Since 2004 I have been helping people to sell online. I specialise in writing hype-free sales copy that works powerfully to build trust. And because my low-key style of sales copy is believeable, it causes customers to respond.
In fact, one of my clients tells me his website is on track to turn over more than $12m during 2009. And he expects to be selling $100m worth of products online within three years.
These kind of results make me feel both excited and humble. On the one hand, it’s immensely satisfying to see that my hard work has paid off so well for my clients. But I also realise that I am working alongside some amazingly talented entrepreneurs and marketers, and it’s their marketing brains, in combination with mine, which have achieved such results.
Hardly anybody is paying enough attention to the WORDS on their websites
This week, a business owner contacted me because he was spending a large amount on Google advertising and getting virutally no response from his website. He wanted me to redesign his site.
I had a look at his website and immediately told him not to waste his money getting it redesigned. The site looked fine as it was. The main reason for his poor response was very clear to me.
At the top of his home page, the ‘headline’ read:
Welcome to (company name)
Yawn … click away. The truth is, unless your website headline grabs your visitor’s attention, 80% of them won’t read any further.
I suggested the first thing he should try is a new headline. We came up with a few headlines and decided to test them for a couple of days each, while continuing to run the same Google ads.
We put the first new headline up, and he emailed me excitedly the next day to say he had got 7 leads off the site that day. (That might not seem like a huge number but he had previously been lucky to get 1 lead per day – and each lead in his industry is potentially worth quite a bit of money).
The second day, we added an exclamation mark after the headline, to test it. This resulted in 8 leads the next day!
This is a classic example of the power of WORDS in selling online. Most business owners don’t understand this. As a result, the number of inquiries and sales coming in off their websites is abysmal. Read more …