I’ve heard one of the biggest mistakes made online is not making an offer on your sales page and another is not asking for the order. I’ve only heard this…not really noticed it much. Most of the sales pages I visit make an offer and ask for an order although sometimes the offer is not very clear. Are you making these mistakes?
The thoughts about offers and orders occurred to me as I was driving through a freak winter storm on my way to Minnesota. On the bright side, it served as a not so subtle reminder of why I hate snow. The weather has added an extra day to an already long drive. Highways (including long stretches of US Interstates) aren’t plowed and barely passable. It’s like driving on unpaved roads and there were more cars in the medians and jack knifed semi-trucks than I could count. Luckily I wasn’t one of them but there’s nothing anybody can do about the weather and that’s not the point.
I will normally just drive straight through but due to the road conditions I’ve stayed at 2 motels on the way. At both places I decided to stop there were several national chains and hardly any of them are making an offer…unless you consider the sign an offer. All I wanted was cable so I could watch the Masters and high-speed Internet. It would also be nice to know the price of a one-night stay.
Not a single one of these national chains made an offer with all three of those things. Some offered a price. Some offered high-speed Internet. Some offered cable. But none of them clearly offered all three so I was left to guess. I wasn’t about to drive around to all of them and ask so I just picked one based on the incomplete offer one of them made and that’s where I stayed.
One morning I woke up at 5 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep so I clicked on the TV to check out the weather and found an endless stream of infomercials. I actually like to watch infomercials occasionally because they are masters of direct marketing. It’s kind of like a sales letter that comes to life. If you listen, they use a lot of the same words & phrases you’ll find in written sales letters.
One guy had invented some contraption that would save me hundreds of dollars on dry cleaning among other things. I wasn’t interested but he was going to knock off one of my 29.95 payments, send me 3 bonuses, and upgrade me to express shipping if ordered now. He even put a phone number up on the screen and told me to call it right now. That’s the TV equivalent of a big bold clickable order link that says “Click Here Now to Order.”
See the big difference? The infomercial guy gave me several reasons to order now and told me exactly how to do it. I just didn’t happen to be interested in his offer. On the other hand, I had a choice of about 6 motels to stay at and none of them stood out and gave me reasons to buy. They all used the same mediocre marketing. I bet one of them lost my business because they didn’t make it crystal clear what they were offering. Don’t make that mistake.
Tags: Domain Names, Article Marketing
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3 Comments
The advice is actually to make an offer with every communication. Not just on sales pages. One should always be offering to help in some way. I offer copywriting assistance to anyone who needs it. One fellow for over a year now and (virtually) no compensation.
Infomercials may be annoying and usually tacky, but they keep being shown because they work…
I think people have a hard time asking for money, even when they’re selling something.
Basic idea: You can’t make sales unless you ask for them.
I realize infomercials work but sometimes when I see the products that they are selling I think to myself can these people actually be making money? I almost feel as if the product you sell isn’t as important as to how the message that is selling the product makes you feel.
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