Your sales page is your best opportunity to get people to buy your product. It’s the final piece of content a prospective customer sees before making a purchase. So, it needs to be attention-grabbing, informative, and persuasive.
What happens, though, if you have everything you need on your sales page–the compelling offer, copy, and images—but it still doesn’t yield those conversions? Then it’s time to assess your sales page and optimize. Read on to know the steps you should take for effective sales page conversion rate optimization:
1. Make a customer persona
Your sales page may not be performing as well as it should because it doesn’t speak to visitors’ pain points. Let’s say you’re selling email marketing software, and your copy says your solution is the “best in the market.” Chances are, your page won’t generate your desired conversions.
People don’t usually buy something because it’s the best (or so the company claims). They buy a product because it solves a problem. That said, a sales page with the copy “Send many emails with just one click” will probably fare better than our example above.
To boost conversions on your sales page, you need to assume you’re not speaking to your visitors’ pain points. Go back to the drawing board. Determine your target audience and create a customer persona. This will help you tailor the content to their needs, helping you build an audience for your brand.
A customer persona is a representation of your ideal customer.
You can use online surveys, customer data analysis, and focus groups to gather the information for your customer persona. Social media is a goldmine of customer information, too.
The better you know your target audience, the more you can tailor the message to your audience on your sales page. Here’s an example of copy we can assume was based on a customer persona:
The copy revolves around things business owners want the most: to develop meaningful relationships, automate the customer-acquisition process, and, well, get customers:
So, when business owners see this sales page, they’re more likely to click on that Buy button.
2. Ensure copy is based on tried-and-tested copywriting formula
So, you now know what your audience wants.
It’s time to create copy based on those and on copywriting formula that works.
There are many copywriting formulas, but these are some of the most used:
- 4 P’s
- AIDCA
- The Star Story Solution
- PAS formula
Here’s a great resource you can read to see how those formulas work.
But just to give you an idea, let’s discuss one. PAS, for instance, according to renowned marketer Dan Kennedy, is the most reliable one. You just present your problem, emphasize it until it becomes visceral, and then present your product as the solution to the problem.
On a sales page, it would look like this:
Let’s break down the PAS elements on that page:
- Problem: Your dream job won’t fall on your lap.
- Agitation: You end up frustrated and paralyzed by the fear of being stuck when old job hunt “tricks” fail.
- Solution: The 80/20 guide
Let’s go back to our email marketing product example. Based on that formula, here’s what your copy can include:
- Problem: Hassle of having to send each email to each customer manually and of having to create one email for each.
- Agitation: You end up wasting hours crafting personalized emails and sending them while other aspects of your business suffer. Leads are no longer coming in, and sales are doing badly because you’re never there to guide your sales team.
- Solution: Your software
You’d have to choose between long-form or short-form sales page copy. Pick the long-form copy if your product is high-risk and if people don’t understand how it works. Generally speaking, though, I’d stick to the long-form copy because it works most of the time.
3. Boost page loading speed
Half of the page visitors wouldn’t hang around if your website’s loading delays for only three seconds. Pretty frightening, right? It gets worse. According to The Drum, 79 percent of buyers confirmed they wouldn’t bother returning to a slow-loading site.
All these numbers point to the same thing—page load speed is vital!
So, if you’re not getting those conversions you expected, check if your sales page is loading quickly. If you get tired of waiting for the entire page to appear, that means you need to do something.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights can help you. You can use it to discover how to improve page loading speed.
In general, though, here are some things you can do to improve your speed:
- Optimize your images: If you have graphics on your page, it’s best to keep them in PNG format. Don’t use more than 16 colors. Keep your images in the JPEG format.
- Ask your web designer to optimize your code: There should be no unnecessary commas and spaces in between.
- Check your server response time: It should be under 200 milliseconds. If it’s above that, consider changing your hosting solution.
It can take a while to implement the recommendations. It’s worth it once you see your loading time improve even by half a second.
4. Improve sales page structure
Don’t just review your sales copy for sales page CRO. Look at your page structure as well. Is there a logic to where you put your images and your testimonials? Is your CTA button where it’s supposed to be?
For example, make sure your testimonials aren’t far from your CTA button. They are supposed to serve as social proof and give your visitor that final nudge to buy. If they’re away from your CTA button, they can’t serve that very purpose.
Notice where the testimonials from members of the Guided Discovery System are. They’re right below the “Join Now” button. So, if at any point you hesitate to click on that, you’ll find someone whose life changed when they joined the community right there and then. You end up taking action.
Speaking of CTA, it should be the only clickable item on your sales page. If you included other buttons apart from the Buy or Join Now button, remove them. You don’t want to decrease your chances of getting your visitor to make a purchase. The more buttons you have on a sales page, the more options you give your visitor, after all.
5. Ensure your sales page is mobile-friendly
About 50 percent of online visitors used their phones to browse in 2017. The stats show mobile phone use is not slowing down, with mobile users already at 54.8 percent in early 2021.
Make sure your layout looks good on mobile based on the source of your traffic.
For example, if your sales page is for people coming from Facebook, it should be mobile-friendly first. According to Backlinko, 98.5 percent of Facebook users access the site through a mobile device. Of that figure, 81.5 percent use a phone. That means when they access your sales page, they’re probably using a mobile device, too.
QR codes have also become increasingly popular. Scan a custom QR code, and you are directly taken to a site.
That’s not to say you should no longer look at how your sales page looks on a desktop. After all, 16.7 percent access Facebook (and therefore your sales page, too) through desktop and mobile.
6. Gather visitor contact details
Many of your sales page visitors might not be ready to make a purchase. But this doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to sell them down the line. Email marketing presents the ideal avenue to keep in touch with these people till they’re ready to become customers. So, if you don’t have that option on your sales page now, consider adding one.
Don’t add that other CTA on your sales page (remember when I said the more options your visitors have, the less likely they’ll click on that Buy button?). Instead, use a pop-up. Give your visitors a content upgrade, for example, to get them into your email list:
You’ll see the pop-up on the Design Masterclass sales page. When you click on “Unlock free training,” you get this:
So, even if some visitors don’t make a purchase, you can still keep in touch with them and sell them your product in the near future.
Bottom line
Sales pages have a primary aim: to get people to purchase your product. If yours don’t yield those conversions, then there must be something wrong.
The good news is, there are ways you can boost those conversions. Just make sure your copy speaks to the pain points of your target customer. Make sure your page loading speed is acceptable, and your page is mobile-friendly, too. Finally, gather visitors’ details on your sales page if you’re not doing that just yet.
Follow these tips, and you’ll see those conversions increasing in no time.
