The Ultimate Sales Page Structure Guide That'll Help You Sell Anything

Launch Your Online Business in Just 7 Days

Trying to figure out how to create a sales page that converts in the absolute best way possible?


We can hear that “yes” from a few countries away, so we’re pleased to say that this is exactly what you're going to get by the end of this post.


Not only will we go over the different details of how to build a powerful sales page structure, but we’ll also provide examples and the perfect tool that’ll help you replicate the same results for you.


Ready? Set. Go!

Research will make or break your sales page structure

And that isn’t an exaggeration.


Research will help you make the right offer to the right audience, and if you want your marketing to succeed, that’s the recipe that’ll get you the most results.


On the other hand, if you neglect research, you’re bound to make 1 or more of these mistakes:

  • Having an unoptimized offer on your sales page that ends up being irrelevant
  • Not testing your own products/services from a customer’s point of view.
    Which prevents you from verifying your product in action
  • Not having clear objectives for your sales pages and losing sales
  • Not keeping up with industry standards and losing out to the competition
  • Failing to identify opportunities for including upsells, cross-sells, and downsells, thus, losing valuable opportunities to earn more revenue

So that begs the question . . .

How do you do proper research before building a sales page?

It’s surprisingly quite easy!


First, you need to know the search channels that you’ll use when doing research.


This area differs from niche to niche but you can always count on:

  • Google
  • Websites like answer the public
  • Interviewing your target audience
  • Checking out good + bad reviews about the competition
  • Joining relevant social media circles like Facebook groups, Reddit threads, and any other virtual place where your target audience might hang out

After that, you can then use this formula created by the seasoned internet marketer, Bob Serling:

  • Create a list of benefits, features, and facts your product or service has

For the uninitiated, features are the technical characteristics of your product or service, like how many miles your new e-bike can go for example.


On the other hand, benefits are what real-world impacts that features would make in the life of the buyer, like how your new e-bike will get them around the town all day without needing to charge.


The list you create doesn’t have to be organized, it doesn’t have to be pretty, just a simple page where you include everything about what you’re planning to offer on the sales page.


Next, pick and highlight the most important benefits, features, and facts that set you apart from everyone else.


This will prove very important for optimizing your conversion rates.

  • Get to know your audience
Traits to track when doing customer research

Traits to track when doing customer research

Create your buyer persona early on, and let it be a compass when you’re coming up with a sales page design.


Use it, and you’ll never stray far away from your end goal.


Because you can have the most powerful product ever, but if you don’t know whom to sell it to . . . you’ll fail.


Think about it, how are you going to get paying customers without knowing the audience who is looking for your unique value proposition (UVP)?


If you don’t know who’s willing to pay for your product, do you really think it’s going to be a huge success when you launch it?


Furthermore, understanding your target market will allow you to speak their exact language, which is more critical than you may think.


For example, if you’ve got a technical product and you’re targeting advanced users — numbers, facts, and use cases will be your best ally on a sales page because they suit the target audience you’re after.

  • Set the objectives after research

Before writing your sales copy, ask yourself these questions:

1. What goals should this sales letter or page achieve to be successful?

2. What are the pain points you’re solving for your target audience?

3. Is the UVP good enough that you’ll stand out from the crowd with it?

4. Are the potential buyers getting at least exactly what you’re promising?

5. What guarantees, bonuses, and freebies are you planning to offer?

After having clear answers written down — even if you’re creating your first sales page ever — reaching this point means you’re on track to creating a great sales page for your product or service.


Now for the exciting part: you’re ready to create sales pages that are tailored to your own business, let’s find out how.


Shall we?

Using research results to write sales copy that converts

The first thing you’re going to do is understand the difference between sales pages and landing pages.


A landing page is a web page that your web traffic “lands” on after visitors click on any type of ads you’re running with the goal of getting leads.


So for example, if you’re running ads and sending traffic to a squeeze page, that page is also considered a landing page.


A sales page, on the other hand, serves a distinct purpose — selling your product or service to prospective buyers.


With that in mind, we’ve featured one of our high-converting sales pages that we used to generate thousands of dollars as an example, we’ll call it the A page for the sake of referencing during the post.


(Note that the A page won’t apply to all of the tactics we’re going to discuss due to its specificity)

The headline — Get viewers to click/read

That’s the only goal your headline really serves, grabbing the attention of the target audience and getting them to click or to continue reading.


One of the most effective ways to write a headline is for it to display its biggest benefit.


Here’s the headline we opted for on our A page:

Systeme.io's Headline

It delivers exactly on the UVP we were trying to convey — offering a 30% discount on an annual subscription.


So ask yourself, what’s the thing that makes your product or service better than anything else?


Got it? Great, now it’s time to word it correctly in your sales copy.


Do that by keeping it just long enough to deliver the promise or your UVP completely. No more. No less.


It’s that easy.


Here’s a pro tip: always write your headline before you write a sales page, it’s always easier to make a promise first and then deliver on it than to deliver on it before making it.

The sub-headline — Show your audience that you know who they are

While not 100% mandatory, sub-headlines are great to show the readers that you understand who they are.


You could also add testimonials from 3rd party individuals or platforms — something like this would work fine:

“This course helped me get in shape with all foods being on the table!”


Randy Smith, CEO of Sleeping Inc

And by the way, if you don’t have existing customers that could offer your sales page testimonials, no worries, we’ll show you how to get them a bit later on in this post.

Body — Deliver on your headline

At this point in your sales page, all you have to do in the body section is to deliver on the promise/claim you’ve made in your headline.


- We know, easier said than done, right?


The best sales pages usually have a mix of benefits, features, use cases, and testimonials (which should have been gathered during your research).


Back to our A page, we displayed a box that has all the features of the systeme.io Startup Annual Plan:

Systeme.io's sales page

That choice was made due to the nature of our audience and how visitors were already on our email list before reaching the A page.

Showcase customer testimonials and other social proof

That’s because you’re going to need every bit of it.


Social proof affirms your value proposition and builds trust between you and the reader.


You want that trust to be built as fast as possible for potential buyers to even consider your product or service as a good candidate from the get-go.


That’s why you should opt-in to showing testimonials, ratings, and awards as soon as possible, either in your sub-headline or closely after it.


It’s not a good practice to leave testimonials for last on your sales page — the absolute worst thing you can do is to have your testimonials on external links that redirect prospects away from your sales page.


But what do you do when you’re just starting out and don’t have any social proof?


Easy! You can try out one of the following methods.

  • Invite experts in your industry

Source: Giphy.com

They get something to talk about and review, and you get their testimony — A win-win situation for everybody involved.

  • Give out freebies

Go out there, find your ideal customers, and offer them to try out your offer for free.


See what results the offer generates for them, and use that alongside their testimonials on your sales page.

  • Launch a Beta version

If you’re still developing your product, you can soft launch with a Beta version that gets a select number of people to try it out.


If the results/feedback turns out to be promising, then you can use it in your testimonials sections.


For instance, if you have an online business and your new online course is coming out soon, you need to:

1. Generate hype around it

2. Gather as much social proof as you can

3. Take constructive feedback for final edits

In this case, you can easily invite a number of people that are definitely interested in your course — because of the proper research you did — and ask them to go through the course for free.


And just like that, you have a new stream of testimonials to show off on your sales page!


Okay, so far you’ve got an attention-grabbing headline and you’ve established trust between you and the prospects via social proof. Then what?

Address their pain, then solve it

Remember how we said you should use your customers’ language to communicate with them directly?


Well, it couldn’t be more vital to use it than now.


Directly attacking the pain points — not the individuals who have them — will shock the prospects a bit of how much you understand them.


You need to show them that you understand what got them into this issue, and:

  • Introduce your online course as the solution
  • Re-affirm trust by showing how the online course worked for others — make sure to include real results and data alongside testimonials

Now you’ve got their attention and trust, they feel understood, your words are very relatable, and they know key things about your product — they are as excited as they can get to know about what you're exactly putting on the table.

Create the ultimate offer — Make it irresistible

If you’ve done all the steps right, and you’re sure you have a great product, then it's just a matter of making it as tempting and smooth as possible.


After the last step, proceed to show prospects the highlights of your product or service, mix the benefits and features that go together like:


Thanks to my 25 years of expertise in the industry with companies like Apple and Microsoft, I’ll teach you exactly how to make your next product a huge success.


The “feature” in that statement is getting taught by somebody who has the right experience, the “benefit” or promise is giving your product the best chance to succeed.


The next best thing you can do is to directly tackle any customer objections when you create sales pages.


Consider this: if you clear up all of your prospects' doubts and questions, what's left to prevent them from making a purchase?


The risk that you’re lying/you’re not a good fit for them, of course.


So you should follow up with a powerful guarantee that paves the way for a risk-free transaction like this:


You think you can’t get the same results as my previous students? I bet you can.

That’s why I’m giving you a 1-year guarantee for the course. If you don’t get the same or better results, then feel free to ask for a 100% refund.


See what we did there? We quickly eliminated the risk of the “deal” not working out for the prospect.


Don’t be afraid of returns. If you trust your product or service enough — which you should — then your sales will skyrocket and you’ll experience very few returns.


Most people won’t return a product after a few months of use, but you’ll definitely get a whole lot more of them to buy it!

Bonuses and a P.S to seal the deal

People love free stuff, so give them some with your new shiny product or service.


Jumping back to our A page, we used a captivating number of bonuses that no sane person would say no to:

Offering bounses on Sales Pages - Systeme.io

You can even include support as a free bonus.


If you buy the online course in the next 1 hour, you’ll get an exclusive perk, which is having me personally on a coaching call every week for 3 months!


And just like that, you’ve learned to create urgency with free bonuses.


Make sure to always include complimentary items with your product or service when creating sales pages.


One last thing to do in terms of your sales copy is to include a P.S that pushes anyone who has read this far on your sales page towards making a purchase.


You can use one of the following tactics:

  • A solid testimonial — “But don’t take my word for it, see what...”
  • Add more urgency — “Limited seats are available to join the course”
  • A hidden benefit — “Free shipping for the next 48 hours”
  • Book a call if they have more to ask (suitable for high-ticket offers) — “Want to talk? Sure, book a call at this link... “
  • Re-confirm awards, certificates, and expert reviews — “We’re trusted by tens of thousands of users”

So now you have solid copy for your sales pages, what’s next?

Crystal clear CTAs

Call to action or CTA statements are every statement pushing the traffic on your sales pages to take actions like making the purchase, downloading files, or signing up for subscriptions.


On sales pages, CTAs are buttons 99.9% of the time and they have distinct wording like “Buy Now” or “Sign Up”.

CTA in SalesPage - Systeme.io

You want your CTAs to be as clear as possible and that means:

  • Having a background color that’s different and consistent for all CTAs
  • They’re positioned right in places that make sense (like after benefits, features, and testimonials)
  • They’re optimized for mobile
  • As direct as they can be

Always have CTAs as outliers to the colors/elements behind them.


And since we’re on the subject of formatting and design . . .

Formatting your sales page is key for conversions

If you’ve implemented all/most of the steps mentioned in this post, you already have solid copy and a foundation that is setting you up for success.


However, we need to look at another part of the puzzle — the format and design of all the pieces you’ve been building.

Formatting the headlines and sub-headlines

You can have all the killer headlines in the world, but if they look something like this:

Bad headline formatting

Your conversion rate will struggle — scratch that, it won’t even exist if the format was this bad:

  • Bad fonts
  • Horrible use of colors
  • Abuses the exclamation mark!
  • Capitalization is horrendous

It takes up to 50ms for users to form an opinion about your online website . . .


A whopping 5% of a second is all it takes for someone to get a first impression of your online business.


Even if you had the best sales team and the best sales letter, almost nothing can make up for a bad introduction.


Here’s an example of how a headline should be displayed on any great sales page:

Good Headline example

On the first look, it looks clean, on the second, you’ll notice that:

  • It conveys the biggest benefit/promise of the sales page to a clear target audience
  • Has an easy-to-read font
  • Has a suitable color that fits the design but stands out enough
  • It’s big — pro tip: keep main headlines between 26px and 28px
  • Has proper headline capitalization

Keep all these points in mind when crafting headlines for your next sales page.

Formatting the body

Let’s put it this way, you’re killing your sales page if you use any font size less than 12px.


Here at systeme.io, we use 14px most of the time for standard body text on our sales pages.


For the type of font, just pick one that’s easy to read like Montserrat or Open Sans.


And for the colors, just play it safe and use ones that are pleasing to the eyes.


Always make use of white/negative space.


Notice how we used the white space on all sides of the content on our A page:

Using Negative Space in a Sales Page - Systeme.io

This helps make everything clearer, easier to read, and overall pleasant to the eye.


An extra note about the above picture: notice how condensing information into readable blocks makes your overall design look cleaner.


Don’t forget that you should highlight important statements/keywords in bold as well.

Including media and internal linking

Here’s a totally honest recommendation about internal links on sales pages: DON’T USE THEM.


The only way we may see it as acceptable to use internal links is when you’re upselling or cross-selling similar products or services — so if you decide on using them, keep the default formatting.


For media, here are the basic elements you’re going to have on your sales page:

  • Hero image — Not 100% necessary but can be used to subtly introduce benefits, features, and product infographics. Keep it simple
  • Gifs — For 90% of the time, you shouldn’t use them. Use gifs for explaining how a product/software/service works
  • Graphics and images — Think of them as supporting pillars to your sales letter. You can unload certain information in graphics/images to better explain something. Don’t overuse them
  • Videos — Perfect for introducing solid testimonials. NOT generic ones. They’re also a great way to show your product in action, display a demo, or serve as sales pitches

One note that can’t be overstated enough, make sure all these elements are optimized for mobile as more than 50% of your traffic is coming from mobile devices.


If you don’t, you’re basically pushing revenue away from your bank account, and that’s the last thing you want.

Both short-form and long-form sales pages work

We already mentioned how sales pages differ from landing pages, but did you know that not all sales pages are created equal?


There are 2 main types of sales pages:

In a nutshell, the short-form sales pages are your regular sales pages that you see all the time.


They pitch the product they’re selling from the start, throw in a couple of testimonials, and call it a day.


Short-form sales pages work best when your offer is:

  • Low cost
  • Simple
  • Marketed to an already educated audience

On the other hand, long-form pages are proven to help increase the conversion rate of offers that:

  • Require a commitment by the buyer
  • Are more complex
  • Marketed to a cold audience
  • Come with a high price tag

Put everything we’ve gone through in this post about the structure of your sales pages together, and you’ll get yourself a long-form sales page. It:

  • Has a headline and a sub-headline
  • Has social proof
  • Displays a mix between benefits, features, and use cases
  • Addresses customers’ pain points and shows them that you understand who they are
  • Pitches your offer as the solution to said pain points
  • Answers all customer’s doubts and fears
  • Eliminates all of the risks from the buyer’s side by offering guarantees
  • Offers bonuses and over delivers on what was promised in the headline

Use long-form sales pages whenever you’re offering something that has a price tag of $100 or more.

Look for examples of awesome sales pages in your niche

You should be an expert on what your competition is doing.


Because it’s simple, if they have a similar offer and their sales page worked for them, there’s a solid chance that it will work for you as well.


Now, we’re not saying copy the sales pages word for word, and straight up steal the design — No.


We’re saying you should draw inspiration from the competition’s sales pages when starting.


For example, say you're an ecommerce coach and planning on offering coaching calls, what would the structure of your sales page look like?


If you take a look at a competitor’s sales page and see this:

  • Low-quality images
  • Bad headline (Both format and wording)
  • Not optimized for mobile view
  • Walls of text
  • Dated info

You’d know that’s a terrible sales page.


They are not converting well. But if you take a look and see:

  • A clean headline
  • Good supporting images for the body text
  • Updated material
  • Optimized for mobile devices

You’ll know that it’s a good sales page, and it’s a good place to draw inspiration from.

Use everything you’ve learned today and go create a sales page with systeme.io

Systeme.io’s logo

Systeme.io’s logo

Systeme.io is a powerful all-in-one package built for creating, maintaining, and scaling sustainable businesses.


What does that mean to you?


It means that you can build sales pages with a drag-and-drop builder effortlessly, without any need for code or technical knowledge.


But it’s not just a sales page builder:

  • You get to create and sell products or courses in the same place
  • Use proven templates to accelerate the design process of your sales pages
  • Create membership sites to give exclusive or free access to members
  • Create A/B tests to see which sales pages are performing better
  • Tap into email marketing which has an insane ROI of $42 for each $1 spent
  • Create automation rules to automate your business

And much more!


For a business owner, writing sales pages is one thing, and designing their style on a website is another.


We showed you how to tackle the first one, and here’s how systeme.io makes designing your sales page a breeze:

1. After signing up — it’s free — you’ll be greeted with this dashboard

Systeme.io Dahsboard

2. In the menu, head to Funnels > Create > Name and choose the type of your funnel. We’ll choose Custom for this one

Creating a sales funnel in Systeme.io

3. In the funnel dashboard, create a new step > Name it > Choose “Sales Page” as the type of the page

Creating a sales page in Systeme.io

4. Next, choose one of the templates you like, they’re all free

Templates in systeme.io

5. You’ve got these icons and a handy link to control your page

Editing icons in systeme.io funnel dashboard

6. And voila! You’re now ready to edit your new sales page in the builder

Editing a template in systeme.io

But wait — we hear you saying — designing great sales pages can’t be that easy, what’s the catch?


You’re right, it’s not easy.


It takes time to build, test what works and what doesn’t, and optimize for conversions.


The real catch here is that you haven’t started yet!

Systeme.io’s pricing

Systeme.io’s pricing

Systeme.io’s pricing

Our pricing is straightforward, we offer 4 plans:

  • Free — Create up to 10 sales pages
  • Startup — $27/month, create up to 50 sales pages
  • Webinar — $47/month, create up to 300 sales pages
  • Unlimited — $97/month, create unlimited sales pages

Our Free plan is free forever, this is our risk-free guarantee to you.


If you already have an established business, we can migrate it to systeme.io in its entirety if you sign up for the unlimited plan or any of our annual plans (which are all offered at a 30% discount)


Pair all that with a superb customer support team that has an average response time of under 2-hours and it’s easy to see why people love systeme.io


Are you ready to write sales pages that will bring your life sustainable income? sign up today and let us help you every step of the way!

FAQs

Got questions?


We’ve got answers.

1. What’s a long-form landing page?

A landing page that describes everything there’s about a product, service, membership, or an online course with the goal of increasing conversions.

2. Is a long sales page better than a short one?

It depends on what you’re offering exactly.


A long-form sales page is more suitable for high-ticket offers that are more complex, and require commitment from the buyer.


On the other hand, a short-form sales page is more suitable for simple offers that don’t require much investment from the buyers.

3. How long should a sales page be?

There’s no set standard for how long a sales page can be.


The best advice is to make it long enough to achieve its objectives.


No more, no less.

4. Should I offer a money-back guarantee on my sales page?

Yes. That’s because a money-back guarantee will increase sales as it gives buyers assurance that if the deal doesn’t work out for them, they virtually have no risk.


Plus, it shows them how confident you’re in your product.

Conclusion

To wrap things up, here’s a neat summary of this post:

  • Doing the proper research before you create sales pages is crucial
  • Your sales letter or copy should include a powerful, clear headline
  • The body should quickly deliver on the promise/UVP of your headline
  • Using social proof is key to earning a prospect’s trust
  • Offer guarantees and eliminate any doubts or fears that readers might have
  • You should never neglect proper formatting and design
  • A sales page that has all the information about your offer is called a long-form sales page
  • You should look for inspiration from the competition

And don’t forget that systeme.io gives you the ability to not only write a sales page and give it an awesome design that converts, but to also do that for free.


So if you haven’t already, sign up today, we don’t ask for any card info.


Cheerio!

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