In today’s episode, I’m going to give you eight tips on how to write more effective sales pages!
If you use a sales page to sell your VIP services, packages, online courses, memberships, or products (particularly if it’s digital products and service-based business offers), then this is going to be really helpful for you.
Here for the links referenced in the show notes?
Core Message freebie: tashcorbin.com/coremessage
Let’s dive in…
Why do we want to make sure that our sales pages are written really effectively and that we give them time and attention?
That’s where the money comes from! That’s where people are making buyer decisions.
Most people don’t need to be convinced that their sales pages need to be really schmick when it comes to ensuring they’ve done a great job of expressing the value of the thing they’re getting someone to buy, and that it helps people to make an informed decision.
How do we ensure that our sales pages are effective in actually doing the job that we need them to do (making sales!)?
1. Write the copy on your sales page for your warmest audience
This might seem really odd for me to say, but the people who are most likely to be ready, willing and able to buy from you, are the people who already know you, like you and trust you.
They are not strangers who simply stumbled across your sales page on the internet. They are not cold audience members who saw an ad for your product and then just went and bought it (in most cases).
The people most likely to buy are your warmest audience.
If you don’t write the copy on your sales page to that warm audience, you may be turning them away in the hope of selling to strangers who are far less likely to actually buy.
Whenever you’re thinking about writing a sales page, I encourage you to really consider what the messaging is that needs to be there for your warmest audience… for people who understand the work that you do, who understand that that is something that could be of use to them, and who are now at the point of discerning what products they should buy for that.
It’s an audience who knows what they need in order to achieve the goal, and they’re now trying to discern if it’s the right offer to meet their needs.
The first tip for writing effective sales pages is ensuring that we’re speaking to our warmest audience as much as we can.
2. Write for your niche
Another thing that can happen when we’re writing sales pages is that we can un-niche our copy. This is because we’re so open to anyone being able to buy our product, that we become super broad and disconnect from that active marketing space.
A lot of people fully understand the power of niche and how effective it is for their social media and email marketing copy… but then when it comes to writing effective sales pages, they’re so aware of the few random people that may stumble across their sales page, that their copy becomes un-niched and it stops being tangible to the people who are looking at it.
It stops being deeply resonant and starts looking like it’s a blanket solution to every problem you could possibly have, or for any kind of person who may have this area that they want to be working on.
As much as possible, you want to be focused specifically on your niche when you write the copy for a sales page, just as you are when you’re writing the promo copy that goes out onto socials and emails.
3. Have your value proposition and core messaging in front of you
If you don’t have that in front of you when you’re writing sales page copy, you will likely tend to write in more vague terms, or you will get fixated on one certain portion of your value proposition rather than being clear on the entire piece of it.
I definitely have made my fair share of mistakes with this.
One year I did a launch of the Take Off program, and I had a lot of questions from people about the live calls and the group mentoring. What I realised was that I still hadn’t been as strong in explaining that the Take Off program is a mentorship program, not a self-study course.
It’s not delivered in the same way that most online courses are – there’s a mentorship aspect to it.
In my next launch of the Take Off program, having had that lightbulb moment, I abandoned all other messaging and just focused on talking about the coaching and mentorship. This meant that I missed a whole lot of the other pieces of the value proposition.
I ended up seeing a drop in my engagement rate and my conversion rate during that launch.
It was only after the launch when I went and reviewed all my content, that I realised I did four Facebook Lives all about how the live calls work, and I didn’t do a Facebook Live about why the process we follow in the Take Off program is so powerful in getting sales faster and making profit in your business.
They are two big value drivers for people who join the Take Off program: quick profits and quick sales.
I had missed a bunch of my core messaging.
Writing sales pages is a particular time when we want to make sure we’re quite balanced in the messaging that we put on that sales page, and that we’re really clear on the value proposition.
I’ve got another example of that from a sales page.
I hired someone to review my sales page and provide copy edits and suggestions. I did not give my value proposition information to that copywriter (it was just a one-off review of my sales page to see where it could be strengthened).
In my next launch, the sales page actually converted at a lower rate. It took me really analysing the difference between my version and their version to see that the sales page had been written through the lens of a very low-ticket buyer… a very discerning buyer who wanted every single detail every step of the way.
The initial copy from the sales page was talking about possibility, connection and not doing business alone. It was a multi-pronged approach to present the value in the investment.
For example, in Sacred Money Archetypes I am a Romantic/Connector/Nurturer.
My version was very Romantic/Connector/Nurturer-driven. The one with the copy edits was more in the Accumulator/Ruler space.
It was written for people who wanted to work hard, people who’d already been working really hard, and people who needed to know exactly where they were going to get every cent back from doing the program.
For me, I found that I get far more conversions and more aligned members of my program when I use my version of the messaging.
I’m not saying I don’t work with Accumulator/Rulers – I absolutely do and I have quite a lot of them who join my program. But they’re not joining it thinking I’m the same as them. They’re not joining it thinking I have mapped out the twenty-one ways that they’re going to get a return on investment for doing the Take Off program.
I don’t want people who join the program to have a list of all the ways that they were going to get a return on investment, and to see that they only got seventeen of those twenty-one, so therefore I didn’t deliver. That can definitely be something that happens when I have very Accumulator/Ruler-heavy copy on my sales pages and promos.
Make sure you’ve got that value proposition in front of you, to remind you what those key pieces of value are so that you can keep that balanced approach in what you want to prioritise for your audience. That’s how you write effective sales pages!
4. Have a balance of logical reasons and emotional reasons to enrol
Effective sales pages have a balance of logical and emotional reasons to purchase.
It’s not about having it all logic logic, but it’s also not about having it all emotion emotion.
The old-school sales page stuff that I saw from when I started my business in 2013 used to talk about how you want people to buy through the lens of emotion, and just make sure they can justify it with their logic.
All the sales pages and webinars had a high priority on getting people emotionally invested. Speaking to the emotion of the success and speaking about how it would feel to have this all figured out. However, it did not have a high priority on the logical reasons behind making the investment decision.
These days, that approach to copywriting and sales pages isn’t as effective because people are wise to it and know how to be far more discerning about what will deliver on that promise for them, and whether they are actually going to be able to experience that emotion or not.
We don’t just focus purely on emotion or purely on logic. To create effective sales pages, we want to have a good balance of the two.
5. Write conversationally
Remember that the more something sounds and looks like an ad, and we feel we’re being sold to, the less likely we are to buy it.
We live in a time of human-to-human connection and very social selling. Therefore, we want to make sure that the sales page reflects that type of language and is talking to people conversationally.
However, I will preface this by saying that it’s not all sassy, snappy remarks.
There are some sales pages that I’ve been reading recently, that try to be so conversational that it almost starts to feel like it’s condescending, or they’re not taking the problem they’re solving seriously.
Whilst I say you want it to be conversational, you don’t want it to be too sassy or as though we’re all just friends here.
You are still selling something. They are still making a buying decision.
It’s conversational but it’s not underestimating the decision-making process that’s going on.
Sometimes I see sales pages where every sentence ends with a snappy bracketed comment.
The more that there are on that sales page, the more I feel like you’re not taking this seriously. It makes me feel like you’re not going to take my investment seriously.
They’re not what I would consider to be effective sales pages.
6. Longer isn’t always better
When it comes to writing sales pages, my rule of thumb is the cheaper the ask, the shorter the sales page.
I once saw someone promoting something for $19 that felt like an absolute no-brainer to me. So I clicked over to the sales page… and I had to scroll so far through this sales page to get to the buying part.
The more I read, the more I felt like this person was trying to convince me of this. That makes me start to wonder why they’re putting in so much effort to convince me to purchase this thing for $19. What am I missing here?
It makes me start to over-analyse the sales page and question my initial decision to buy.
The cheaper it is, the shorter the sales page.
In terms of longer-form sales pages, it’s not necessarily just that high ticket equals longer sales pages.
I also feel that with anything where there’s more connection with you (you are the mentor in the program, they get calls with you, etc.), the more people want to ensure that you’re on the same page. Therefore, it may take a longer-form sales page to create that shared connection and understanding.
Remember that we’re writing this for your warmest audience, so it’s not always longer is better. But sometimes you do need a little more length to those sales pages to cover the depth that you need to cover.
Don’t just include information for information’s sake and think that the longer the sales page is, the more convincing space you have. Because actually, you can start to talk people out of it after a while.
7. Visually dynamic and easy to read
You want it to look as modern as possible, especially when you’re selling online.
Old school 90s sales pages, whilst they’re fun and nostalgic for us to look at, do give subconscious messaging that you’re not up with the times. They do give subconscious messaging that this is a bit of a homemade job and it’s not up to date.
We don’t want to be doing that with sales pages.
Use those nice modern templates. Go and have a look at some of the sales pages from people that you follow or people that you admire, and just look for what looks the most fresh and modern to you. What is the easiest to read but still has some dynamism to it?
It’s definitely a balancing act. We don’t want it to be completely plain and boring, just to make it easy to read. But we also don’t want to sacrifice the visually appealing stuff.
You want it to be visually dynamic, but easy to read.
You don’t want it all to be left aligned – you want some content to be centred, you want some content off to the left, you want some off to the right, and you want images of you. If it’s got a tangible product attached to it, you want images of the product, and if it has a digital download, you want a mock-up of that digital download.
There’s some visual appeal, it’s colourful if that’s your style, or it’s black and white if that’s the mood and aesthetic.
Just understand visual dynamism and make sure that it’s easy to read.
And do please, please, please also read through it on mobile. Most people who come to sales pages these days are doing that on mobile, and it blows me away how many people still don’t have mobile-optimised sales pages on their websites.
Make the most of that and ensure that you’ve checked it on both.
My partner and I have different screen sizes on our phones so I’ll often check things on his as well as mine, just to make sure it’s not just a size-specific thing.
8. Test and refine those sales pages
There will be no perfect sales page written in a vacuum if you don’t ever share it with your audience.
Certain things work for certain audiences… and certain things don’t.
You won’t know what’s going to work for your specific audience with your specific voice and your specific target market until you get out there, test it and see where people get stuck. Pay attention to what questions come in, and what conversion rates you’re getting.
Something that I love to look at is the heat map on my sales pages.
If you don’t have that, get someone to set that up for you so you can see where people mostly get to before they either click away or before they click buy now.
It really shows where people stop and read the most detail, and which detailed content people skip over and needs to be refined.
Be sure to track the effectiveness of your sales pages. Look at those heat maps if you can get them set up. Pay attention to questions that are submitted by people who’ve already been to the sales page to see if maybe there’s something that you’re missing.
Refine as consistently as you can.
As a rule of thumb, I recommend that every time you launch, you have a little review of your sales page. If you don’t do live launches and you sell on evergreen, then review every 90 days.
Once a quarter, you’re doing that review of your sales page and looking for those opportunities to improve.
Remember that at some point, you’re going to cap out on your conversion rate for the sales page anyway. It’s silly to aim for 100% conversion rate on the sales page.
If you can get your sales page conversion rate up to 20%, then that’s amazing. You can then know how many people you need to get there, and you can do a little review but you’re not putting pressure on it to do any more than that.
The best person to compete against is yourself, and there comes a point where that level of conversion rate is very healthy, it’s definitely doing its job, you can focus on just getting more people to see it, and know that you want to get more sales.
They are my top eight strategies for ensuring that you write effective sales pages.
I would love to help you get that nailed.
One of the things I talked about was having your value proposition in front of you when you write your sales page.
I have a fabulous template and training that will walk you through how to do that.
It’s my Core Messaging freebie, and you can grab it for free here: tashcorbin.com/coremessage
As always, feel free to slide into my DMs on Instagram or Facebook. I would love to hear if you have any questions, or want to share any lightbulb moments you’ve had as a result of reading these tips to write effective sales pages.
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
