Make Your Sales Letters Compete Against Each Other
When you’re building niche sites or you’re writing sales letters which you’ll have data for later, you’ll want to follow the advice in this article.
As copywriters, our sales letters are like our children. We bring them into the world and we improve upon them until they get great conversion rates and make us proud parents. We can then leave them to make us some pocket change in perpetuity.
What we really need to do is throw our children in a pit and have them fight to the death to see which one is victorious.
Make Your Sales Letters Compete Against One Another
If imagery of your own children beating each other to death for your affection doesn’t inspire some sort of reaction within you, then you probably need to see a specialist.
It’s a much more dramatic way of saying, “Check your sales letters against each other and replace out poorer performing ones with ones which perform well.” That’s what we really want to do.
It’s something that I haven’t done until very recently. I’m a stickler for figures, so I have always known my conversion/sales rates for various items and sales letters. Intuitively, I always took stock of what performed well versus what didn’t.
What I haven’t done is simply removed an old review or sales page on one of my sites and replaced it with an entirely new one.
Let’s go through a made up example: Imagine you started a niche site, ostensibly reviewing but also selling Widget X. You write a sales letter a day, and you post it to your website. On Day One, you write a sale for Widget X1, the original widget which is popular all over the world.
It’s not popular on your website though. You get a few readers and maybe a couple of clicks. No sales. You don’t know where you’re going wrong, but you stick with your niche site.
Two months later, you’ve really gotten the hang of it. You find that writing your sales letters only takes an hour now where it used to take you two hours. More importantly, your site is building traffic and your sales letters are better. You get a hundred reads, ten clicks and five sales.
Obviously you’re onto a winner with this sales page, and we all love it when our kids are winners. So you look into it. You think back to when you started, and realise that your first page didn’t really have a specific audience in mind. This latest one had a very specific audience in mind, and that was the real difference. You make sure that you always write for that audience on that niche site from now on.
Most people will live and learn and leave it at that. What you should do is say, “Right. My old review just isn’t cutting it. Time to change it up.” Then you should rewrite your first article so it contains all the good points that your most successful article does. Then you see which one is better.
Ultimately, accounting for audience sizes/keyword search volume and the like, your sales pages should all perform equally well. If they don’t, then you need to think about why some perform better than others, and then make those changes.
By going back, you’re not only ensuring you’ll make more money, but you’re continually testing, upgrading and making more money from words you’ve already written. You’re also making sure your babies are fighting for you constantly. (I’m going to stop with that metaphor now.)
What To Change?
The beauty of this approach is that it’s just real-time, real-world split testing. You can work on the basic, obvious things:
- Structure
- Narrative (storytelling)
- Pacing
- Audience
- Language
But you can also go on to test out little micro-things that might make a big difference. Practically any psychological trigger works for this. The good thing is you don’t need to exclusively test for any of the micro-triggers. Whereas your sales page can only have one structure, you can include all sorts of things across several articles. Things like:
- Rhetorical questions
- Embedded metaphors
- Invoking fear or sadness (Don’t be evil!)
- Invoking a future scenario – and split testing multiple scenarios
- Different calls to action
- Different features and benefits
The beauty of all these things is that there’s not much tampering with the overall writing. This means editing in new things that work is not all that time-consuming. For instance, if I told you that starting each article with a rhetorical question would up your conversion rates, how quickly could you write a relevant question and stick it at the beginning of each of your articles?
Pretty quickly, I bet.
Final Thoughts
Once something is written, most people leave it behind. However, that’s not really the best course of action a lot of the time. You can make more money by writing entirely new sales letters or starting entirely new projects, but that’s hard work. Sometimes, you should go for the low hanging fruit by taking what you’ve learned recently and applying it to old projects which are otherwise underperforming or lying dormant.
If you do this, you’ll ensure your whole library of writings gets more valuable over time.