Most people think music is about the notes.
But think about the silence between the notes for a second. Doesn’t the absence of sound complete the composition?
Without the silence, you only hear dozens of notes jostling madly into each other, causing a cacophony.
Copywriting is a bit like writing a concerto.
You may believe that copywriting is only about words. If so, you are forgetting about critical, invisible elements that affect whether or not you make a sale.
Most readers skim madly through a sales page. They read the headline, a bit of the first paragraph, and then continue down the page.
Which sections can you, as a copywriter, engineer to decelerate a reader’s pace? Where do they slow down? Where do they stop?
When writing a sales page, consider utilizing silent elements that help increase conversions.
Here are three invisible elements you can add to the copy of your sales pages to increase conversions …
1. Graphics
Do visitors really pay attention to graphics?
Are they just pretty pictures on the page?
If you strip graphics from a sales page, you’ll see how tedious the page looks. Without images, photos, and videos, a sales page will become sterile and uninviting.
And yet, for eons, marketers have sold products through copy-intensive text.
If you go back to around 2003 or so, you’ll find that many marketers would send you pages of sales material without any graphics. And that worked, and probably still may work, but the medium was different back then.
You’d get the sales page in an envelope and usually from someone you knew. You weren’t bombarded with sales pages day in and day out, so you took a little more time to read and absorb.
Today, we’re on a scroll roll.
A client will quickly scan your sales page, trying to find the offer, and graphics enable you to present the offer without too much effort.
A graphic slows down a reader, and if you use a caption (What? You’re not using a caption?) you can highlight the problem and solution. The caption helps communicate your message.
The same applies to videos strategically created to exemplify a problem your prospect may have or reduce buyer risk. Visuals create brakes that cause the client to stop and absorb your text.
Graphics also enable the use of white space.
Let’s say you take a photograph. Do you know one quality that often produces a great photo? It’s not just what you focus on, but the space around it, that makes it compelling.
The same concept applies to photos as it does to copywriting.
The space around a graphic creates negative space — breathing space — in your copy that’s really handy on a page that seems to have endless content.
But the graphics are only one “invisible” element. Another is what people who have already bought have to say …
2. Testimonials
How important are testimonials?
You’ll be amazed that you can actually fit an entire sales letter into testimonials.
Really? Yes, really.
Let’s say you have seven main points about why I should attend your seminar.
Well, do you have seven testimonials? If you do, each of those points can be covered in the testimonial itself.
To collect these testimonials, tell your clients you’d like them to describe a certain aspect of your seminar. You can let your clients choose the point they’d like to discuss, but at the end of the exercise you’ll have seven testimonials each covering one point.
And see, that seems invisible, doesn’t it?
You don’t see the testimonials as anything more than a sort of risk reversal mechanism.
But when correctly constructed, a testimonial can create enormous impact. And if you use a reverse testimonial (which I explain in my book, The Brain Audit), the testimonial will be even stronger.
Add photos, titles, location, etc., to the testimonial and you’ve got a power-packed tool that clients will slow down and read every single time.
Even if they don’t read all the testimonials, they will read several, and so you’ve got a good chunk of your sales letter in the testimonials in a concise format.
Clients tend to skip the main text to read the testimonials, so I place them on the right side of the text and at several points in the body of the copy itself.
Which brings us to the third critical, invisible element …
3. Uniqueness
Once you’ve made your entire pitch, all you’ve really done is convince the client that it’s a good idea to buy “a product” or “a service.”
You haven’t convinced them to buy your product or service.
If there are two or three products of seemingly equal value at approximately the same price, the client will opt for the best deal.
But uniqueness is an element that changes everything.
If you explain why your product or service is different from the competition, it creates a subtle uniqueness factor.
Let’s say we’re having a workshop in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in September. What’s unique about the workshop? What if there are other info-products workshops at the same time?
Most people don’t explicitly state the unique qualities of an event, but it’s also not enough to just state your uniqueness — you have to compare it with the competition.
So, I’d say:
What’s unique about the workshop itself? It’s one thing to create a non-boring information product. It’s quite another to create a product that’s not ‘too hot,’ not ‘too cold’ — and ‘just right.’ Yup, that’s our ‘Goldilocks System’ where you’ll learn to create product after product that’s just right.
Other information products workshops inundate you with information about how to make a product, but no one teaches you how to get it just right. That’s unique to Psychotactics, and in fact, it’s why clients keep coming back time and time again.
Appreciate the silence
You’ve just met the three critical, yet often invisible elements on a sales page.
- The graphics
- The testimonials
- The uniqueness
When most of us think of a sales page, we think “text, text, and more text.” Yet, graphics, testimonials, and uniqueness pack a ton of punch.
They seem quiet, almost invisible, and yet it’s the silence between the notes that makes up the music.
Let’s go over to Google+ to discuss more ways to use these silent elements to your advantage … today!
Flickr Creative Commons Image (cropped) via Marian Beck.
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