How to Write Effective Sales Copy That Converts

Looking to increase your sales?

Who doesn’t? Improving your sales copy can boost your bottom line and help you succeed in today’s ultra-competitive online markets.

Your sales copy is your best chance to showcase your offerings to potential clients. If your sales pages are not converting, you’re losing money. Even if you spend your entire marketing budget, you still won’t notice any difference.

Read on to find out what techniques boost conversions in this guide on how to write effective sales copy.

Understand Your Goal

Before you write a word, you have to define your sales goal. What are you trying to sell? What do you wish to achieve?

Obviously, your goal will have something to do with you making more money, but you have to be more specific.

Are you writing a funnel page? Are you improving existing copy? Are you creating e-commerce product descriptions?

Your sales copy must align with your marketing strategy and your branding goals. You have to be consistent and direct, otherwise, your copy will lack the impact to generate sales.

Understand Your Audience

With your goal in mind, you now have to realise who you’re talking to. Depending on what you want to sell, you will have to target different demographics at different places.

Who is likely to be interested in your products or services? The answer to this question might be harder than you think. To find out who your audience is, you need to construct a buyer persona.

A buyer persona is a fictional but plausible person who represents your ideal customer. You can have more than one buyer persona interested in your offerings. By identifying how that person gets their information and how they decide to buy, you will be able to write effective sales copy.

To build a buyer persona, you will have to leverage data from your analytics and social media pages. If you don’t have enough to build a complete picture, consider sending out customer surveys or asking your existing customers through your newsletter.

Find Your Value Proposition

Now that you know who your ideal customer is, it’s time to craft your value proposition. This is the core of your offer and will feature in the headline.

Your value proposition states what your customers should expect when buying your product. It needs to be simple, concise, and powerful. It has to entice readers to dig deeper and convert into paying customers.

The value proposition should solve problems, improve life, and generally offer an undeniable benefit. The value proposition is not a full list of features and benefits. These can wait.

Ideally, you will want a single, powerful sentence to serve as the cornerstone of your sales copy. It’s a good idea for your value proposition to align with your marketing plan.

For example, if your brand offers kitchen equipment, your marketing slogans should include your value proposition. The value proposition should outline the benefits of your equipment to homeowners.

Explain Features and Benefits

This is the meat and potatoes of your sales copy. Explaining the features and the benefits of your offering is what will influence your customers most.

Note that benefits and features are not one and the same thing.

Features include all the characteristics of your offering. For products, the features include all physical features and functions that your product can perform. For services, they include specific services you provide as part of your offerings.

However, benefits are more valuable. These include every life improvement your customers can expect from buying your products or services. Benefits are the ways customers can use the features of a product to solve a problem.

Knowing how to write effective sales copy is all about explaining both features and benefits to your audience.

For example, if you’re selling custom toys, you will have to list all the physical features of each toy. These include size, weight, colour, and other parameters. When it comes to benefits, you will have to relate to the aforementioned features and describe how children will enjoy playing with your toys.

The principle is the same, whether you’re selling toys, cars, kitchen appliances, or massage services. You have to list the features and then tell your audience how they translate to benefits.

Find Your Unique Selling Proposition

Sure, you might have amazing products and services, but what makes them different from your competitors’ offers?

Your unique selling proposition is how you differentiate your offerings from everything else on the market. In order to stand out, you have to offer something that customers can’t quite find anywhere else.

Some companies focus on unbeatable prices and ironclad guarantees as their unique selling propositions. Others offer unique features or highlight benefits that no competitor have thought about before.

Keep in mind that standing out too much can harm your sales. When considering your unique selling proposition, always keep in mind your average buyer personal. Will they love your proposition, or will it turn them off?

Answer Questions

Effective sales copy answers questions. Potential customers are seeking out your offerings to solve one or more problem they might have. They’re more likely to buy if you clearly answer their questions and ease their worries.

Most long sales pages and e-commerce pages have a dedicated FAQ section where you answer all major concerns a customer might have. Giants like Amazon are doing it with their products, and so should you.

When a visitor arrives on your website, they will be worried about the quality and actual benefits of your offerings. It’s up to you to identify those worries and address them in your FAQ section.

For example, if you’re selling clothes, you’ll have to give precise answers about the size and fit since most of your customers will be worried about that.

Go Long

While e-commerce pages need short copy to work, if you are selling a complex service or a unique product, you might have to write a long-form sales page. This gives you the space you need to describe all benefits in detail.

Long-form sales pages give you many opportunities to persuade visitors to buy. They also allow you to answer any questions and list detailed FAQs.

Long form sales pages also benefit your SEO efforts. With longer copy, you can use more keywords and tell Google as well as your visitors what your offering is about.

However, you should never fill up your sales page with boring fluff. Be concise and stay on point. If you say all you have to say, then wrap the page up and don’t push for more words.

Integrate Media

Depending on what you’re selling, you might want to integrate video or audio media to your sales page. This will give your sales copy an extra layer of oomph to turn leads into buyers.

Most long sales pages feature one or more videos. When integrating videos, try to make them pausable so people can keep reading your page if they decide to stop watching the video. Non-pausable videos lead to higher bounce rates.

Call to Action (CTA)

To wrap up your sales copy, you should package your value proposition into powerful calls to action. You can feature these CTAs across your sales copy to urge your visitors to purchase.

CTAs should be honest and direct. In many circumstances, a single CTA towards the end of the sales copy will do the trick. In long sales pages, you might need different CTAs at different points through the copy.

Technical Considerations

Finally, you have to take care of some technical issues. Long sales page with lots of videos take longer to load, which will affect bounce rates and SEO ratings.

Also, you have to make you’re your sales copy is mobile friendly since today more than 50 percent of all users access the Internet from their smartphones.

Now That You Know How to Write Effective Sales Copy…

The power of your sales copy cannot be overstated. Knowing how to write effective sales copy can make or break your marketing and advertising efforts. Here at Optimise & Grow, we aim to achieve real results for our clients.

Our goal is to streamline business processes, including driving traffic, increasing conversions, boosting sales, enhancing customer experience, and automating lead generation.

Instead of offering a one-size-fits-all solution, we tailor each plan to each customer’s unique needs. From freelancers looking to build a sustainable business to existing companies seeking to expand online, we have helped countless people realise their online goals.

Contact us and find out how we can help you optimise your sales pages and grow your business online! Send us a message now.

Strategic Optimisation + Growth consultant for lean start-ups and change-making entrepreneurs enabling them to grow their business in a sustainable and profitable way. My super-powers are business optimisation, CX, SEO, and leveraging data insights for business growth. #fuelledbycoffee

Originally published at optimiseandgrowonline.com.au on November 18, 2018.