Ultimately, marketing comes down to sales on a larger scale. And Internet marketing is like marketing on a larger scale. To be great at digital marketing then, it pays to know how to sell something.
Thankfully though, you’re not going to be going around door-to-door but will rather be selling things remotely via sales pages and landing pages. This means using persuasive language, which is an incredibly valuable skill. This one chapter can make a massive difference to your sales and profits, so sit up straight and pay attention!
The Art of Persuasive Writing
Persuasive writing is copywriting that will go on your landing pages, squeeze pages and website. Likewise, it will live in your autoresponder sequences and your marketing. This is what will take your unknown product and turn it into something that your audience absolutely must have.
How do you do that?
Well a good place to start is with AIDA. This is a simple framework that many copywriters and marketers refer to when trying to sell a new product. It is an acronym for:
Awareness
Interest
Desire
Action
So in other words, you need to start by explaining what you have to offer and then move to why people should care, why they should want it and then how they can buy it.
The hardest part is the initial awareness, largely for the reason we discussed earlier – mainly that everybody is in a massive rush and no one has time to read something they weren’t initially looking for. Targeting your audience well using the countless techniques we’ve already discussed will help this to some degree.
What’s next though is to grab their attention and get them interested. And one way you can do this is by starting with a narrative.
If you look at other examples of landing pages, you’ll find that they often start in one of two ways: with a personal story by the ‘creator’ of the product (or their affiliate/copywriter, posing as the creator) or with a rhetorical question.
“I used to be just like you, stuck in a dead end job. I didn’t think there was any way out but that was before…”
“Have you ever thought there must be an easier way?”
In the first scenario, you create intrigue and get people to want to read that way. It’s incredibly hard to stop listening to a story without knowing how it ends and we are practically programmed to listen to stories all the way through to the end.
In the second scenario, the question forces a moment of reflection and that requires engagement and thought. Without doing anything major, you have created an interaction with the user that commits them to read further.
From here, you then want to focus on what we’ve discussed at several points throughout this book: the value proposition. Remember: the emotional element behind your product is what makes it sell, not the function of the product itself. You don’t sell hats, you sell warm heads (and hopefully stylish looks). This is what gets people excited and interested in your product beyond just the sum of its parts and it’s what leads to that all important step: desire.
Once you’ve generated that awareness, interest and desire in your buyer, you then need to get to the point where they just have to buy quickly. This way, you want to give them incentive to act quickly rather than to go away and think about it. Remembering that the emotional aspect is what drives most sales, you want to encourage an impulsive decision to buy rather than giving them time to realize they don’t need what you’re offering. This is called time pressure and it’s very powerful when used correctly. Time pressure can mean for instance offering a limited-time discount on your offer that will get people to act while the discount is available rather than risk going away only to find that they then have to pay more. The thought process here is that if they really want it, then it makes sense to buy now rather than think about it and miss the special offer. It gives them away to convince themselves into buying what they want while they want it. This is something we will come back to as well.
Time pressure creates urgency. A related concept is scarcity. Scarcity means that what you’re selling will run out and this has a double effect. When you use scarcity – the most simple expression of which is ‘while stocks last’ – you create urgency by suggesting your item will disappear but at the same time you also make your item seem more interesting and unique and even elite. If fewer people have something, it makes it rarer and this in turn makes it more interesting and therefore desirable. Who wants the same thing everyone else has, when they can have something completely new?
You can actually make your urgency and scarcity far more potent with a timer. If you visit some landing pages, they will actually have a clock ticking down until stocks last.
Of course you can then always come back with a ‘slacker campaign’ or a ‘last-minute reprieve’ for those who missed the boat the last time, which can be a great marketing opportunity in itself.
Persuasive Writing Techniques
The above should provide a basic structure and some general themes for your sales copy, from here there are then a number of other advanced techniques you can employ…
Be Agreeable
You want to get people to agree with you and to listen to you. One way to do this is by starting out with statements that they can definitely agree to. In neurolinguistic programming it is often claimed that if someone says ‘yes’ twice, they’ll be more likely to say yes a third time. Utilize this concept by building on ideas and facts:
Are you sick and tired of being out of shape? (Yes)
Have you given up on training techniques that just don’t work? (Yes)
Then you should use our amazing eBook! (YES! Wait, what?)
Building on facts also gives you more of an air of authority. I.e.:
Broccoli is green à Broccoli tastes nice à Our product is green à So you will like our product
Obviously this you use the process a little more subtly and elegantly than that, but you get the idea.
Likewise, you can also get people to agree with you by telling them what you want them to hear. Tell them that they’ve done incredibly well to make it as far as your website and that the mere fact they’re reading your pitch shows they’re leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else! If you were right about that, then you’re probably right about that amazing product…
Appeal to Authorities and Facts
In his favorite experiment on obedience, psychologist Milgram showed that people would do terrible things if instructed by a figure of authority. Put on a lab coat and people will listen to you, which is why so many health supplements are sold to us by ‘Drs’. It’s also why ‘Doctor Organic’ is a great brand name – because it implies authority without explicitly claiming it.
But what if you’re not a doctor and you don’t feel like lying about it? Simple – you just refer to someone who is. Look for a study or a quote from someone in position of power and demonstrate how it backs up your claim! You can also try doing your own research to prove that your product is great, you can’t argue with numbers (though of course we know they’re very easy to manipulate).
Use Social Proof and Social Influence
Likewise, you can also appeal to other buyers. Testimonials and reviews are great for showing that ‘real people’ like a product and also for making it look like ‘everyone is doing it’. We are greatly influenced by the society we live in and have a desperate desire to fit in. Often door to door salesmen will use this to their advantage by saying that ‘Dorothy down your road has this new TV deal and just loves it!’.
Ask your existing customers if they’d mind lending their name to some testimonials and put these up on your landing page – it can make a huge difference.
No Risk
Another thing you should always try to do is to mitigate the risk for your potential buyers. As a species, humans are highly risk adverse. This means we’ll go out of our way to avoid risk – often actually to our own detriment. For instance, if you can spend $5 to either lose $20 or gain $50, with a 75% chance of the latter, many people will feel emotionally compelled to stay safe and turn down the offer.
This should highlight how important it is for you to mitigate the risk for your buyers. And the best way to do that? That would be to offer
Reciprocity
Use Great Writing
Finally though, you need to use great writing that will really reel in the reader and encourage them to keep moving on to the next line. This writing should flow and should have no break points – it should feel like every sentence ends on an amazing cliff hanger that’s compelling and addictive to read.
You can try reading through your content to see if it accomplishes that both through its narrative structure and through the vocabulary, pacing and general writing ability. If you read and find a break point where your attention wanders even momentarily, then fix it.
If you aren’t a great writer and especially if English isn’t your first language, then you shouldn’t think about trying to write your own sales pitch as it will only end up putting your customers off. In this case, it’s more than worth outsourcing the process to a decent writer. This is one purchase with potentially huge ROI.
The Right Price
The next consideration is how you’re going to price your product. Of course this can have a huge impact on your revenue, turnover and profits.
But bear in mind that it’s not quite so simple as you may at first think. For instance, the idea that cheaper items will sell in greater volume does not always hold true. When you sell something very cheaply for example, this can often make it appear to be lower quality. Sell your eBook for $5 when the going rate is generally at least $35 and people might start to ask what’s wrong with that eBook. If you price something at a premium price meanwhile, you may actually make people want it more. The key is to find the happy middle ground.
Likewise, selling your eBook cheaply also removes any opportunity for sales and discounts that can help you to gain more attention.
And there is of course a balance to be struck between volume and profit margin. As you lower the price, you may get increased turnover resulting in increased profits. At some point though, this will lead to diminishing returns as you stop increasing sales enough to make it worth the decrease in profits. You can test this using split testing.
Advanced Techniques for Pricing
Penny Sales
A penny sale is one name for a sale that increases in price every time someone buys your item. So your item will begin at $1 say, and every time someone buys it, it will go up $1. This creates urgency and at the same time shows social proof as the high price point proves that people are buying it. The result is that it becomes highly in demand very quickly – and it’s also a bit of fun.
Contrast
Contrast is an interesting technique often used by store owners. The idea here is that you create contrast between the prices of your items by having your cheapest products listed right next to your most expensive products. Why does this work? Simple: it makes your most expensive items seem even more expensive and even more premium as a result – this must be the best of the best! Why would someone buy your cheaper product when for just $10 more they could have the very top of the range model? To a certain type of person who has to have the best, this is a great way to get them to spend that little bit more.
On the other hand though, having your slightly cheaper item listed next to the more expensive one, makes that seem like an even better deal. And going back to the idea of letting the prospect ‘convince themselves’, this lets them feel as though they’re making the very savvy decision. ‘Well, I can’t justify the most expensive package, so perhaps I’ll just buy the cheaper option and save some money’. Of course they’re not really saving money because they’d never have bought anything in the first place if that product wasn’t there and cleverly priced.
Look at this way, show someone a $20 product that they like and they might say that they don’t have the money for it. But if you show them a $30 product, get them to want it, and then show them the $20 product as an alternative, you can then get them to buy when they otherwise wouldn’t.
This also plays into the whole idea of context when it comes to pricing. We tend to view pricing in terms of the context and become almost blind to deals and rip offs as a result.
So imagine you’re buying a house for $100,000 dollars. If someone says to you ‘actually, it’s $100,100’ you wouldn’t care and you’d be quite happy to pay the extra $100. But if someone was selling you a 50 cent apple and then turned round and said ‘it’s an extra $100’ then you’d laugh them out of their own store. As you can see then, incrementally increasing the price is a much more effective way of getting a little extra cash from a transaction versus jumping from nothing. In some ways, it’s almost worth introducing more expensive items just to help your cheaper ones sell!
Bundling
Bundling is very similar to contrast but has couple of minor differences. Essentially, this means grouping items together in order to create a more tailored offer, or dividing them apart.
So if you have 3 separate e-books, bundling might mean selling them in different combinations at different price points. They might be $20 each, but you could sell all three for $50 and have a special offer for $35 for two. Now people can mix and match to choose the precise product they want and they’ll feel like they’re saving money whichever choice they make. People also love getting items that are bundled together when they can, as it feels like they have a whole bounty instead of making a single purchase.
Exit Discounts
You know how you’re in a store haggling and when you leave, the seller shouts ‘Okay, $1!!’. This is basically an exit discount. This is a special type of pop-up that appears when the user tries to leave the page and provides an offer that they can’t refuse. It’s a great technique because it means you can capture the buyers who were just leaving, while at the same time getting full price from those who are wowed the first time. And no one needs to know… Until they find out at least, at which point you might face a bit of a backlash, so be careful with this technique.
Remarketing and Cookies
You can do some insidious things with cookies (a file downloaded from the Internet behind the scenes) and this is an idea that many shoppers are wise to now – but only when it comes to holiday deals (for some reason!).
If you’ve ever been shopping for a package holiday and noted the price, you might have found when you came back to the site, that it cost you most than it did before. This is because a cookie was logged on your computer, indicating your interest and marking you as a prospect rather than a lead.
You can do the same on your website in a variety of ways. For instance, Google uses something called ‘Google Remarketing’ which lets you use your AdWords and AdSense campaigns to draw previous visitors back to your site and to show them tailored content (such as discounts). You can also use this technique the same way that the holiday websites do, by increasing the price for people who have checked your site back a couple of times.
Bonus: Over Delivering
Over delivering is something you do after you’ve made the sale, but it’s a great strategy because it can help to increase brand loyalty, generate more good reviews and encourage good will.
Basically, this means that you ‘under promise’ such that you can exceed expectations with your final product. So instead of saying your estimated delivery is ‘1-2 days’ and then taking 2 days for the item to arrive, you say ‘2-3 days’ so that when it arrives in 1 day, the buyer will be incredibly impressed and happy. It could also mean including a freebie inside your packaging – and if you’re savvy then you’ll make that a promotional item like a branded t-shirt so that you can build more brand awareness as a result.
People love being surprised and it makes them feel like they’re getting better value for money. As such, they’re more likely to buy from you again and more likely to recommend you to others.
Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income recommends a really great way to over deliver on eCourses and digital products – by including a personal message that has been recorded by you, thanking the person who bought from you by name. It would take a couple of seconds, but the fact you went to that trouble would leave an amazing lasting impact on your buyer, leading to much better brand loyalty and much better reviews.
