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Visual and Verbal Mastery
The best sales pages are visually compelling and verbally convincing. The truth is, if your sales copy is great and your product is in demand you can sell a ton of products with even the ugliest of websites. Good sales copy overcomes a lot of visual peccadillos.If you have a website that looks professional and your sales copy is a bit on the novice side, you still have a fair chance of your potential customers viewing you as a reliable source because of the positive visual appeal.
This is what visual and verbal professionalism can do for you—they can increase your sales, sometimes dramatically. Of course, for the best results you want both a great looking sales page and persuasive sales copy. It all comes down to this old saying:
YOU ONLY GET ONE CHANCE TO MAKE A GOOD FIRST IMPRESSION
It's true, so you'd be wise to ditch the glitz, don't bring the bling, gaudy is naughty so . . . OK, you get the idea. I get carried away when I get on a roll. In my defense though, that was more like a bagel.
Assuming you want to succeed:
- Design your sales page with a clean and uncluttered business-style layout. Use sufficient white space, clear headings, and subheadings to make the content easy to read and navigate. If a business-style design is not your strong suit, consider hiring it done or use one of the thousands of free or low cost templates that can be found online.
- Use high-resolution product images, videos, or infographics that showcase your product or service. Use professional-looking visuals that are visually appealing and relevant to your offering. High-quality images help create the perception that your product or service is high quality also.
- Design your sales page so it is optimized for mobile devices since many users browse the internet on their smartphones or tablets. Test the page's responsiveness and make necessary adjustments for a seamless mobile experience.
- Maintain consistency in terms of colors, fonts, and overall branding elements across your sales page. This helps create a professional and cohesive visual identity.
- Display trust symbols, security badges, or certifications to instill confidence in potential customers that their information will be safe.
- Before going live with your sales page, proofread the content to eliminate any spelling, punctuation, or grammatical errors. Test all the links, forms, and interactive elements to make sure they are functioning properly.
- Use fonts that are easy to read, but limit the number of different fonts used. Too many fonts make the layout look cluttered and amateurish. Be sure there's plenty of contrast between the text and the background color. Ensure your font choices are still readable when scaled down for small screens.
In other words, build the kind of sales page that buyers are conditioned to expect from a business. Trying to retrain their expectations will drive away sales. That's visual professionalism. Once it looks good, you need sales copy that rocks! That's the verbal professionalism part.
The better your sales copy the more prospects it will convert into buyers. Sales copy is more than just stringing words together; it's the communication of ideas and how those ideas benefit the prospect. Copywriting is all about mind alchemy.
What is mind alchemy?
Mind alchemy is simply where you and your prospect are on the same mental wavelength. To achieve mind alchemy you must meet the prospect where they already are mentally, and lead them to where they need to be to make a purchase decision. It's about knowing what they want and speaking their emotional language to show why your product is the answer to their needs and desires.
What are their needs and desires? People buy things to gain something they want or to avoid pain. Everything fits into those two overarching reasons. If that sounds difficult, relax, it's easier than it sounds . . . you simply offer people solutions they already want to problems they already have.
I'm going to be honest with you . . . most people suck at copywriting! Some are too pushy, some sound too needy, but for most there's a different kind of problem. They don't like trying to persuade people to buy. It makes them feel intrusive, perhaps even greedy or bad.
That was me, until I had this realization...
If you truly believe in your product, you'll want to do all you can to get it to the people it will help. If you fail to convince your target market that your product will help them solve their problems or do whatever it's intended to do for them, then it's their loss as much as yours. Their problems or lack continue because you didn't convince them to buy. It's your duty to be as convincing as you can in order to help them.
Below are a few quotes from my Sales Letter Secrets ebook I sold before I retired. Note that the course isn't set up as a "tips" eBook. It has flow and rhythm. These quotes are pulled from the flow of the content. I chose these because they are excerpts that make sense on their own without the surrounding context.
Here's what a good copywriter is in a nutshell: A good copywriter is a matchmaker.
That's the task—to match prospect's needs with your solutions. If you learn to think and write from that mindset, your odds of creating effective sales copy increase dramatically.
To do this, run your sales copy by a few people that you know in your target market. Listen carefully to their feedback. If they're not begging you for a copy and practically drooling to get their hands on it, you know what to do…
Work on it some more.
You need to use the same words the prospects used when they told you what they wanted. You need to hit on the emotions they described.
If you can touch it, it's a feature.
Simple enough, but do you really understand how it's applied?
True benefits occur in the head and the heart. They're emotional, or they're based in our own self-image.
If your sales page had only your headline and a toll-free phone number to call for more information, would the headline be good enough to get people to call? If you think the answer is yes, then it should be good enough to get people to keep reading.
If you think the answer is no . . . back to the drawing board for you!
- It's too expensive
- I don't really need it
- It won't solve my problem
- This could be a scam
- Now is not a good time
Of course, there are many more objections a buyer can conjure up, but the fact that they're even reading your sales page means you have a chance to overcome their fear and resistance and make a sale.
You can't overcome every possible objection. Some objections won't even be about your product, but you should still try to anticipate what the common objections will be so you can counter them. If you follow the advice given about researching your audience in the Basic Skills chapter of this course [remember, this is an excerpt from Sales Letter Secrets], your potential customers will often tell you the most common objections.
I'm going to stop excerpting my Sales Letter Secrets here because these "sound bites" really don't do the product justice. It's just not designed for short excerpts; it's designed to teach copywriting skills to beginners and to improve the skills of intermediate level copywriters.
Copywriting is one of the best skills you can learn if you want to have a successful online business.
