use teasers at the ends of paragraphs to keep the reader hooked. You can break your copy with testimonial boxes or other graphics. If you are going to do this should do so in the middle of a sentence. You should play on the human necessitate for completion to keep your reader eager for more.
It is a good idea to keep your sales copy one-to-one as if you were talking to the reader face-to-face. This can often be a good way to visualise how your sales copy reads.
Remember to keep your sales copy clean and easily digestible for your reader and try to refrain from using complex words and sentences. Also, use plenty of sub-headings to break up the text and remember to emphasize the major benefits of your product or service.
At this stage you should have included most of the benefits of your product within your sales copy. Your reader should be on the verge of purchasing your product, but you can’t stop here.
You now need to encourage your reader and help them to overcome their unwillingness to purchase. It’s not that your prospect doesn’t want to buy your product, because chances are they probably do. It’s just that people just naturally employ a degree of caution when deciding to purchase a product.
You now have to persuade the reader that the risks of not buying you product far surpass the risks of buying your product. A great way of doing this is to provoke ‘envy’ in your reader, one of the seven capital sins that we earlier.
As also discussed earlier, you can use testimonials to demonstrate to the reader how other people have already benefited from purchasing your product. You need to make them feel as though they are part of a very small group of people who are not yet benefiting from using your product or service.
Some of the most widely used tools and strategies in the information marketing industry are:
- A free sample, preview or trial
- Money-back guarantee
- Statistics
- Third party endorsements
- Press coverage
- Online credibility and security certification
Free samples and free trials are predominantly effective and have become increasingly popular in the internet information marketing community. This strategy is also used a lot in offline promotions as well as online promotions.
Think back to when you last bought a fragrance from your local beauty store. Would you have still purchased the fragrance if you didn’t have the option to smell a free tester sample first? The chances are, you most likely wouldn’t have. Prospects want re-assurance that what they are about to purchase delivers exactly what it promises.
It is now time to push your prospect into buying your product or service.
Call to Action
Whether you are selling, looking for subscribers or wanting contact from your prospect, you must make it clear what you want them to do.
It is important that you clarify the actual objective of your sales copy and make it clear what the reader must do to receive the benefits that you have mentioned earlier.
The call to action is the make or break point of your whole sales page when attempting to compel the reader to do what you want them to do, whether it be subscribe to your mailing list or buy your product or service.
You already have their attention and interest in your product, you have developed their aspiration for your product, and you have convinced them that your product will deliver as it promises. All that remains to do is tell the reader what to do to purchase your product.
You can even scatter calls to action through your sales copy to allow your readers to stop reading and take action at certain points on your sales page, before finishing reading the full sales copy.
Whether you choose to use frequent calls to action throughout your copy, or just the one at the end, it is critical that you make it an order, not a request.
Don’t ask your prospect if they would like to order your product, tell them to oder. Use verbs which make them take action and purchase your product. The best call to action words to use are ‘Add to Cart’ when trying to get your prospect to buy your product, rather than the typical ‘Order Now’ which is frequently used. If you read my last post about the ‘7 Elements of a High Converting Order Button’ you understand why this is important and how it can significantly increase your conversion rate.
It may seem abrupt to take this approach but take it from me; it is much more effective than making a delicate request and I know this because I have tested this many times.
If you are writing your sales copy in a sales letter format, as we tend to do with internet information marketing products, it is habitually a sensible strategy to sum up the key benefits of your product or service using a PS and PSS to capture the prospects that are still indecisive about purchasing your product and who make it to the very end of your sales copy, past the order section.
You could also add an additional call to action here, such as a subscribe box if the prospect has passed your order section. It may be the case that they still want more information and proof that the product works before they make a purchase so if a free sample or trial was offered here, with the call to action being a newsletter subscribe form, you could send the preview over to them via email and then follow up with an email campaign to persuade them into making a purchase. If you follow up with them over the following week, this will give them enough time to rationalize buying your product.
Another option would be to add a few more testimonials here to give your prospect a little more confidence.
That’s it! You should now have a well written, high converting sales copy which is ready to present to your prospects and start making you sales.
If you feel that this article has helped you, please leave your comments below.
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