Sales Copy Call To Action

You could have killer sales copy, an excellent product and a fantastic marketing campaign, but without a call to action you’re unlikely to make many, if any, sales.

Why?

Because the call to action is arguably the most vital part of your sales copy, and is the stage at which you tell your prospect how to become your customer. That’s not to say that sales copy is completely redundant without it: in fact, sales copy without a call to action may merely be pushy PR, but it’s unlikely to give you a high conversion rate.

Buy Me!

Once your prospect is ‘sold’ on your product or service, you need to tell them exactly what it is you want them to do next. The complexity of your call to action will depend on what it is that you are selling, whether you require your prospect to ask for further information, to register their interest or simply to enter their card details on the next page.

Be Assertive

Your call to action may be at the bottom of your sales page, or if you are using long copy, you might have a cumulative call to action, or several calls to action that are placed in strategic areas throughout your copy. When writing a call to action, you should ensure that you are direct but not rude. By including a simple but effective call to action you can increase responses to your marketing considerably. For example, “Call us before 9pm tonight and we’ll take 25% off the cost of your order” is better than “For more information, or to place an order, phone us on this number.”

Make It Urgent

An effective call to action should inject urgency into the prospect’s mind. Deals that are ‘only available to the first 100 customers’, offers that are ‘while stocks last’, or ‘sale ends Friday’ are all time-sensitive and provoke a ‘now or never’ type of response.

Avoid Complications

Remember to keep it simple. Giving your prospects a choice is rarely, if ever, an effective call to action. Ask yourself what you want people to do once they’ve read your sales letter or web copy. It may sound stupid but it’s worth revisiting your existing copy with a critical eye. Do you tell them exactly what it is they need to do now? Don’t be afraid to experiment, either. Monitor your success rates, and you’ll be able to identify the words that are the most effective for your business.

As always, please feel free to leave your comments below

Internet Sales Letters

Sales letters are designed to convert interested prospects into red hot buyers, and when they’re well written and subjected to a highly targeted pay per click campaign they can literally earn thousands of pounds worth of profit overnight. So what is it that makes sales copy so persuasive?

Benefits v Features

Good sales copy explains how your product benefits customers. This requires you to know the difference between what you’re trying to say and what they want to hear. You don’t sell someone a duster with an extendable pole (features): you tell them that can banish dust and cobwebs in those hard to reach places forever (benefits). You don’t merely show someone a titanium high-powered drill (features): you describe the fantastic holes they’ll be able to make once they own it (benefits.)

Relevance

A major element of internet sales letters is that they are written with a very specific audience in mind. The people who buy after reading a sales letter have had a problem solved for them. They went onto the internet looking for information, a solution, guidance or knowledge about a particular problem they have – and your product or service offers the solution they’re after.

Outline Of An Internet Sales Letter

The headline, or statement, at the top of a sales letter must be very bold and entice the reader to scroll further down the page. Get this wrong, and you’ve lost your chance: Get it right and you’ve got the interest of your prospect, but don’t over-promise, as your reader will feel let down.

There should be no distractions as you scroll down the page. Plain, black copy on a white background helps, but a whole block of text can be intimidating, which is why the most effective letters contain break out boxes of highlighted and/or coloured text. This makes reading easier on the eye but often includes third party endorsements (facts, expert opinion, testimonials) which reaffirms the sales message.

Call To Action

There are usually several opportunities to ‘opt in’, either to sign up for further information or to buy the product. After the first ‘opt in’ link, there are usually other enticements such as a no-quibble money back guarantee, and bonuses that you receive for free when you buy the main product or service. These reaffirm to the reader that the product is not only good value for money, but also that their decision to buy is indeed ‘risk free.’

Get the structure of your sales letter right, combine it with a targeted PPC campaign, and you could see your sales dramatically increase.

Please feel free to leave your comments and questions below.

The Power of Correctly Formatted Testimonials

No matter what you sell whether product or service, online or offline you can dramatically increase sales by displaying testimonials from previous customers that are happy with your product or service.

Even those of you that are using testimonials could increase sales by formatting them correctly. Firstly let’s take a look at how you can acquire those first few testimonials to get the ball rolling. Let’s assume that your website is brand new and you have not made any sales yet.

How to get testimonials

My first suggestion would be to contact a few people that your product or service would appeal to and offer them a free copy, trial, loan etc.. In exchange for a review of the product.

Simply send them the product and ask them to fill out a questionnaire, you can then use the completed questionnaire to create a testimonial.

The most basic testimonial you can use is a text only testimonial. However, even these can be extremely powerful when formatted correctly.

So what does a correctly formatted testimonial look like?

1) Every testimonial should contain the customers name and their city or county. This provides added credibility that the testimonial is genuine.

2) The testimonial should alleviate or address concerns that the visitor may be having about purchasing your product.

3) You should bold, underline or italicise the benefits or the main points of the testimonial. This make it easier for the reader to skim read the testimonials and you are drawing their attention to the parts that matter.

Asking The Right Questions

As we have covered already to acquire testimonials you’ll need to ask for them but how and what you ask can make all the difference.
Why not send all of your previous customers a simple questionnaire.

Here’s some questions you might want to ask them:-

Did you have any concerns before purchasing?
Was the product shipped on time?
Is the product what you expected?
How have you benefited from the product?
What do you particularly like about the product?
Etc…

Don’t forget to ask if you can use their feed back on the website.

By creating testimonials from questionnaires you will not only discover new concerns that customers may have had before purchasing you can now alleviate similar concerns new customers might be experiencing.

Each piece of sales copy on the web should answer all objections that a new purchaser might have and testimonials formatted in this way are a fantastic way to achieve that quickly and efficiently.

Boost The Power Of Testimonials With Images Audio & Video

Remember the most basic testimonial is a text only testimonial. By incorporating Images, Video & Audio you can dramatically increase their credibility. Although “faking” testimonials is illegal adding audio and especially video removes any concerns that the testimonial is not genuine.

Long Copy or Short Copy?

Over the next few posts I’d like to talk about sales copy

I thought the first thing I should cover is the great debate about whether you should use long sales copy or short sales copy.

Pardon the pun but the long and short of it is that they both have their places! The trick is knowing how and when to use them.

Let’s first cover exactly what happens when a visitor is searching for something online and finds your website.

Example:-

Joe is looking for the latest album by Cold Play. He goes to Google and searches either “Cold Play Latest Album” or “The name of the album”.

Great! He finds your site and you’ve done the right thing by directing him to the page that is selling the latest cold play album on your website.

Here you do not need to write a 10 page sales letter explaining the benefits of listening to their new album, you do not need to establish cold plays credibility as a good band or anything like that.

The visitor has already made a decision to purchase the album the only decision he has not made yet is who he is going to buy it from!

Here you would use short copy detailing what’s on the album, anything you particularly like about it etc. Not forgetting to mention your great delivery terms eg guaranteed next day delivery or your Iron clad returns policy. Etc…

On the other hand let’s say Joe was searching for “Music CD’s” here you would direct Joe (the visitor) to your home page where you would use some slightly longer copy detailing the benefits of purchasing music from you and why your site is “unique” clearly stating a compelling headline etc…

Now again you would not need to craft page after page of long copy to do this. But that doesn’t mean that long copy has no place on a catalogue or shopping cart style website. There are many places you would use long copy such as selling a loyalty or membership club to previous customers for example.

I’ll cover some of those areas later but for now let’s take a look at another scenario.

Mandy has a new puppy and she’s looking for information on how she can house train her new puppy.
Mandy goes to Google and searches for “How to House Train a Puppy”.

This time Mandy has not yet made any kind buying decision. In fact she is most probably looking for free information.  90% of all web surfers using search phrases indicative of searching for a solution to a problem are looking for free information. Mandy does not yet have her credit card in hand looking to buy your e-book or DVD etc.

In this case the copy required to take Mandy from a free information mind set in to an “Ok I want to buy the book”, DVD etc, needs to be a whole lot different and here in this scenario the long sales letter copy is the best way to go.

However, it needs to be done correctly and in the correct order. Good short copy will always out-perform bad long copy.

However, get your long sales letter right and you’ll be shocked at the difference.

In my next article I’ll cover the layout and format of a sales letter.

Many Thanks
Jon Stringer

Please feel free to ask questions or leave comments below.