You wrote the sales page. It didn’t sell.
So you changed the headline. Still nothing. You dropped the price, added a bonus and tried swapping the button colour. A week later you’ve rewritten most of the page and you’ve made enough to buy a couple of cappuccinos.
I’ve done this more times than I’d like to admit.
Or at least I did, until I worked out that when something isn’t selling, rewriting the sales page is usually the slowest way to fix it. To find out why, read on…
It’s rarely the whole page
A sale is a series of small yeses.
The reader has to notice you, decide you’re worth their time and attention, feel like you understand their actual problem, want what you’re offering, believe you can deliver it and feel safe enough to act.
Miss any one of those and they leave. And you never find out which of those stages you missed.
When you rewrite the whole page, you change all of them at once, including the parts that were already doing their job. That’s why a full rewrite so often makes no difference or makes things worse.
All too often, you fix the one weak spot and break three strong parts in the process.
So before you touch a word, it’s worth finding out where people lose interest.
Watch what people really do
You can guess where your page loses people. Or you can watch them.
Microsoft Clarity records real visits to your page for free, so you can see where people stop scrolling, where they hesitate and where they give up. It’s the closest thing to sitting behind someone while they read it:
If you’d rather see clicks and scroll depth at a glance, Hotjar does much the same thing on its free plan
Once you can see where you lose people, the CXL blog is a good place to learn what that behaviour usually means and what to check next:
And if they’re leaving right at the moment of buying, the Baymard Institute has spent years researching exactly why people abandon a purchase, with data you can use straight away:
Borrow the words already in their head
Most pages don’t resonate with your prospective buyer because they describe the product in the writer’s words instead of the reader’s.
The fix is to listen more than you write.
Marketing Examples, by Harry Dry, is a free library of real before-and-after rewrites, and it’s the fastest way to see how much a page improves when it starts speaking the customer’s language:
Copyhackers has a whole free archive on customer research, and how the exact phrases your buyers use become your strongest copy:
And when you want to know what people are worried about before they buy, AlsoAsked maps out the questions they type into Google as a branching tree, so you can answer the doubt before it stops them. It’s free for a few searches a day
Then make it easier to read, not longer
When a page isn’t working, the urge is to add more when it almost always needs less. In other words, prune.
The Hemingway Editor is a free tool that flags long, tangled sentences so a nervous first-time reader can follow you:
And if you want to see how a clear page is built, Julian Shapiro’s growth guide breaks down why most landing pages fail and how to lay one out that doesn’t:
Your writing probably isn’t the problem. Usually one part of the sales process is just not working as well as the rest.. Find that part first, change it and leave the rest alone.
Your TED talk this week
Rory Sutherland, Life lessons from an ad man.
Rory spent his career in advertising and his whole argument is that the biggest wins rarely come from rebuilding the thing itself. They come from changing how people see it.
He’s sharp and funny and by the end you’ll never look at a “problem” on your page the same way again. Twelve minutes well spent.
One more thing
I’ve been creating something that helps you do all of this in a blink of an eye (more or less) so you get people to buy more. It works for vendors, affiliates and authors alike.
More on that very soon so keep an eye on your inbox next week.