Improve Your Offers
What Are You Offering?
As a product seller and promoter, you need to know what you’re promoting and offering to your audience. The best way to do this is to map the offers that you have for your ideal customer’s entire buying journey. When you do this, you should know which offers you’re making during each stage, whether it’s when they gain awareness or if it’s when they’re ready to make a purchase or whether it’s after the purchasing.
You’ll end up with a list of offers that you can track. You’ll want to create an inventory of every single offer you have, whether it’s free, an affiliate offer, or a paid offer that you created. An excellent way to do it is to create a spreadsheet arranged with each stage of the buying journey matched with your offers. Include links to the offer page, landing pages, and affiliate products so that it’s easy to share at any point you want to.
Once you organize your offers, you can more easily notice where you have gaps in your offers. For example, are there some intermediate levels or beginning levels of products and information you can offer within the buying journey? Maybe you have a lot of lower-cost products that can be turned into a more lucrative membership website? Perhaps you’ll notice a gap in your higher-priced options. The best way to not only get ideas for more offers but to track, tweak, and improve the offers you have is to know what you have first.
Even when you offer digital products, you should consider them to be part of your inventory. All businesses that have products to sell keep track of their inventory. Your information product business, content marketing business, or even service-based business should be treated the same so that you know what you’re offering to them when you’re offering it, why you’re offering it, and more. That information will help you improve your profit margins exponentially.
Once you have your product inventory set up, now you can more easily monitor the results you’re getting from making offers. Can you improve the SEO for your sales pages? Can you create more blog content to teach your audience about the problems that they have that your solutions solve? You can when you know what’s happening, and the only way to know what’s happening is to get your inventory organized. The best way to do it is to organize it based on your ideal customer’s buying journey.
When you get organized, you’ll be able to manage brand consistency, maximize your internal processes, save time and money, and be able to easily tell customers what you offer and how you can help them right now. By using the right systems, you’ll improve all your offers in every way possible. Without a plan, it’ll be a lot harder to be consistent.
Audit Your Sales Pages
When you create a sales page, you must use all the tactics you can to ensure it provides the results you’re looking for. These ideas can help you stop leaks in your sales process. You can use the information to create a new sales page as well as to tweak existing ones to make them better. You can use this information for all your landing pages, not just specifically sales pages, to improve.
Audit These Sales Page Elements
Your Offer and Benefits – How does your offer differentiate your brand from the competition? Are there any specific emotions you’d like to elicit from site visitors to drive your prospects to buy? Are there any triggers at all that may lead your prospects to buy the offer? Does the offer match the intended audience where they are in their buying journey? Plus, what does the product really do for your buyers? They need to know what’s in it for them.
The Call to Action – Is your CTA visible enough? Is your headline compelling? What are the benefits, and are they included near your CTA to remind your audience? To better frame your CTAs, you’ll need to know the answer to “What do you want them to do next?” If there is an incongruency with the CTA and the audience, it can cause lower sales margins.
Trust Building and Social Proof – What do you have added to your sales page that tells your audience you’re trustworthy? You’ll need testimonials, a privacy policy, and a guarantee that builds trust in the buyer. If they don’t believe you, they’re not going to buy it.
Visual Elements – The way your sales page looks is essential too. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel here. Instead, you need to create sales and landing pages that are familiar to your audience. Who your audience is will inform you how far you can go with technology and the look. The navigation, the size of the buttons, the colors, and all that matter very much when it comes to sales pages.
Page Abandonment – Checking out how many people just get there and then leave the page either by abandoning the page entirely (bouncing) or by filling a shopping cart and leaving. Why and how your audience is leaving your sales page will inform the improvements you can make.
Subject Matter Continuity – The other thing to double-check is, does the marketing information you provide your audience on your blog, in advertisements, on social media, and so forth match the sales page you’re delivering to the audience? If there is a problem with subject matter continuity, it will confuse people who click through to the sales page. Make sure there is information continuity.
To ensure you get these elements of your sales pages right, you’ll want to know who your ideal customer is so that you know for sure the offers you’re making are just for them. Your audience needs to know the benefits of the offer and exactly why it’s going to solve their problems while also feeling trust enough to spend money or give away their personal information to you. Your sales pages can accomplish this if you take the time to know the audience and know your products well enough to explain them on your sales pages fully.
Crafting And Testing Different Headlines
Every time you create a sales page, just like when you write a blog post or an email message, you must write a headline that will get clicks from your ideal audience. If you craft the headline wrong, you may get clicks from the wrong audience. The wrong people clicking through will not increase sales. Therefore, you need to ensure your headlines match the intent of your audience that you want to come to the sales page.
The best way to fix your headlines is to test them. After considering your audience and who you want to see the sales page or landing page, after brainstorming at least 20 to 50 headlines for each sales page, choose three to five headlines for your sales page to test.
Essentially, you’ll have three to five different headlines, but the sales page will be exactly the same otherwise. Testing them at the same time is usually best, but you can also just do one at a time while tracking to see what works and what doesn’t work.
When you write your headlines, throw out the lessons you learned in English class, and focus instead on marketing. The fact is only about two percent of those who read your headlines are going to click through, but you can improve it over time if you work toward it.
Use Pronouns to Talk Directly to Your Audience – It’s okay to use words like “you” in your content and especially on your sales pages and in headlines. You want to talk directly to your audience just like I am doing right now when I mention you in this sentence.
Promise a Valid Solution to Their Pressing Problems – Your audience, as much as they may love you, only care about what’s in it for them. What problem will you solve with your solution? Tell them right in the headline. “Use This Method to Sleep Soundly Every Night.”
Give Your Customers Hope for a Better Future – Tell them the results of the solution you’re offering to them in the headline. “Lose 20 Pounds by Christmas” is straight forward and tells them their future will be better.
Tell Them How to Do something Better or Best – Studies show that when an audience sees words like “better” or “best,” they tend to click on the link more often. However, don’t trick them. Make sure your headline matches what you deliver to them.
Provide Evidence for Supporting Your Assumptions – If you can put any proof or stats in your headline that is always interesting to your audience.
Give Advice – When you give advice and are an expert, people often listen. “Why You Should Stop Doing This One Thing Now.” Insert the one thing you want your audience to stop.
Get Personal – Share your experience with your audience in the headline. “What I Learned About Weight Loss the Hard Way.”
Keep Your Headlines Simple – You only have so much space for your headlines to show up in search results appropriately. Keep your headlines to the right length. This will require that you keep it simple.
Be Very Specific – The more specific you can make your headlines, the better. Leave out words that you don’t need to advance the meaning of the headline.
Don’t Be Passive – When you are writing any type of content, it’s best to avoid passive voice. Instead of worrying about this as you write, use your editing software like Grammarly or Word to help you locate and eliminate passive voice.
Brainstorm Every Headline – When you create a sales page, a blog post, or anything that needs a headline, try writing at least 20 to 50 of them for each page. The reason you want to write so many is that it will take time to get the right one, and through brainstorming, you’ll find it.
Finally, consider using technology to help you create better and more effective headlines. One such headline analyzer is at Advanced Marketing Institute. (https://www.aminstitute.com/headline/)
In the meantime, read many headlines and practice writing them. Test them using Google Analytics to ensure they work for your needs.
Time To Play With Pricing
One of the ways to improve sales is to test out different price points. Often, when someone is not making enough money for the effort that they’re putting in, it’s usually due to using a poor pricing method. Inaccurate or not very well-planned pricing is especially true for digital product creators. We are all familiar with the cost of goods when it comes to a physical product, but digital products have a cost too even though that cost goes down per product the more you sell.
Calculating Profit
When you calculate profit, you’ll want to reduce your revenue by what you spent to get the product ready for sale and to market it and sell it. For example, you have expenses for writers, content buying, editing, graphic design, and so forth for every single product you make. Even if you do it all yourself, you have spent your valuable time, and that should be included.
You can use online calculators (https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/financial/selling-price-calculator.php) to help, but most of the time, pricing, especially for digital products, isn’t as precise and you can actually play with these numbers to test your audience to find out what they’re willing to pay. Set your prices too low, and you may lose sales because they think the product is cheap, set your price point too high, and you may price out your audience.
Pricing Your Products
when you price your digital products, you’ll want to consider several factors:
The Cost to Create the Product – Remember to figure in your time and not just the direct financial costs. Your time is worth something too.
The Price Point Your Audience Can Pay – How much extra money your audience has to spend on things that they don’t need or something that they do need if you sell a commodity is also an important thing to know to help you price your products.
The Value the Product Provides the Buyer – If your product can save your buyers a substantial amount of money or time, that can also inform the price point.
The Amount You Want to Earn – This is an essential factor that is often left out when pricing something. If you know you’re going to get about 50 orders of anything you promote, due to checking your stats, that is a good way to determine how much you need to charge to make a good profit.
Once you’ve set your price points, you can test out different methods of payment, such as allowing your customers to pay monthly, quarterly, or yearly or even offer a onetime lifetime payment depending on the type of products you are promoting. For example, some prolific information marketers sometimes sell keys that entitle the buyer to everything they ever produce now and, in the future, to raise money. Often, they sell these keys for more than a grand each and limit the sales to five to ten people out of an audience of thousands. Another way to find out what price most of your audience wants to pay is to offer a “pay your own price” sale. Then change the price to the average amount your audience paid. As you work on pricing, think outside the box a little and remember to put your customers first but don’t discount the worth to your customers of you making enough money to keep existing. After all, they need you and your solutions.
Could You Add A Bonus To Improve Conversions?
If you need a way to boost sales for either affiliate products or your own products, one effective way is to add a bonus. Bonuses will improve conversions because people love getting things for nothing. You can include both unannounced and announced bonuses in your sales to improve conversions. Let’s explore how this will work.
Brainstorming Your Bonuses
The first thing you need to do is look at the main product you’re promoting on the sales page so that you can identify any additional information that will make it easier for your customers to use the solution in the product.
For example, can you create a checklist, organize a spreadsheet for them, or provide a better step by step help? Maybe you can provide a case study with the product that shows the story of someone who used this solution? Bonuses are simply little extras that aren’t needed to make the main product work, but that enhances what is already being offered or makes what is being offered easier to implement.
Create Your Bonus Offers
Once you get some ideas about what you can create to help your customer with their purchase, you may not even have to create it yourself. For example, if you are selling an information product about making money blogging, you might want to give them a content marketing calendar spreadsheet or a Trello.com template to get them organized. Maybe you have a list of products that they can buy and use that helps them implement your solution that you can give them. As long as the bonus makes things easier, then it qualifies as a bonus.
Test with and Without Bonus
Even after you create the bonus, try running your offer via ads or content marketing to find out which version your audience prefers. If you change nothing else, do you sell more with the bonus offer mentioned, or do you sell more without mentioning the bonus item? Each audience responds differently, and the only way to know is to test them.
Test Different Names
When you run tests, try giving your bonus offers different names. Some names may attract more of your audience than others. The main thing is to get the name right so that it really tells your customer what they’re getting in the bonus. Brainstorm as many names as you can, choose the top three or so, and then test how it works out for your audience.
Test Placement of The Bonus
The other factor you want to test as you add bonuses to your offers is how you mention it. Some people prefer to mention it on the sales pages, and some like to refer to it only in the cart. It really does depend on your own audience and how they respond. Try different methods of bonus add-ons to find out what works for your audience.
You’ll also want to figure out the best way to deliver your bonuses. If it’s your own product, it’s easy enough to add the bonus to the package, but if you’re using a bonus to encourage affiliate sales, it will depend on the system your product creator uses. Sometimes you may have to get creative with how you distribute the bonus for these products compared to your own. If you’re unsure about this, ask your product creator if you’re able to add a bonus to their system for ease of downloading from your customers, they may be able to accommodate you.
Testing And Tracking Every Part Of Your Sales Page
The one thing you really need to know is that a sales page up and running is better than never having one up and running. Don’t allow the idea of testing and tracking every part of your sales page to deter you from getting sales pages up for each of your offers. Get them up, and then start working on improving them through testing and tracking.
Headlines – For every sales page you create, try writing down at least 20 to 50 headlines so that you can perfect them. Out of the brainstorming session, choose three to five to test using multivariant or A/B testing.
Call to Action – The same thing needs to be said about your calls to action. You’ll want to test out three to five different CTAs to find out what will work best for your audience. The more time you spend brainstorming your CTAs, the better the ones that you test will be.
Video Versus No Video – Does your audience like video on your sales pages, or do they prefer it without? You don’t know if you don’t test. Try running two versions of your sales page that are identical except including a short video at the top of one and don’t include one on the other. Which sells more?
Graphics – The graphics you use are very important too. Which graphics, such as buy boxes, buttons, lines, and colors, does your audience react to more? Do they like a large buy button or a smaller one?
Buy Box Information – The forms you create and the buy box you insert into your sales page should be exactly what your audience needs to encourage them to buy. How much information can you get away with collecting at the time of sale? Do they prefer checkmarks, or do they prefer another method of adding to the cart?
Payment Methods – If you have access to more than one payment method such as Amazon.com, Paypal.com, Stripe.com, and others, you should include them all to find out which one your audience is more likely to use to pay you? You may be surprised that all your audience isn’t using PayPal.com.
Price Points – Test out higher price points, as well as pay your own price ideas, monthly payments, and so forth: the more pricing methods and points you can test, the better. The truth is that this is one time that offering as many methods as possible increases sales over just allowing one way.
Product Name – Test out different names for your main product too. It’s amazing how one word can make all the difference when it comes to your audience understanding the solution they’re going to purchase and feeling safe to do so.
Traffic Sources – Knowing where your traffic originated is fundamental because you can then do more to get more traffic if you know you’re deficient in some areas and doing better in others.
Views – How many people come to your page and view it compared to other times when you’re not promoting anything?
New Visitors Versus Return Visitors – How many of your visitors are returning versus how many are original? When you get a new visitor, what do they do differently than a returning visitor once they come to your landing page?
Bounce Rate – A critical value is the bounce rate; this is how many people don’t view the site but click through and then leave immediately. This can be reduced by matching up inconsistencies in copy and targeting.
Time on Page – How long your visitors are spending on the page is indicative of whether they’re consuming the information you’re providing to them.
Conversion Rate – Out of your visitors, how many make a purchase or download the freebie?
Conversion Value – How much is your average sale at checkout?
Abandonment – How many visitors read the page, and then abandon it without buying, or even put things in their cart and don’t finish the purchase?
Cost Per Conversion – How much does it cost you for each lead to convert to a customer and purchase or download something? This is a figure you need as it will inform your marketing budget.
Creating a sales page that makes sales requires that you know your audience, understand your products and solutions, and your costs. Then you simply need to set up testing and tracking so that you can tweak and improve over time. Get it up, try out different versions, and then tweak and repeat. Over time you’ll start producing more effective sales pages for each new product due to your testing and tracking.