Increasing Conversions In Sales Copy
Have you ever created a sales letter or a squeeze page that you just can’t seem to beat and has remained your control for a number of months (years?)…
I’ll tell you what…
I typed up a sales letter about a year ago and have been polishing up the copy about every other month. The response started out very good, but as I polished the copy it seemed to actually diminish my conversion rates…
This was so counter-intuitive because the reason why I was making changes was because I had gotten new market research and wanted to make sure I was using the right appeals…
… but I forgot about one very important rule I have when writing copy…
Don’t Sell…
The new market research got me in the this-will-make-me-more-money mood and I lost touch with the customer… the reason why my original sales letter had outperformed my ‘polished’ copy was because when I wrote the original story, I was simply being genuine and therefore related to my customer better…
In other words, I was not selling anything, but rather telling a story about how I went through the same problem they are now trying to solve…
The sales formula I use and most every major internet marketing guru uses is Problem, Agitate, Solve…
I find a series of problems and agitate them before I offer the solution which obviously is the product I’m selling… but there is also another component that few people know about, let alone talk about…
And that is to find a flaw that your target market is very likely to share or at least relate to…
Let me give you an example…
If I were to try to sell a product on making money online, the sales formula would have me write a story about not having enough money… (the problem)…
To agitate I would tell you my story about how it affected me not having money when I got started in my first business… things that my target market wouldn’t even be aware of but can see themselves being there if they don’t take action and get my solution…
Now… to accomplish this, most copywriters will write a story about how they were broke and then became filthy rich online… basically how they went from loser to expert… but there is a disconnect there…
Most people will see that as hype or as someone getting lucky…
To avoid that, I came across the one thing I added to original sales letter that for the first time in over a year increased conversions…
That is to include a flaw…
Meaning, openly talk about how you take responsibility for being a loser before you became an expert…
This allows your customer to see fault in you and basically see themselves through you… it makes you one of them and that’s what they want…
They say that the best market you can sell to is the market in which you yourself are or has been a customer… in other words, you have experienced first-hand the problems you are helping other to solve…
Another way I was able to increase my conversions was to actually solve the major problem upfront… Eben Pagan says to give your best secret away… pull out the big guns and show your customer you have the goods…
So I did…
I gave away my best technique away…
This doesn’t increase conversions directly, but what it did for me was to increase the loyalty and readership in my email list… and conversions increased when I ran an internal product launch…
How do I know?
Before giving out my best secret away, my readership in emails was only about 18%… but that increased to about 24% once I shared my best tips… most importantly, my conversion rates for sales letters were up to about 13% compared to the 1-2% from regular traffic…
Last… never forget that even with a checklist for writing copy, you will miss the most simple obvious things you should include in your sales letter at the right place…
I got an email from an interested customer wanting to buy my product and basically asked me if I had a product that would fit his ‘situation’ which basically was that he was completely new to the subject and needed to be spoon fed…
Well I did include this in the sales copy, but it was too far into the copy that I was not drawing him into the rest of the story… I went back and added a line saying “even if you’ve never done X” right after the first sentence and the average time on the sales letter increased by almost two minutes… which led to more conversions…
So those are the three things I have found have increased conversions in my sales copy the most…
Do you have any?
