Fixing the Long Sales Letter

For some readers, your marketing includes a long sales letter on your website. If that’s the case, I’m going to guess that you have a particular challenge: Figuring out what’s wrong.

Here’s the very common situation for these long sales letters:

You use a variety of marketing methods (Google AdWords or Twitter or Affiliates or whatever) to get people to your webpage. Once there, you present them with a loooooooong letter that is chock-full of effective sales messages and benefits and testimonials and screenshots and "buy now" buttons. And some buy and some don’t.

So here’s the problem: You can measure who clicks to your site, and from where. You can see how long they spend on your site. And you know how many people buy from you. Those give you some useful metrics, but there is one piece of data you do not have: Why do people leave?

Knowing the reason that people leave can help you create a far more compelling site with a sales offer that closes even more deals.

The challenge is to find what part of the message is driving people away. That’s hard to do when you have such a long letter.

Here’s a potential solution: Break up your sales letter across several pages. Let’s say that you have enough content to break it up across ten pages. All of sudden, you have a much more trackable funnel!

If you see that people are clicking to your home page then from page 1 to page 2 then from page 2 to page 3, but most people are leaving on page 3, then you know you’ve got a problem on that page. Over time, you can build up a very informative set of averages along this "click pathway". Set up a chart in Excel and across the top label each of the steps in your steps in the path (with "$" representing the "buy now" step. Record the progress by taking the average number of clicks each day and noting how things progress as users click from one page to the next. So let’s say that you end up with something like this.

Here’s what this chart tells you:

The first page is okay, getting an average of 100 clicks a day. An average of 22 people lose interest during page 1 and don’t bother clicking to page 2. Of the 88 who do click to page 2, 59 drop off on page 2 and don’t bother to click to page 3. So, the site owner knows to make changes to page 2.

Sure enough, after gathering more data, the site owner sees that the number of people clicking from page 2 to page 3 has improved. Now they notice another problem on page 4. The site appears to be dropping off nearly half of its visitors at that point. So, they make further changes.

Ultimately, these changes are done to help you find ways to keep your customers engaged and increase the likelihood that they will stay with you through to the end and ultimately buy from you.

This chart offers a very useful way to track viewers along your site’s pathway to take them from being a cold prospect toward becoming a customer.

Contemporary VA

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