Are you writing that sales page to friends or to strangers?

 

When I write a landing page or sales page, I first ask plenty of questions about the people who will be reading it.

 

It's Copywriting 101 – knowing your audience and crafting your information and sales messages accordingly.

 

Like you, I do the best I can to achieve a clear understanding of what kind of approach will work best for the people coming to that page.

 

What do they want? What are their desires? What is most urgent for them?

 

However, as I have recently been learning, there are often a number of different audiences to please...and a single copy approach won't do well across all these groups.

 

This is something I have been learning with one of my own sites, WritingRituals.com.

 

When I first wrote the Writing Rituals ebook, created the sales page and did some promotion back in the Spring, conversion rates for the first month of sales were at about 10%.

 

My first reaction was to pat myself on the back and congratulate myself on writing such a good sales page.

 

But in the second month that conversion rate fell to a little under 5%. And in the third month is bottomed out at a little under 2%.

 

What was happening here? How could the same sales page for the same product perform so differently each month?

 

Here's what happened:

 

1. I first promoted the e-book in this newsletter. Of the people who subscribe to the newsletter, a certain number have known and read me for years now. They are fans and they trust me. And if I write something on a topic that interests them, and I charge a reasonable price, they'll buy a copy.

 

For this first group of buyers, it doesn't much matter how good or bad my sales page is. In fact, on the first day I announced the availability of the ebook, someone wrote back saying they had gone to the sale page and simply scrolled directly to the end and clicked the Buy button, without reading the text at all.

 

2. Over the following weeks I continued to promote the ebook, but my conversion rates started to decline. By this stage the fans who were interested in the topic had already bought a copy. Now I was selling to subscribers to my list who enjoyed my writing, but didn't necessarily think that everything I wrote was worth buying.

 

In other words, the copy on my sales page started to matter a great deal more. I had to do some selling.

 

3. After a couple of months I had pretty much got all the sales I was going to get from both my fans and loyal newsletter subscribers. By this stage, my reputation no longer had much impact on whether or not I'd make a sale.

 

Put simply, once I started promoting my ebook to strangers, all the heavy lifting fell to the copy I wrote for the sales page.

 

As a result, that sales copy has now been through a number of quite dramatic revisions. Only a few sentences are exactly the same as they were when I first uploaded the page.

 

As the nature of my audience has changed, so has the copy.

 

And it's not that I have simply had to make the copy work harder. I have had to change the tone as well. For the first little while I was writing to people who knew me. Now I'm writing to strangers. And, for me at least, that makes a difference.

 

What does this mean for my copywriting for clients?

 

My experience with my own site has made me pause and think a little about the copy I write for paying clients.

 

When I write a sales page for a company, am I writing to friends or to strangers?

 

To be honest, this isn't a question I have been asking myself, or my clients.

 

But I should. And I should be recommending that they have me write at least two different versions of each page - one for members and subscribers, and another for strangers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Copywriting Course and Guides

 

 

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A guide to help freelance writers and copywriters achieve their goals faster.

 

 

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