Could your sales page be making this easy-to-overlook mistake? Join me in the video to see what it is and how to fix it, so you can write powerful and persuasive sales pitches for your products and services.
TRANSCRIPT:
In today’s copy review, we’re going to look at a productized service sales page that has a “problem” problem, and I’ll show you what I mean.
If we haven’t met yet, Hi, I’m Paige. I’m a conversion copywriter, and I help founders and marketing teams boost the conversion rates for their most critical marketing and sales campaigns by focusing on how they communicate their products and services.
Let’s take a look.
So I’ve copied the opening of the sales page into a Google Doc so that we can focus exclusively on the copy. And before we get into the problem, I first want to highlight what this page is doing well because it was written by a copywriter.
✔️ We have a preheader that calls out the ideal buyer.
✔️ We have a strong headline that introduces the problem that they’re going to be solving, followed by the unique mechanism or the core of the offer, the thing that they’re going to get to solve that problem.
✔️ We have a button that’s leading with a call to value.
And if you focus on the next section, you’ll see that…
✔️the copywriter is using a proven persuasion framework, specifically PAS: Problem Agitation Solution.
Now, if I were auditing this sales page, the first thing I would flag is this:
The problem that the hero is solving seems to be different from the problem that the following section is solving. So there’s a disconnect.
In the hero, the page introduces the problem “escape post-launch famine,” which to me means the problem of following the launch model where you have tons of sales coming in when you launch, but then you go for months on end between launches where you have no sales coming in, which puts a lot of stress and pressure on your launch periods.
Based on that information alone, I would expect this sales page to pitch me on copywriting services intended to help me create an evergreen sales funnel where I could see sales all the time, all year long.
However, when I look at the section below it, that speaks to a completely different problem context.
It reads: “Every day your leaky funnel runs, you’re missing out on sales.” So, obviously, by mentioning every day, that’s no longer a launch context because you don’t launch every day, right? If you have a funnel that’s running every day, you have an evergreen funnel, and you don’t have post-launch famine.
Now, for me, this is a pretty jarring disconnect that could potentially throw off ideal buyers, depending on who the ideal buyer is.
To fix it, I would first start by clarifying who our one reader actually is for the page in question.
So for this fun little rewrite, let’s imagine our one reader is an exhausted course creator who is struggling with that post-launch famine due to the feast-and-famine nature of the launch strategy. This reader is tired of having to go months at a time without seeing any sales come in. And they’re tired of being so stressed out because there’s so much pressure on the few launches that they have a year to generate all the revenue that they need to sustain and grow their business.
So this one reader would be interested in copywriting services that would help them evergreen their launch in the easiest way possible, so they could start seeing sales every single day.
Keeping that in mind, here’s what I’ve done:
I kept “escape postlaunch famine.” I think that’s good phrasing for our problem context. But I also wanted to pull in the emotional impact, so I’ve added “and the stress of high-pressure sales” as well.
I’ve swapped “funnel copy” for “evergreen funnel” because in this scenario, evergreen funnel is our solution.
At the end, I’ve modified the outcome statement to better reflect what these ideal buyers want, which is to go from not making any sales for months to making sales every single day.
So the full headline reads: “Escape post-launch famine and the stress of high-pressure sales with an evergreen funnel that floods your inbox with ‘You made a sale!’ notifications every single day.”
Admittedly, this is a bit long, so in the design, we may have to split this up and create a headline and a subheading.
For the button, I’ve kept the call to value, but I’ve made sure the message matches what we’re saying in the headline. So it now reads: “Go evergreen and make sales every day.”
The biggest change happens in the following section, where we have to completely rewrite the opening crosshead because it doesn’t align with that post-launch famine problem context. So, what I’ve written is:
“I have good news and bad news. You don’t have to live launch to build a six or seven-figure business. In fact, making customers wait for months on end to join your course is costing you sales and stifling your growth.”
The first sentence sort of sets them free from that belief that they have to live launch in order to build a successful business.
In the second sentence, I’m starting to introduce an argument that I would need to make further in the page that launching is actually more costly than they realized, which I could support further in the page with details like:
If a customer has a problem and they want to join your course to solve it, but your course is closed for now, they might go choose one of your competitors. I have personal experience with that.
And also, if you don’t have sales coming in for months on end and you only have sales coming in a few times a year, you kind of hurt yourself from a revenue perspective and a growth perspective because you don’t have the funds you need to invest in areas to grow the business.
For this example, I didn’t touch the body copy below the crosshead. But just keep in mind, in a real project, once you’ve clarified your one reader and your value proposition, you would have to go back through the page and make sure all the copy supports that one reader and that value proposition so that you have a cohesive sales story woven throughout your page.
Now, this rewrite only took me about ten minutes. But as you can see, there’s a dramatic improvement in the story we’re trying to tell. It speaks much more strongly to that post-launch famine context than the original version.
Now, keep in mind, this was just a fun little exercise.
In a real optimization project, we would first dig into the strategy, the purpose of the offer, and the conversion context before we start making decisions like this.
And if you’d like my help improving your sales pages so you can turn more page visitors into customers and clients, we should chat.
