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!
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:
So that begs the question . . .
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:
After that, you can then use this formula created by the seasoned internet marketer, Bob Serling:
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.
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.
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?
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)
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Source: Giphy.com
They get something to talk about and review, and you get their testimony — A win-win situation for everybody involved.
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.
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?
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:
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.
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!
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:
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:
So now you have solid copy for your sales pages, what’s next?
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”.
You want your CTAs to be as clear as possible and that means:
Always have CTAs as outliers to the colors/elements behind them.
And since we’re on the subject of formatting and design . . .
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.
You can have all the killer headlines in the world, but if they look something like this:
Your conversion rate will struggle — scratch that, it won’t even exist if the format was this bad:
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:
On the first look, it looks clean, on the second, you’ll notice that:
Keep all these points in mind when crafting headlines for your next sales page.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
On the other hand, long-form pages are proven to help increase the conversion rate of offers that:
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:
Use long-form sales pages whenever you’re offering something that has a price tag of $100 or more.
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:
You’d know that’s a terrible sales page.
They are not converting well. But if you take a look and see:
You’ll know that it’s a good sales page, and it’s a good place to draw inspiration from.
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:
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
2. In the menu, head to Funnels > Create > Name and choose the type of your funnel. We’ll choose Custom for this one
3. In the funnel dashboard, create a new step > Name it > Choose “Sales Page” as the type of the page
4. Next, choose one of the templates you like, they’re all free
5. You’ve got these icons and a handy link to control your page
6. And voila! You’re now ready to edit your new sales page in the builder
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
Our pricing is straightforward, we offer 4 plans:
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!
Got questions?
We’ve got answers.
A landing page that describes everything there’s about a product, service, membership, or an online course with the goal of increasing conversions.
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.
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.
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.
To wrap things up, here’s a neat summary of this post:
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!
Other related posts about sales pages:
Download the book
Get this free guide
The New System to Launch
an Online Business
What you'll learn:
We HATE spam. Your email address is 100% secure
PRODUCT
© systeme.io. All rights reserved.
© systeme.io. All rights reserved.