Are you struggling to convert your visitors into customers? Chances are that your sales pages lack conviction.
It’s not a secret that sales pages are one of the most essential elements of a successful business website. They are what convince your visitors to either buy your product, sign up for your service, fill out your lead form, or whatever your call-to-action might be.
Therefore, if they’re not optimised for conversions, they can make your marketing and advertising efforts a complete waste of time.
A great sales page must be designed with the customer in mind. It should be easy to navigate and include all the information that the customer needs to decide from.
In this article, we explore some of the critical elements of a great sales page and how you can use them to increase your conversion rate.
What should you do before creating a sales page
Understand your audience
The first and most crucial thing to do before you write a sales page is to know exactly who is your writing for?
As not every business caters to the same audience, then why should your sales page be the same as any other brand?
Making a buyer persona is one of the best ways to do this. It’s a made-up character that stands in as your ideal client.
The persona may be made up, however, it’s based on information that you can gather from:
- Direct customer feedback (think; surveys, asking directly and review information, for example)
- Google Analytics data
- Engaging social media audiences
Once you have a buyer persona ready, you can write sales copy that talks about pain points and motivations for your potential consumer.
You should also consider making multiple buyer personas, should you have multiple audiences to target.
For example, this High Wycombe martial arts training company tailors their content to both adults and children, as the company’s content has to be readable by multiple audiences — requiring multiple buyer personas.
Determine the length of your sales page
Once you have an understanding of your audience, the next obstacle you will face is how long should your sales page be?
Is there a perfect length that will guarantee conversion? The answer is: it depends.
It depends on several factors including your product, the audience and what you offer.
However, to give you an idea, longer sales pages are best for products that require a lot of explanation (industries that have no current market). Whereas, shorter sales pages work best for an audience that are already aware of what your product offers (industries that have a competitive market).
To further determine what best works, you could consider trying A/B testing with sales pages too.
Make sure you have a responsive site
You might not fully know where your visitors are landing on your sales pages from. Since there has been a growing trend of people using mobile devices to access the internet, it’s essential to make sure that your website is designed to work well on these devices.
You don’t want to give your readers any reason to close your sales page.
What should you do whilst writing your sales page content
Choose a good hook
In his book, The Adweek Copywriting Handbook, Joseph Sugarman stated that only 2 out of 10 people read the complete sales copy, and the remaining 8 only read the headline.
Therefore, to make visitors read your sales page in full, it’s a must that you keep them hooked right from the start.
Although there are hundreds of ways you can write a great headline, the fundamental requirements are that it’s short, simple, and directly addresses what your product helps solve.
You can either try experimenting with new types of headlines or you can also use online tools that’ll help you create headlines that are proven to work.
Make it scannable
It’s a known fact that people don’t read, they scan.
In a study done by Nielsen Norman Group, they found out that most visitors don’t read every line instead they scan long texts in an F pattern.
To make sure your users don’t miss out on any important information, try to produce your sales page content using an F pattern.
Following from that, here are some other things you can do to make sales page content more scannable:
- Use a consistent font throughout all your pages
- Make sure all text is in the same font size, colour, and style
- Write short sentences or paragraphs that are easy to read
- Use lots of correctly formatted headings (think ordered H1 to H6)
Features Vs. Benefits:
Even the most experienced salespersons often make this mistake, where they list down the features of their products rather than telling their customers the benefits.
Technical and descriptive aspects of your product are deemed as features, meanwhile, benefits convey what’s in it for the customers and why they should care about those features.
The following questions may help you to extract the benefits of your product:
- Is this feature notable?
- Is it something every reader must know about the product?
- What problem does this feature aim to solve?
- Does it have the potential to evoke any emotion in the reader’s mind?
What you should add at the end of your sales page
Clear call-to-actions
A call-to-action (CTA) is an opportunity to inspire your audience to take meaningful action to become a lead or customer.
Don’t shy away from telling your readers what you want them to do, as many times, not including a CTA is what keeps your readers from converting into customers.
Therefore, It’s important that you not only choose persuasive CTAs but also place them where people are most likely to click.
The best CTAs are the ones that evoke emotions and create a sense of urgency in the minds of the visitor. Therefore, you may want to add touch up to your CTAs with a splash of bright colour, in order to not only differentiate them from other elements but also to create an alarming visual.
You could also play around with the words used too. For example, if you are a nutritional brand using words such as “Try it today” within your CTAs, you could use words such as “Transform your body today” instead.
Finally, you should place CTAs in your introduction, in the middle of your page’s content and lastly, at the very end of your page’s content.
Include social proof
The whole of marketing can be summed up in two words: Awareness and Trust.
Whilst you are spreading awareness about your products through the first half of your sales page, the second half is where you need to build trust.
Here is where the concept of social proof comes in. If potential customers see that other people are using and enjoying your product, they will be more likely to try it for themselves too.
Testimonials and customer reviews ultimately get rid of the remaining doubt that readers have in their minds, helping to make that final purchasing decision easier.
Through this post, we’ve given you an idea of what you should do at every stage of your writing process. However, the bottom line is this: selling something is hard. There are no tricks, shortcuts, or gimmicks for creating a successful sales page besides doing it right.
We would also like to add one last reminder, which is not to be afraid to try new things when producing your sales pages. Whilst it can be scary, the more you practice and get feedback from others, the better you’ll get at it!