Fired Up and Focused Bootcamp: Day 14

The Founder of Copy Hackers, Joanna Wiebe Shows You
Why You Should Land Your Sales Emails on Long Form Sales Pages

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TRANSCRIPT

Hello. Joanna here from Copy Hackers. Today, we are going to be talking about everybody’s second favorite topic after sales e-mails: the landing pages for those sales e-mails. Now, your job in the sales e-mail is to get people to click through to your landing page. That’s really what you’re trying to do with your sales e-mail. It’s great to get them to want to click through, not to manufacture clicks by hiding important information and things like that, unless that’s something you’re doing really strategically, but rather to give them enough of the T’s and enough of a taste that they want to click through to your landing page.

It’s your landing page’s job then to satisfy all their expectations, which is not exactly a small task. That’s why we have different types of landing pages for sales e-mails. You don’t have to use a long-form sales page as your landing pages for your sales e-mail. You can use really nicely design kind of hybrid sales page that I can go along way where it looks a lot more short-form but it incorporates some of the best parts of long-form, really enticing cross-heads and other things like that.

Now, I’m not going to talk to you today about those kinds of pages. It could really take a lot of what you’ve learned from on bounce of a kickoff labs, so far about landing pages and what you’re constantly learning anyway about it. If you want to do a short landing page for your sales e-mail, there’s lots of ways to go about doing that.

This is about optimization. If you want to optimize that sales process where you’ve already done a lot of the work to get more subscribers to drip out better stuff to them and to then try to move them from being a subscriber to a paying customer, you’ve done all that work. Now is not the time to stop doing the work. Now is not the time to pullback on optimizing. Now is the time to really open your mind to long-form sales pages.

Now, I have a whole book that covers this and it’s definitely my most intense book at Copy Hackers. You’re welcome to check that out if you have already fantastic. If you have what you have and implemented it, then this will hopefully help you. If you’re just new to the world of long-form sales pages, great. Let’s talk now about the top things you need to know and do to make your landing page that you land those important sales e-mails on so that they’re more likely to cover off all the objections, to delight people, to make it feel your product is … to make your solution look just as fantastic as it is by which we’re really getting into, demonstrating it and doing things like listing out everything that went into building yet.

What makes such a powerful solution? Why this is the right solution for them? Checking off every box, that’s what a long-form sales page will often, when it’s done right at least do. Let us take a look now on some of those. Right now, you are looking at this long strip of, what is that? It’s just this little graphic. What it is is an image of the recent long-form sales page that I created and used for the Conversion Copywriting Course.

This is one of a handful that I used. Just you’d want to tailor your e-mail, you’ll often want to tailor at least the opening part of your long-form sales page based on who’s arriving, how new they are to the concept that you’re trying to sell here. If it’s a product of some kind or a course or a service or something like that. How much they know about it should be an important part of you writing that page at all.

Long-form sales pages as you can see go quite long. That’s the idea, but they don’t have to go long. They should only go as long as they need to go to convince your audience at that moment in time that your solution is right for them. If they had come back and opened your e-mails a couple times and click through, and you know they have seen this page already a few times, then you will probably want to make sure that when you send let’s say, the final e-mails to them to try to get them to convert if they haven’t already, that you land them on a page that gets more quickly to the point, because they’ve already seen you overcome a lot of their objections.

You won’t always need a page to be this long. Indeed, this is how long it can be. We’re going to zoom in a little bit here. Here we are at the top of the page and we can see that we’re using a video sales letter here. You’re welcome to use a video sales letter and when you do, you don’t have to use a full sales letter like I did here. You can focus all of your efforts on that video sales letter itself and then really focus more on calls to action below that.

My audience is looking to read more than they are to watch. I like to combine both where we have a video sales letter for those people who want to watch that, who don’t want to read and who want to be able to fast-forward through things and stuff like that. Then we have of course the actual copy below it that is there to get people who want to read.

Now there are a lot of ways that you can go with your landing page for your sales e-mails. A lot of things that you should be thinking about. One of the big ones that I want you to takeaway is that when you’re working with long copy, you’re really working with the power of a narrative. You’re in the first person, you’re talking about something that happened or could happen or is likely to happen in a way that’s meaningful for your reader.

It’s one to one. You are sharing a story with them. This isn’t your brand story. This is one of a handful of stories that I broken out into genres. You may be familiar with this if you’ve read my book on long-form sales pages. Those are a handful of ways that you can start thinking about how you might begin writing a long-form sales page, really beginning the work of it is the hardest part, but that doesn’t mean you should begin with that opening. What I recommend you to do for most landing pages is start with the point at which you hope people will be converting and that’s really if you have your first called action on your long-form page or in any page, is really the point that you’d want to begin around.

I find this extremely helpful when I’m writing along from sales page because it focuses you on the goal rather than letting you start with the beginning of this wild story that could actually go on for endless numbers of pages which doesn’t work like it once did, because we’re online, we’re not in print. We can take a lot of the best of long-form sales letters and apply it to pages but we don’t have that captive attention that you would have when a mail, a piece of mail come in to your mailbox and you would stand there and read it and actually hold the paper and not necessarily have quite as many distractions as we have today around us.

Start writing by starting with your called action or your plans and pricing table that you might have on your sales page. Start there and then work out. In this case, I started with what we’re looking at right now with the plans that I knew I was going to be selling. Starting with this called action and then working backwards. What do I need to do? What do I need to say to get people interested? If I only had the space around this called action to actually write in, what would I say there.

You needed important headline. This one is probably formatted right now because I’ve been playing around with my formatting a bit for that introductory text. You do need an engaging headline that should match the called action essentially, the called action that you had in the e-mail that drove people here. That’s more of message matching as we’ve heard about already in this course.

You can start to put more calls to action up above the fold for those people who are returning visitors and actually know that this is what they want. It can also be very helpful to have a timer or countdown tool on your long-form sales page as well. We want to use cross-heads. That’s what this orange … in my case, they are orange so they can be any color you’d like. They’re really headlines or subheads that are really powerful. They should be able to read together.

Recent copy tests I’ve run for my clients have led to, that’s engaged and that’s pulling people in than leading down to because your message is what sells. Smart copy almost always leads to test wins. We increased paid conversions on his homepage by a whopping 51% . Down, it’s about finding a process, proving it works and repeating it.

If you were to read only those cross–heads, you would just to get the just of it on the same way that you might only see those things on a short-copy page. We just flashed out what we’re talking about with the stuff that goes in the middle. A few more tips, “Use images.” People like seeing images. It’s great to have arrows, especially pointing to different parts of your copy. It’s good to have captions on those images, and the caption doesn’t always have to be a little line of text below the image.

It can also be something like this where you’re getting people to read and think about what they’re seeing in that image. Again, adding more arrows here especially when you just have a block of text which is what we had here and we did some scroll tracking and we saw people were going right pass this area, we added this and they started to slow down there and pay more attention. It really goes a long way to add some arrows in.

That’s your introduction to long-form sales pages. I know that I’m scratching the surface but we’re here just to try to get you to start writing along from sales page. Landing page tools like on-bounce have long-form sales pages as themes that are built in, so you can go there and start experimenting with that especially we’ve already setup an on-bounce account.

Otherwise, you can find really great themes online that are designed to help you make really effective long-form sales pages. You don’t have to go crazy with it. You just have to have this in your back pocket for when you’re ready to launch that campaign that we were talking about the other day that was your assignment to start thinking about and put in your calendar. If you’ve done that and you’re starting to think, “Okay, we’re going to write these e-mails, were we going to land those people?”

I hope you’re taking away that you need to have the right landing page for the different things that your visitors are going through. This is one case where if you want to make the sale, really give it a shot. Try doing a long-form sales page.

Okay, well, that is it for today. Good job. I hope that you take the assignment seriously today and that you work on it not only today but over the coming weeks and revisit it whenever you’re ready to do a promotional campaign of any kind. Have a great day!

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