Building a website can be simple, but building an effective website is a whole different topic. To be effective a website must achieve its goal – too many, though not all, this goal is a financial objective of generating sales (or perhaps, leads). Either way, that goal is very definitive and quantifiable and is referred to as a conversion. If you sell a product, a conversion occurs when a customer initiates and completes a sale. Now, many potential customers will come to your site, but only some of them will become conversions. One of the prime focuses that you should have on your business is doing everything humanly possible to increase those conversions and the conversion rate. The single most effective way to do this is to improve conversions through copywriting.
In order to explain this concept further, let’s define an example of a company that sells a digital information product via a standard opt-in protected sales page. An opt-in page is merely a teaser page that has just enough information to hopefully get the prospective client to enter their name and email address into an optin box. The purpose of this page, often times called a “squeeze” page, is to capture the email address of that prospect so that you can continue to market to them via email even if they do not purchase at this time. Okay, back to the example. In order to make this all clear, we need to attach some numbers. So, let’s say that out of 1000 people that we send to our squeeze page each day, 140 of them “opt in” and continue on to our sales page. Then let’s say that of those 140 that see the sales page, 15 of them purchase the product. That would equate to a 1.5% conversion rate, or, out of 1000 people 15 will become customers or conversions.
As any business knows, the key to revenue growth and expansion is efficiency. Taking the example above, let’s assume that the traffic (the 1000 potential customers) cost $1 each for acquisition cost via Google PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. That means that in order for this campaign to be profitable you would have to generate more than $1000 worth of income in a mere 15 sales. Now, if the information product sells for $77, then this campaign would make approximately $150 a day. So, what would be the best approach (the most efficient) to increase that revenue? From a business perspective, ideally, you would want to find a way to increase the number of conversions for the same amount of money spent. What if instead of 15 sales you generated 20 sales (a mere 0.5% increase in the conversion rate) for the same $1000 in ad revenue spent? That increase would take a $150 per day campaign to a $500 per day earner. That is more than $180,000 in annual revenue – conversion rates are crucial.
The single most effective way to increase your profitability is to improve your conversions through copywriting. Copywriting is an art form that few are gifted enough to fully understand. The power of the spoken or written word to influence people to take action is absolutely incredible. Until you between split testing various sales letter modifications, you will likely not believe that statement. A split test, for those that aren’t familiar, involves testing two variations against each other. The important thing about split testing is that you only make one change at a time so that you can determine the impact of that change. As an example, on your sales page, you would want to create two different attention grabbing titles to the sales page and split test them. The way to do this is simply have two separate web pages and split your traffic evenly between the two and then allow some time to pass for ample data to be collected. You then can look at the data from the two pages and will find one of three results. Either page A outperformed page B, vice versa, or there was no real difference in the conversions between the two variations. That is split testing in its simplest form. Keep in mind you must be doing conversion tracking – you have to know the numbers to improve them.
Copywriting is very easy to split test and can have a huge impact on your conversion rate. It is very possible to double your conversion rate through iterative improvements to the copywriting on your sales page. In fact, sometimes one simple and single change can, in and of itself, double your conversion rate. That is why a skilled copywriter makes a very handsome income – many charge $2,000 to $5,000 or more for a single sales page; the elite may charge as high as $25,000. Now, go back to that example from before. The most common thing that most businesses will do in that example to increase income, is increase their ad spend. They look at it and say “well, for every $1000 I spend I generate $150, so I guess I need to spend $4000 a day in advertising in order to meet our required profit threshold of $500 a day”. But as was illustrated before, simply improving the conversion rate and going from only 15 sales to just 20 sales – not a huge improvement, just a mere 0.5% enhancement – will have a tremendous impact on the net revenues.
As do many subjects in business, it all comes down to the numbers and math. There are several ways to improve copywriting, hiring a skilled professional is perhaps the best, but not the only approach. You can also find numerous courses online that teach you advanced copywriting skills so that you can improve your conversions through copywriting improvements. The most important lesson that you need to learn is that split testing is vital, not optional. A 1% improvement in conversions attributed to split testing in the example above would yield $127,000 more in annual revenue – small conversion increases can have dramatic impacts on your income statement. Thus, you can see why a skilled copywriter might get as much as $25,000 for a single sales page. In such a writer’s skilled hands, it is not uncommon to see conversion rates over 10%. So whether you choose to hire a sales copywriter or purchase a course and do it yourself, don’t forget to split test your alterations and continue to refine them. You should never stop testing. Once things stabilize, you may test less frequently, but you should still continue to try and improve your conversion rates and there is no more effective way to do that then via copywriting.
