Three simple questions your sales pages need to answer
When it comes to websites, sales pages are often overlooked. Home pages get all the attention and design love, ‘about’ pages get all the storytelling magic, but sales or ‘our services’ pages push people away.
Content design is key. If people click through to explore your services, it’s fair to assume that they’re interested in learning about your offer. They do want to read more, but that doesn’t mean they’ll automatically be ready to digest a wall of text. White space, headings, clear messages, reassuring structure, and a logical flow all matter on sales pages.
Switching tone is a common trap that businesses fall into when it comes to writing their sales pages too. All the friendly customer focused language you’ve woven into the home page gets replaced by business speak. One minute you’re offering design that will get them noticed, and the next it’s all spiky 360 branding solutions and market leading customer acquisition strategies.
But even more than bad business jargon, the mistake I see most often is just not being clear enough on what you’re actually selling. Your service pages need to lead your customers through a conversation that answers these three questions.
What’s the real life problem you are solving?
What are you selling?
How do I buy it?
Those three in a bit more detail.
Solve a real problem
Sales pages need to continue the same conversation you started on the home page. Launch straight into your suite of products or services and you’ll disorientate your potential customer. And seeding confusion is the quickest way to get someone to switch off. Instead, use the same customer focused language to frame the service. How is this product or service going to make your customer’s life better? What’s the real life problem you’re solving? By this I mean, people don’t necessarily want a 'robust lead generation pipeline,' they just want their phone to ring more often.
Be clear what you are selling
Sales pages are the place for facts and details. Don’t assume people know what you do. Spell out what you’re selling.
And if you’re selling a service, specify how you’ll deliver it. Walking people through your process helps them imagine working with you, and that’s a key step on the path to making a sale.
It’s okay to use your internal lexicon here to name the stages in your process, as long as you spell out what you mean. You might think everyone knows what ‘discover’ or ‘explore’ or means, but they might not. And they definitely won’t know what you mean by it if you don’t tell them. So clarify how you deliver your ‘discover’ phase. Workshops or customer research? Surveys or interviews? How long will it take? How many people are involved?
You don’t have to write an essay. Be succinct here but do spell it out.
Tell people how to buy it
Make it clear how your potential client can buy from you. If you want them to schedule a call, say so, and put the ‘get in touch’ link on the page. If there’s a pre-qualifying exercise you’d like them to do before you speak to them, tell them. Hopefully your clear and customer focused page has got them excited about the prospect of working with you, so make the next step feel easy and natural too.
Start here
Look at your pages with those three questions in mind, and reshape the pages so that they clearly answer them. If you think your sales pages do answer those three questions, and they're still not converting, take a step back.
Get some outside help - it's really hard to see your offer from a customer's point of view so an independent perspective could be helpful and just what you need to help you tweak the pages into shape.
Or might be that you need to reframe your whole offer entirely. By that I mean the sales pages could be doing the best they could, but you're not actually selling what your customer wants. Some time spent on customer research, listening to your customers' challenges and focusing in on where you're uniquely placed to help, will help you create services and packages that people want to buy.
