Five Essential Elements for a Great Sales Letter Landing Page
Forget the cash register. First, make sure your landing pages answer this question for your users: “what’s in it for me?”
At Mequoda, we know through trial and error, that a landing page chock full of content and detail works best for selling information products online.
Most readers “scan” information, but the more information you give them, the less they’ll question what your product is about and what the value of that product may be.
Lay everything out for them with a long salesletter, but remember that it’s also important that the information they want most is available to them quickly.
Depending on what you’re selling, you can probably guess what information that is.
With a live event, it may be the date, price, and a list of take-aways they will get from the event. With a newsletter, it may be the price, length of subscription, delivery schedule (monthly, bi-monthly), average number of pages and delivery format (print, pdf).
With that said, here are five more essential elements of great landing pages, partially excerpted from our Creating Landing Pages that Sell handbook.
1. Headline
It may seem hard to believe, but far too many landing pages fail almost immediately by offering up lackluster headlines and subheads. Think benefits and features when putting up your headlines.
The visitor who’s reading your landing page wants nothing more than the answer to this question: “What’s in this for me?” Answer that question well and you will make a sale.
2. Story and Content
Make sure your landing page contains an interesting, engaging, believable story told by someone your audience can relate to and appreciate.
After all, you’re asking them to spend their valuable time reading your pitch… you owe them a good narrative. Plus, a compelling story will move them smoothly along to the purchasing decision.
3. Email Capture
Once you’ve captured your prospect’s interest, it’s important to keep your name, product, and/or service in front of them.
During the orderflow for your product purchase, include a checkbox that asks the user if they want to subscribe to your email newsletter. This way, you can keep in contact with those who are clearly in your target audience.
4. Links to Order Flow
Links and buttons are the vehicles that allow a prospect to navigate your landing page. Make them as easy as possible to understand and use.
We find that using longer text on buttons leaves no room for confusion: “Yes, I want to buy [title]” continues to convert better than “buy now”.
5. Labeling and Language
Have you ever seen a sales letter that included a bulleted list of items… and the last item in the list said, “and much, much more?”
Well, I hate to break it to these publishers, but nobody with an IQ higher than room temperature believes that there is “much, much more.”
If you actually have more benefits or features, put them in the list. Clear language and good grammar are part of good storytelling and so is telling the truth. Don’t try to bamboozle your prospect with tired ad copy clichés.
To get our full 12 item landing page scorecard, as well as 12 case studies on effective, tested and successful landing pages, read Creating Landing Pages that Sell.
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May 6th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Interesting observation re: “much more”. That’s not something I’ve seen split-testing on before. Wonder if your opinion re: the beliefs of people when that’s used has an impact on sales. Good post, btw.
May 6th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
One thing not mentioned on that note… if you’re trying to conserve space at the top of a page and really need to use “and much, much more”, it makes sense to link it down the page, to a bigger list, that shows the “more”.