In the last post, we gave you a useful chart so that you could break up your long sales letter into several steps and that allowed you to track potential customers along the imaginary pathway that you had created. You could more easily see where people were disengaging from your sales letter and you could fix it, ultimately improving the number of people who would make it to the end of your sales letter and buy from you.

But there’s more you can do from this simple chart. Assuming (of course) that you would continue to use this chart to track the success (or failure) of customer engagement in your long sales letter, here are some more ideas to use your chart and take your sales page to an all-new level:

IMPROVE YOUR PAGE 1 ADVERTISING: Once you know how all of your pages are performing and you are making changes to improve the conversion rates of the pages that are "down the pathway", you should turn your attention to page 1. It’s important to note that this is not something you should do BEFORE you know how your other pages are converting. Do it after. That way, once you’ve optimized all of your pages for maximum sales, you can work on your first page to increase that initial, all-important attention-capturing page.

IMPROVE YOUR ADVERTISING-TO-PAGE-1 IMPACT: Look at your advertising and compare that to the number of people who appear on your first page by comparing impressions to clicks. (You may want to add another column in your chart.) When you work first at increasing your website’s conversion rate, then you work at improving the number of people who come to your site, you’ll maximize your own effort. (By comparison, if you do it the other way around, you’ll just be sending more traffic to a website that doesn’t convert.)

TEST ALTERNATE PATHWAYS: If you’re a user of Google AdWords, you know that you can use Google to help you test different landing pages from the same ad. Well, you can use a similar approach inside your broke-up sales letter, too. Once you have found a good conversion rate, try sending people to a different inside page. Perhaps, instead of page 4 being a list of problems they face, you might make it a list of testimonials, for example. Consider using this testing method to test a shorter letter, a longer letter, a story-style pitch, a more aggressive pitch, a funny pitch, etc.

ENGAGE USERS: User engagement is huge and often inadequately utilized in web-based sales letters. But the paper-based direct marketing world understands it all too well. That’s why you get junk mail that encourages users to scratch something off or check a box or apply a "yes" or "no" sticker. You might throw out your junk mail without scratching the scratch section, but others will scratch it off. You might throw out your junk mail without peeling and sticking the "yes" or "no" stickers, but other people might put the "no" sticker on and send it back… and enough of them put the "yes" sticker on and send it back to make it worth the company’s time. That’s user engagement.

You can do this, too. You might have pop-up windows that link from "click here to read more testimonials". Or you might have a video. Or you might have a downloadable document. Or (and here is the power of the chart) you might have 2 options at the bottom of your page instead of one. One option says "tell me more" and takes users to the next page in the sales letter while the second option says "I’d like to think about it" and takes users to a email sign-up page where they can sign up for a newsletter.

So, break up your sales letter. Create your chart. Watch where people are falling off and fix it. Then, use the same chart to make improvements earlier in the pathway to win more and more potential customers and move more and more of these potential customers… into REAL customers!

Contemporary VA

@ContemporaryVA on Twitter.  Follow us to stay updated with our many resources that include business, accounting and bookkeeping, social media, and much more!

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

@ContemporaryVA on Twitter.  Follow us to stay updated with our many resources that include business, accounting and bookkeeping, social media, and much more!