Do you want to write a killer sales page for your business? If you’re like many website owners and marketers, your goal is to sell a product or service to your audience. Across all industries, conversion funnels will eventually bring potential customers to a sales page.
A sales page is designed to show customers why your product is worth their time and hard-earned money. When you’re crafting sales copy, you have to be persuasive, educational, and entertaining — yes, all at once!
It sounds daunting at first, but anyone can master this effective marketing strategy. Today we will talk about how you can improve existing sales pages and tips to help you get started if this is your first attempt.
Extensively Research Your Target Customers
The only way to reach your target audience is to understand their pain points, goals, and preferences. Imagine trying to write a letter to someone you’ve never met in your life. Now imagine writing another letter, but this to your best friend. Both copies would sound drastically different, right?
Learning about potential customers is essential for writing sales pages. Like you wouldn’t know what to say to the stranger, you’ll have no idea what to say to entice consumers to buy your product or service.
There are plenty of excellent ways to gather information about the people most interested in your products or service. Social media is the perfect place to start. There are over 3.8 billion users across all platforms, and you can bet that a percentage of those people are interested in what you’re offering.
Spend time communicating with people from your industry on social media, and you’ll slowly start to see interested consumers following your brand. Use this opportunity to engage with them by sharing your best blog content or posting surveys to learn more about their needs and wants.
You can also add a feedback form to your website. Allow consumers to answer questions about their pain points, expectations, and experience with your product or service. Use this data to start planning copy for your next sales page.
Put Your Value Proposition on Display
Now that you’ve spent some time researching your audience, it’s time to start thinking about what value you bring to the table. Consumers want to buy from brands that solve a problem or make life easier. If you don’t give readers a compelling reason to stay on your page and keep reading, you could miss countless leads every month.
A value proposition is one or two sentences that set the standard for the rest of your sales page. If you can manage to align your value message with the rest of your content, you’ll have a much easier time keeping users engaged while earning new subscribers and conversions.
The key to determining your value proposition is to answer three questions:
-Who do I want to help?
-What problem do I hope to solve?
-What results can the user expect?
Let’s say you run an eCommerce storefront that sells pet supplies. You offer bundle boxes for cat and dog owners that include a monthly supply of food, litter, toys, etc. If you want to create a value proposition for a sales page, you could say;
“We want pet owners to save time and money by offering high-quality supplies shipped right to their door. Spend more time with your pets, and less time driving to the pet store.”
In this example, we want to help pet owners. The problem they are currently facing is they are taking too many trips to the pet store each month. After buying the bundle box, the customer can look forward to getting all of their pet’s favorite supplies without going out. We touched on all of the bases mentioned above, and thus, our fictional sales page is designed perfectly for pet owners dealing with this issue.
Build Social Proof
Another excellent way to boost the success of your sales page is to build social proof. Essentially, social proof is a psychological phenomenon where people are more likely to make a purchasing decision based on other people’s opinions.
The mentality here is that the product or service must be good if so many other people say good things and use the brand. You can build social proof with your audience in several ways, both on and off your sales page.
TrustPulse is a social proof plugin that lets you display notifications from users on your site to other people, even after the action is complete. If someone is browsing your website, they will be able to see that other customers are subscribing, participating in an event, and purchasing items. This behavior sends a social cue to the person viewing the notification and can help drive sales.
You can also build social proof directly on your sales page. Many marketing teams include testimonials and reviews from happy customers throughout their sales copy. The goal here is to explain your product’s benefits and then show how other people have found success.
We are going to revisit the eCommerce pet store example. Imagine if weaved between your monthly pet box’s different benefits and features, you showed pictures of users that tagged your brand on social media when they received their boxes. When a potential customer sees pictures of other people and pets enjoying your product, they are much more likely to follow through on your sales page.
Test Your Existing Sales Page
Our final tip of the day is going to focus on split testing your existing sales page. A/B testing, also known as split-testing, is a popular marketing strategy where you change elements of a campaign to improve click-throughs and conversions.
A/B testing is an essential part of success whether you’re talking about your email marketing campaign, on-site forms, or sales page. The best way to start split-testing is to change one part of your campaign at a time. If you start switching around too many things, you’ll have a hard time telling which change produced the positive results. Consequently, you won’t be able to use this strategy in future campaigns.
Instead of focusing on everything, use split testing tools to target specific parts, like the color of your CTA box, or placement. Make small changes and allow some time for new results to come in. After you’ve analyzed the reports, you can make more tweaks to see if you can improve the results in other ways.
This is by far the most time-consuming part of boosting your sales page success. You won’t be able to see if your split testing efforts are working overnight. However, this is one strategy worth pursuing because it gives you additional insights on your target audience’s behavior, and presents new content marketing opportunities for future campaigns.
Back to You
Your sales page is, without a doubt, one of the most critical parts of your website. As your business scales up and you diversify your product line, you’ll have to make changes to your existing sales copy.
Don’t be afraid to get out there and learn about your audience base. Spend as much time as possible with potential customers and use what you’ve learned to craft a killer value proposition. Afterward, you should split-test your page so you can take your sales to the next level. All the while, you should be building trust and social proof across all platforms.
Ultimately, building a successful sales page takes time, but it’s one effort worth pursuing if you want to see your business grow.
Syed Balkhi is an award-winning entrepreneur and online marketing expert. He is the co-founder of OptinMonster, WPBeginner, MonsterInsights, and WPForms.