Make Ordering Easy To Spot
It's never too early to ask for the sale on a sales page. You want to ask for it at the very top after your headline and subheading. You want to ask for it midway through the sales page at regular intervals and you want to ask for it at the very end too. In order to make it easy to spot, you want to create buttons that graphically indicate a “clickable” spot on the page. You can do the same with a text link, but a “Buy Now” button is far more effective, both visually and logically.
Make It Simple Enough For A Child
You want to give really clear instructions for the ordering process. It should be as if someone who has never ordered online suddenly found your site and wanted to order. How would you explain the ordering process to them? This is the way you want to make things: Simple enough for a child to understand how to order. You should have step-by-step instructions that are very easy to follow and leave no room for misunderstanding.
Give Numerous Payment Options
Especially during the recession, fewer and fewer people want to break out the credit cards, or they have lost their credit. Make sure you offer multiple ways to make a payment. Offer PayPal for those with online PayPal accounts. Include directions for people who might want to pay over the phone or who want to mail in a check. If there are additional fees for International orders, be sure that you are clear on that.
People who want to buy something from another country often use PayPal, as the money can be directly converted into dollars or other denominations from their account. Offer payment plans, if that's possible, as this can be a very popular feature during tough economic times. You'll even see retail stores offering layaway, something unheard of when store credit was easier to get. Whatever way you can make it easy, offering more payment options to help the customer make the choice to buy is going to help your bottom line.
Closing The Sale
If after reading everything, or at least the important pieces of your sales page, and your visitor is still musing over the sale, you need to try one last time to close that sale. This would be in your final paragraph or two and it/they should be as convincing as you can make it. In these paragraphs, summarize the most important points of your sales letters. Try to reiterate the best benefit and hit a couple of psychological triggers that make it uncomfortable for the reader to leave the page without giving your offer a second thought. After making your final appeal, again, ask for the sale.
Some Technical Features To Help
There are some technical features you can implement on your sales page that can help you close that sale. One of them is a simple pop-up screen that asks the visitor to rethink the offer before leaving. This can be annoying for some people; some people may even have pop-ups disabled on their computers. It is worth a try and can be an effective way to try to generate one last interaction with the visitor before he/she moves off of your sales page.
Another technical feature that is less intrusive is a chat window that is available to the person who still has some pre-sales inquiries. You don't necessarily have it come up when they move off your sales page, but you make sure they know that you have customer service representatives who will talk them through the offer if they still have questions. This is a very effective way to close a sale as it is much harder to say “no” to a real live person than it is to say “no” to your copy.
If you have the money to hire representatives who can close the sale, it can be a great way to generate business. It's also considered far less intrusive because the visitor makes the decision to chat by clicking the link available in the closing statement, rather than having some offensive pop-up demanding their attention when they try to leave. Some people get so offended by the pop-ups that they decide not to come back, but it's still a good way to try to catch people before they leave.
Find Examples And Split Test
One of the best ways to find out how to write effective sales pages is to take a close look at the ones that inspire you to buy. Just hop online and start to do your own research by visiting your competitors’ sites and seeing how they have built their pages to generate sales. There's no reason you can't use some of their strategies on your own pages. You may even discover some psychological triggers you weren't aware of, but that are very effective for your market niche. Just be sure not to copy their sales copy verbatim. That's called plagiarism.
Instead, look for the ideas behind the words and the marketing strategies they are using. Then, build your own sales pages with your own words and images to help you achieve even better results. If you're not sure what's working, you can always do a split test and set up two versions of the same offer.
Direct half of your traffic with a small piece of code on a re-direct page to one offer and the other half to the other sales page. The one sales page that creates better results is the best format. This way, you can continuously improve the design and effectiveness of your sales page by trying out different techniques. Start slowly by changing just one element of the sales page if you are doing a split test, like offering two versions with a different headline. Once you do that test and figure out which headline works best, you can move on to a split test on the call-to-action element. Slowly, you will get a better idea of what works for your demographic and products in a way that is uniquely suited to your business and product offerings.
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