Do you wake up to new sales each morning (#blessed)?
Is your sales page converting well?
Are you confident that your sales page speaks to your ideal customer in her language?
If you answered no to any of those questions, today’s blog post is for you.
I’m giving you ten actionable ways you can improve your sales page that will result in more sales. Cha-ching!
1. Rewrite Your Headline
If your headline isn’t clear and doesn’t include a benefit, rewrite it.
You headline should capture your potential customer’s attention and get them to keep reading. If possible, make a big promise (but only do this if it’s honest).
For instance, if you’re selling a meditation program for people who struggle with chronic pain, your headline might say something like: Reduce Your Chronic Pain by 50% with Only 30 Minutes of Meditation a Day.
If you do all the other action items below and your sales page still isn’t converting, I would look at how long people are staying on the page. If most are clicking away in seconds, your headline isn’t doing it’s job.
2. Explain Why You’re the Right Person or Brand to Buy From
You’ve got competition unless you sell magical house elves (and, in that case, does Dobby have a twin you can send my way?). You need to give your potential customers a reason why they should pick your product.
Depending on the amount of competition you have, you might need to include a short paragraph or a lengthy story to differentiate your brand.
My biz bestie, Mayi Carles, and I team up every year as affiliates for B-School and there is a ton of competition. We have to strategically set ourselves apart from the other affiliates. We do this by targeting creative entrepreneurs, women who want to make good money from their businesses but don’t want to run billion-dollar empires, and creatives who struggle staying focused.
We also sell to less people than some of the big name affiliates which means that women who buy from us will receive a lot more hand-holding and will definitely get their questions answered. This intimate, pajama party atmosphere attracts creatives who are introverted and want to be apart of a smaller group.
Make sure your sales page clarifies what makes your offering different and why they should buy from you.
3. Describe the Before and After
This one of the most effective selling techniques and one of the most underutilized.
What does the before look like? Before the person buys your product or service, what is she struggling with? What does she want to change? What is she thinking?
And, then what does life look like afterwards? How do things change for her? How does her life improve?
For example, I sell an ebook, Marketing for Creatives.
Before someone purchases this ebook, she’s feeling overwhelmed with all the marketing advice that seems to only work for business-to-business models, she doesn’t know where to start and she wonders if she’ll ever figure this marketing thing out.
After purchasing and reading Marketing for Creatives, she has a solid plan to promote her creative products, she feels confident with marketing and her sales increase as she begins to take action.
Break down the before and after on your sales page to give your readers a picture of what they can expect.
4. Succinctly List the Features
If your sales page is really long, somewhere near the top you should list the features (perhaps in a bullet form fashion). Then, you can describe each one in more detail further down the page, but this gives people an overview of your offering.
Without this clear list, some potential customers will walk away not understanding exactly what’s included and a confused customer never buys.
5. Describe the Benefits
Most people include the features on their sales pages, but not everyone includes the benefits (which are more important).
For instance, a feature of my membership program, Sunday Society, is access to the private Facebook group.
The benefit of getting a pass to the FB clubhouse is the ability to connect with other creatives working on the same things every day. You can ask for feedback on your top five choices of your next blog post headline. You can rant about a customer who’s totally in the wrong and get instant camaraderie and support. You can ask the group whether you should go with AWeber or Convert Kit or MailChimp for your email marketing and get feedback from members who’ve used those platforms.
The Facebook group as a feature is nice, but the benefits are better.
Make sure you include the benefits for each feature. This will instantly help you convert more sales.
6. Give Potential Customers a Reason to Buy Now
Your potential customers, like everyone, procrastinate. They come up with multiple reasons to buy later, to come back, to think about it some more.
You’ve got to help your customers make the right decision on whether or not they should buy. Get them off the procrastination train.
You do this by giving them a reason to buy right now.
The reason could be that it’s a time-limited offer, it could be that if they buy within 48 hours, they get a bonus, or it could be a solid reason why they shouldn’t wait.
Let’s say that your offering isn’t time-limited. That’s okay. You can still come up with reasons to buy now.
For instance, my ebook, Marketing for Creatives, isn’t a time-limited offer but the reasons the ideal customer for that product should buy now are to save hours and hours of trying to figure this marketing thing out on their own and to learn how to make more money quickly.
7. Add Three More Testimonials
You can never have enough testimonials. If you don’t have any testimonials on your sales page, this is the perfect time to add a few. If you have some, collect a few new ones and add them near your buy buttons. See if that doesn’t help convert more sales!
8. Link to a Case Study
The step up from testimonials are case studies. A case study is basically a longer, more detailed testimonial that shows the before and after of a real customer.
Here’s a recent case study I published for Sunday Society. If you haven’t read it, take a few moments to do so in order to understand how a case study differs from a testimonial.
Reach out to a few of your most loyal customers and ask them if they would be up for doing a case study with you. If someone says yes, send them a list of questions to answer and then set up a Skype call or Google Hangout so that you can clarify any questions you have after reading through her answers and get more details.
Write up the case study and then send it to your customer to make sure you got everything right. When she gives you the go ahead, publish it (I recommend publishing it as a blog post) and then link to it on your sales page.
9. Add Two More Buy Buttons
Most people make the mistake of only including one or two buy buttons. If your sales page is more than a couple pages long, you need more buy buttons.
Add two more buy buttons on your sales page and watch your sales increase.
10. Reduce Buying Anxiety and Risk
How do you minimize risk for your customers? Do you offer a money-back guarantee? Do you give them an easy way to return your product if they aren’t satisfied?
If you want to increase your sales, reduce your customer’s anxiety.
For example, I include information on the Sunday Society sales page that lets customers know that they can cancel their membership anytime without reason. I did that on purpose to help minimize risk and give women an opportunity to come in and try it out to see if it’s a good fit.
On the other hand, I don’t offer any money back guarantees for my ebook, Marketing for Creatives. I bet my sales would increase if I did, but because this product is an instant download and is only $29.50, I don’t feel like it’s necessary and I want to protect my content.
So, this is totally up to you, but whenever you reduce the risk, you will increase your sales.
There you have it. Ten ways to improve your sales page right now!
Which one will you put into action first?
Definitely bookmarking this for when I make the page for my little community. I almost never have very many testimonials, roflol. Seriously the worst at even asking for them.
YAY! So glad you found it helpful. Get those testimonials, girl!
April, thanks for sharing this 🙂 It is so helpful and timely. I am working on the sales page for my first online course for artists–Creating Courses That Fill: An Artist’s Guide to Teaching. I just launched my first sales page for an upcoming creativity retreat I am leading this October in Florence, Italy. I will be using this list to go back and see if there are tweaks that I can make to that. I already think I haven’t emphasized the benefits enough. I know that my header could be stronger (struggled with it when writing the page and have gone back and changed it a couple of times–I see another change coming after reading this 😉 ).
I am curious what one should do if one doesn’t have testimonials yet? For example, when one is just starting out or if this is the first offering of its type?
I definitely will be sharing this post with the art business coaching group I am in. I know that they will find it as useful as I have.
Hey Jennifer,
Thanks for commenting! So…if you don’t have testimonials for a specific offering yet but you do have testimonials for your brand or working with you in general, you can use those.
If you don’t have testimonials from anything else (make sure you look through emails and social media to see if anyone has said anything really nice about your brand), you can either: add some as you go OR give early, free access to a handful of people in return for them providing you with a testimonial and feedback.
Hope that helps!
I couldn’t agree less with this post and not that it works only for sales page, but also the Services page.
I would try to work on some of these tips on my services page especially The “Why You Should Buy From Me” 🙂
Yep…it can work for any type of sales page, product description, services page.
I love it April! Thank you! You are an absolute star and look forward to talking to you in next OWD Call!
Thanks Ermy! That makes my day!!!
April you are so generous! This will be tremendously helpful when I start drafting mine! Thank you!
Oh, and a friend of mine DOES make house elves 🙂 You can find yours here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/HerShelvesElves
Without understanding why people buy the product, it is almost impossible for the salesperson to close the deal. A good sales training course which is clearly linked to customer service will encourage your staff to consider the underlying and psychological reasons people will make a purchase. This increased understanding of customer behavior can help create an environment where your customers feel comfortable and confident buying from you.
A common language means greater efficiency. A company-wide sales training initiative will allow everyone to work from the same playbook, and that includes having internal conversations with a shared language in place.