Today what we’re going to talk about is writing copy that sells – namely writing sales letters and sales videos. Here’s the reason why, so last week we talked a lot about lead generation. We talked a lot about lead funnels and bringing people into your world so that you’re able to market to them through email, through automation, through all of those ways that we tried to market to them.
This convo will be loosely based on this article on writing sales letters that convert…
Especially when you can’t meet with somebody face to face. My specialty really is in helping companies create inbound marketing flows, inbound marketing channels. You don’t ever have to do cold calling, you don’t ever have to do cold email if you have the right automated system that is bringing people to you day in and day out. That’s the idea of an automated inbound marketing sales funnel.
At the end of the day, that’s what we want. We want people to come in and give us their email addresses, and fill in an application or buy something or whatever. What we’re going to talk about today is this idea of sales copy.
This is an article that we wrote quite a couple of years ago, but basically, this is kind of going to be the basis of what we’re going to talk about today. So the first thing I want to cover is our sales assets. What we do when we are creating sales material, sales content, it comes as a number. It comes in a number of different shapes and sizes. The first is any written word that you write needs to have some sort of sales psychology and sales connotation to it. It has to.
You have to sell people, so your emails should be written in a way to move somebody closer to the thing you want them to do, which is buying something from you. Now your emails, your web pages, your landing pages, everything is written to insight an action. If it’s not written to insight in action, then it has no place being on your website because, at the end of the day, you were here to generate revenue. People come to your website looking for solutions for their problems. I mean, that’s literally what business is.
You have to move people in the direction of buying something from you. So that’s what your website does. Now, every page on your website needs to be written so that it is moving somebody closer to making a purchase decision.
However, there are a couple of pieces that are exceptionally important in this process. Anything sales-related, anything attached to a buy button, and add-to-cart button is super, super important. Writing copy that sells is a process – It needs to be architected in a way that basically makes people move through the sales copy and ultimately towards a purchase decision.
The webinars, sales videos, sales videos for your sales pages, and writing sales copy are what we call sales assets, sales material. Every single sales funnel has one of those assets. You literally cannot sell anything without having some piece of sales copy. You can’t just throw up a buy button and say, “Well, here’s a buy button. Maybe click it, maybe don’t, I don’t care. Whatever.” I mean, you’re not going to sell shit. That’s as simple as it is.
How does it work?
If you are promoting something that is $1,000 or more, a service, a product, a digital product, whatever, then you need to have a webinar. That webinar needs to move somebody through the buying cycle, through the buyer’s journey from being introduced to you and learning about you to delivering some content or value. Then ultimately, to buy something at the end, to transition into a sale.
If that sale is highly complex or highly expensive, then it needs to be sold on a sales call. If it is not complex or not expensive, then you can sell it from an add-to-cart button. So that’s the flow of a webinar.
Now the webinar needs to be 50 or 60 slides. Generally, if you have a very busy target market, then it’s going to be something that you can kind of shorten because people are busy. So they sign up, they sign up, they attend, whatever. So at the end of the day though, they move through this buyer’s journey online. Now on a sales video, so if it’s under a thousand dollars, then typically you need a couple of sales videos. You need a couple of ways to go about the sales process.
Sales videos
The sales videos on the sales page, need to be shorter. So oftentimes you’re going to find sales videos when you’re selling a book, when you’re selling a free plus shipping offer, when you’re selling something lower tickets and easier to understand, digital product, a couple of hundred bucks, a hundred bucks, $47, $12, whatever, it doesn’t matter.
But when it’s easy to understand and when it’s a lower ticket, then the sales video itself is kind of this little mini self-contained salesperson that is literally just chilling there waiting to sell people all fricking day long. That’s its goal. That’s what a sales video does. Now, sales videos, between four to six minutes is ideal. Now some people are like, “Whoa, but my videos are only 60 seconds,” whatever, makes them longer.
They need to go through, you need to go through a buyer’s journey and there’s a couple of things that you need to understand in terms of writing copy. The first is you need to know your audience, writing copy that sells, whether it’s writing a sales video or whether it’s writing a webinar.
You have to know who it is you’re marketing to. So you need to know what their fears are. You need to know what problem they are looking to solve, their motivations are and why they are seeking a solution. Now, this is never, ever, ever, ever more important than it is right now because everybody is scared.
Everybody has these deep-seated emotions. Everybody is wondering what the fuck to do tomorrow, and next week, and the next month, and how their situation, their problem, now, it’s blown to this whole other magnitude because they are working from their house, because they are fearful of losing their job, because of all of these other things.
Your target market is different. You know your target market. I mean, your target market, not only do they have these problems that they’re seeking solutions through, but they also have this, now that there’s another, there’s an added filter, which is Coronavirus, which is a fear, which is doubts and they always have those.
But now it’s just kind of blown through a whole nother magnitude. So knowing your audience, now you have to put that new frame on for your audience and say, “What does that person need? What do they need in order to understand how I am of value and how I’m able to benefit them right now. That’s who your audience is. You also need to know your channels. This is one of the things that you know, I really get on so much because Facebook, and Google, and all of the other ad platforms that we use, Google Search, all of the verticals that people come through.
Now think about your offer and those verticals when you’re understanding how people are finding you. All right, so here’s an example. Facebook. Facebook is an interruption-based marketing method. When somebody sees your ad, you are literally interrupting them from what they are doing. The hope is that your ad gives value to their day somehow or that your interest targeting, when you set up your ad is good enough, is close enough that they are actually entering.
You’re entering into the conversation that is going on in their brain. Do you know what I mean? Let’s say you’re promoting I don’t know, a 3D printer, let’s say because I have one sitting right here. Let’s say you’re promoting a 3D printer. Well the 3D printer that you put the ad on Facebook, obviously somebody who was interested in that 3D printer, they are techs.
They like 3D printing, IT and they like all of these other things. But when they’re scrolling through their newsfeed, listen, checking out all their family stuff, seeing who’s safe, seeing whatever. Then they see this ad for a 3D printer move up. You were interrupting, your 3D printer ad is interrupting them in the flow that they are in. It’s an interruption-based marketing method.
You actually, have to understand that you are going to be interrupting them so that you can create the ad that will effectively pre-frame your 3D printer so that people, when they click through the ad are going to buy your thing. So it’s a different way of understanding your verticals.
Now, compare that to Google. So Google, they are literally going to Google and typing in the search box, 3D printer comparison or best 3D printer or buy 3D printer now or two-day shipping 3D printer because they need to build respirators or whatever. They are looking for very, very specific, something 3D printing-related very, very specifically.
You know that that person is coming in. They are already pre-framed for what it is you’re buying. They’re already looking for it. They’re literally just looking for you to solve their problem or at least help them solve their problem. So that is the difference.
Google is search-based, Facebook is interruption-based, Pinterest interruption-base. So many of these social media channels are interruption-based. Amazon is search-based because people go to Amazon. Amazon is the number three search engine in the world for physical products. They go to Amazon actually looking for physical products, so they are looking to buy something. So search-based. So you need to understand your channels in order to work with them.
Now email traffic is interruption-based but they already opted in. So it’s more helpful than social because social, you just have an interest. With email, if they already opted in, then you know what they’re into. One of the things that we do in a lot of our sales funnels is we do surveys and we do chatbots so that we segment people into the buckets that they are most interested in.
We deliver the email marketing and deliver the marketing based on the buckets they’re in. So we get super granular as far as what we serve up based on what they want. Then content marketing is just an additional arm because people generally, they go from like a Google search engine to a blog post or content.
Then from there, you move, they move through your sales funnel. Now we’ve talked a little bit about this video sales letter versus a traditional sales letter. Your video sales letter a while ago, many, many years ago. The video sales letters created were created by a guy named John Benson. John Benson, basically he took the long copy sales approach, writing long copy sales letters.
He flipped it on its side. Then you end up going sideways. The whole reason of a video sales letter is so you control when the offer is going to be made. So typically with when writing copy that’s long… The long sales copy and sales letters… What happens is you start at the top here. I’m going to use my little blog post here as an example. You start at the top, you read the headlines. So tactical tips for writing copy that sells.
Your sales typically, your sales letters, if you watch a screen recording of how somebody interacts with the sales letter, they do this. They start at the top and then go here. Also, they read this sub-headline. They go here and read this sub-headline, maybe look at the image. Then they usually read the third one or sometimes they don’t. Then they go like this, all the way to the bottom and then they scroll up to see what the price is.
Now, this is a blog post, so there’s no price. They scroll up, they look for an add to cart button, see how much it is. Then they go down and look at the PS. So, in this case, our related articles are going to be our PS. They look at the PS. Typically all long-form sales letters kind of ended with a PS because it was a sales letter.
They read the PS, and then if they were intrigued by the offer, they would scroll all the way back up. Then they would read, they would go through line by line. How sales letters are engineered or how they were was a paragraph. You would have your paragraph and then sub-headline. Then every, so basically your headlines, the primary job of your headline was to get you to then read the subheadline.
The goal of the subheadline was to get you to read the next paragraph, which is usually the first body copy. So in that way, sales letters were engineered to get you reading all the way down the page, all the way.
There was all kinds of ways, there are all kinds of writing copy that uses the headlines to summarize the sales copy and then move them. So that if they’re reading kind of fast and just doing headlines, then they’re able to see what’s going on. So let’s see, maybe froze up here, might’ve overextended the platform a little bit.
But anyway, here, let me. Oh, there we go. All right, so it looks like I’m back on mine. I froze for a row. I wasn’t sure. I’m not sure if you guys got to see any of that. But anyway, so headline, subheadlines moving down the sales copy. So all in all, a nice way to get things done. Now, I’m going to flip back over here and then we’re going to flip back here. Okay, cool. So I think we’re good. I might’ve been a software glitch or it might’ve been, I don’t know, whatever.
Sales video, writing copy for sales, is meant to get you moving down the sales page so that you were. So you move ultimately all the way down into the add to cart button, to the buy button. Then from there, you’re able to purchase. Now sales videos came along so that every video was entered slide by slide by slide by slide. This strong call to action would be one slide. Then this line, oops. Then this line is one slide and then this line is one slide. We’re going to go find a sales video. Let’s see. This is a sales video on a black background. I’m not sure if we’re going to be able to hear this. All right, there we go. Let’s hit the little volume button.
Diversify your traffic chances with something long-term. If so, let me introduce you to a strategy that will send you 300% more leads than traditional outbound methods.
I’m not sure if you can hear that. But this is a true more traditional sales letter. Writing copy in video form, and then performing that video sales letter is a slide by slide by slide process. It’s a black background and white letters here. It’s actually on this page. So let me just replay this a little bit.
Or are you looking to diversify your traffic channels with something multiterm? If so, let me introduce you to a strategy that will send you 300% more leads than traditional.
Now, so that’s a true, more traditional video sales letter. There is no like fully qualified graphics in this one or not fully qualified graphics. There’s no like full-motion graphics in here. Whereas like on our sales funnel page, there is more. There’s an actual full-motion video in here. Let’s see, so this started as a sales video of a video sales letter.
Then I kind of dubbed in myself and then 50 pounds heavier. Then I dubbed in a B roll video on top of that. So through a lot of testing, we actually kind of proof for the most case, in most situations, the sales videos that start with the VSL and then you throw in there. There are simple PowerPoint-based presentations. After you get done writing a copy for the presentation, you just slide, and then you just slide by slide by slide by slide, just read and read and read. Then from there you, you add in B roll on top of it or you add in like a talking human. Then it adds to the conversion. It adds to the number of people who are watching that sales video.
That has worked out really, really, really well a, from a conversion standpoint. I think mostly because people, get bored easily. Literally, if you’re just watching slide by slide by slide, it’s just like really?
Okay. You couldn’t try harder than that? I mean nowadays it’s like we all have stronger cameras in our pockets better cameras in our pockets than when video sales letters first came out six years ago or seven or eight years ago or whatever, longer than that, might’ve been 10 now. PowerPoint screen recording was about as good as we were going to do. It was funny, Sebastian was running around here with like an iPhone 3. I turned it in, I charged it up and gave it to him. The screen is like this big, it’s so small. So it’s just crazy. So writing copy… Video sales letters versus traditional sales letters, you want to have a video sales letter, it’s going to increase conversions. There’s actually a blog post and a video on how to actually create video sales letters on Done For You.
Let me see if I can, let’s see if I can just find it real quick. You can drop a link in here. So yeah, what is a video sales letter? Look at that. So I’m posting this, what is a VSL? Okay. So I just dropped that to everybody so you don’t have to go looking for it. Did it get out? Yeah, it went everywhere. It even went to YouTube that second time. Very cool. So let’s see. Your headline should be the most compelling part. So headlines are always the first thing we test in sales videos.
Always, always, always the first thing we split test as a headline. So that’s super important. Personalized content also works nicely, sometimes with the marketing, with marketing automation, so depending on the platform that you are on, like Ontraport or there are a couple of WordPress plugins that can actually dynamically add somebody’s first name or last name into it.
NOTE: If you’d like a deep dive into writing sales copy that converts, and building entire funnels around it, check out our Funnel Formula Course!
You can add dates, you can add certain contents and certain things based on who was actually watching or who was looking at the contents. Also, you also as the product owner, as the business owner, want to share your own personal stories. You want to share some things that give you humanity I guess.
They show just your personal side. I mean, at the end of the day, that’s kind of the big thing about social media is just being real, being honest. So use your words carefully. Then make sure to include benefits and calls to action.
The benefits are really pretty, benefits in your sales video. So one of the best tricks that I learned when it comes to having features and benefits is you always want to. This camera sucks. You always want to make sure that every qualifying statement has a so. Do you see? Your feature and benefit, your feature is always going to be the thing before so, and your benefits going to be the thing after so. For instance, I say so all the time. I think it’s because I’m a copywriter, it’s just how it works. See? Then when you call attention to it, you’re like, “What the fuck?”
But anyway, I was going to say it again. We launched an ebook called the Funnel Factor over the weekend. And it was just something that I had been working on and finally got around to it. Then we basically took this 19-page ebook that had four funnels in it and we expanded it to 274 pages. So if you go to … I’m sure you’re going to see an ad for it because we’ve had ads in emails and all of that other stuff up.
The 270-page funnel factor ebook, so you can get better at building your own sales funnels, so feature 274-page ebook. The benefit is you can get better at running your own sales funnels, the cutting edge automated webinar funnel format that we use to launch clients so you can sell your high ticket programs and products on-demand, whatever, or the six to eight-page lead magnet strategy we pioneered.
You can attract more people onto your lead mat, whatever. So you have feature, so benefit. It’s nice and compact that way. Literally, every single feature needs to have a so, or else it is not a feature and benefit, it’s just a feature. Features don’t connect with your end-users. So you want to make sure that you include a so everywhere. So include the benefits.
Strong calls to action. Now, this, the call to action is the thing that I find most … So many people just kind of glossing through and skipping out on it because it’s uncomfortable and weird. So the call to action changes depending on how expensive or how complex your product is, your sales videos, your webinars, whatever. Each of them is going to have a call to action. Your landing pages are going to have a call to action. If you have a low-ticket product, the call to action is literally always going to click the button below to add your item to the shopping cart. It’s always going to be the call to action. But there are lots of calls to action, so if you remember, we talked about micro-actions in a podcast.
Every single time that you want somebody to do anything, you have to make a call to action. So if you want to have them watch a video, you have to make the call to action. Click here to watch the video. If you want them to download your podcast, click here to download your podcast. If you want them to download a lead magnet or buy anything or book a call or whatever, you always have to get them to have some sort of a call to action. You need to make that call to action to them. So the two biggest calls to action that we use that are for revenue are of course add to cart or click to book a strategy session or click to book an action plan call or a discovery call or whatever. So that is kind of our fully qualified lead format.
The call to action on your sales video is either going to click the button below to add this widget to your shopping cart. Click the button below to add to the cart, click the button below to get started now or whatever, or it is going to click the button below to book a strategy session on my call or on my calendar. So that’s it. That’s really all there is to it.
Transitioning to the call to action is actually pretty easy. On a webinar, you recap the content. Even in a sales video, recap the content and then you put a stick in the sand and say, this is the transition. This is how we’re going to move from where we were the content to where we’re going, which is going to be selling you some shit.
Once we put the stick in the sand and then we transition into that content action. The transition is usually something like if you’re an enterprising business owner who has something of value to offer to the world, click the button below and get my super duper awesome digital video package for $997. There’s a 30-day free trial or a 30-day money-back guarantee or whatever.
I mean obviously, it’s going to be engineered more than that. As for writing copy – I don’t write quite the way that maybe some other people can. I can type it like crazy, which involves editing and backspaces. So your call to action needs to be apparent. It needs to do something and it needs to move people in the right direction. So never stop split testing your sales pages is going to be the next piece.
Your sales letters, whether it’s a sales video, whether it’s a webinar, whether it’s webinar registration, whatever. Never ever, ever stop split testing your sales letters. They are paramount in the success of your business. It will grow and transform and everything with your business.
If you split test your headline first and you have five or six different headlines that you’re trying, then it will work out. Then you’re going to find a winner. Well, generally what you do is you move on to the next thing. You split test the next thing. How we do it is we test headlines and then we test sub-headlines. Then we test images and buttons. Buttons are a big one, so a button being green or a button being orange. We’ve even tried red and black.
Red and black don’t ever work. So don’t, don’t do those. But red or orange and green, both solid button colors, will outperform each other depending on the, on the case. Headlines, sub-headlines, buttons, images if there’s no video. If there is video, it’s going to be headline, video,sub-headline, buttons typically. So that’s our testing procedure.
As soon as you go through the whole thing, you redo it, you test the headlines again, then you test. So you go through when you never ever stop testing the sales letters, the sales pages. One of the reasons why you never stop is because you never actually get the winner. There are landing pages that I have literally tested. So this landing page, let’s see if I can find it real quick.
It’s not always writing copy either… Sometimes split testing other things about a page is what will drive conversions.
Which window do I have up? Okay, cool. So sources is it? This landing page type right here. Oh, so this is that funnel, the 274-page book I was talking about that I just rereleased. It’s free. SYu can go ahead and download it. This sales page, I’ve literally tested 37 times. Everything from buttons to this background, sub-headline to these sub-headlines to these. This is always the format that wins. The last test that I did, I actually increased this font size to font size 18 and it tested a couple of percents better. But this format works tremendously well. Am I? Oops, you’re not seeing my screen again. There it is. So this format, now, this is where that ebook is.
Let me just throw it in here so you can check it out. So here’s the ebook. This ebook is an absolute monster, so definitely download it if you are the least bit interested in selling more shit online. So that’s the funnel factory book. But this landing page, I’ve split tested, as I said, I’ve split tested, Navbar, no Navbar logo, no logo, logo, sub-headlines, headlines, images. I even had like the little 3D graphic image and this one tested better than that. So not this particular one, but generally the flat images test better anymore. So just something to think about.
Now I’m split testing your winning sales letter. So that brings us to the end of this blog post. You’re winning a sales letter, writing copy that converts is the thing that works. I mean literally, that’s really about all it is. The sales letter that you have that is … You writing copy that converts more people than not that is going to be the sales letter that you continue to test and continue to try to refine and do better and everything else.
That’s the idea of writing copy that sells. So your sales copy should never be done. You should always be writing copy variations and testing them against the best versions of your sales letters. It should never be finished. You should always try to do better than what’s up there. Even if that means only testing to a very small group of people, so 10% or 20% of the traffic that is hitting your webpage, then goes off into this new sales video.
They buy or they don’t buy it. That way you’re not, you’re not killing your main core business by testing. By testing this new thing. You are very simply testing with just a small portion of the traffic that is, that sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The more and more and more split tests that you do, the longer or the more dialed in your sales letter is going to be.
It’s not just the page, you want to split test the sales copy, you want to split test the webinar. The one thing I will say about the webinars is you want to make sure to have enough people go through it. You can’t have a hundred to 150 people go through a webinar and then call it bad or call it even good. With a webinar, there’s a substantial amount of time and energy and work that goes into it.
The webinar itself, like we use Wistia so that you can see the video metrics, how people drop off of a webinar. If there is a lull around minute 14 or whatever, then if there’s a lull around minute 14, then you know that you said something wrong on the webinar too. They’re just not able to, maybe they disagreed with it or whatever. They ended up logging off.
Adam just wrote in with a comment, “If I’m going to test, do I need separate ads or can I have a redirect for 10% of the traffic somehow?” So, there are split testing tools that you can have a redirect.
One of the ones that we use is Inspect Lit, which does screen recording and split testing. The screen recording might be a little odd for you because you’re a lawyer. So it might be … Check this out. The other one we like is VWO, which is split testing software. Here. I wasn’t sharing my screen again. So VWO, very, very nice split testing software. What this does is it lets you … There are two different types of split tests, AB split tests. So the AB split tests, you have two pages. You split the test side by side. You can say 95% goes to one and 5% goes to the other. Writing copy for the split tests? Sometimes all you need to do is change out a headline or subheadline!
Then if the 5% wins, then you can redirect all traffic to 5%. Then you can start another split test, split test B. Inspect Lit does the same. It does AB testing, but you will also get the addition of screen recording software. Screen recording is super nice if you just want to see how somebody interacts with a page.
It actually takes a screen recording of how people are moving through it. So these are the two tools that we like. VWO, Inspect Lit. The other one doesn’t do split testing but is super, super nice for just analytics-wise Hot Jar. So Hot Jar is, they do screen recordings, they do heat maps, they do even like this cool sale funnel flow so you can see people as they move through the sales funnel. So does that help? Cool.
