Landing Pages: How to Sell your Product without Selling your Product

Do you get solid traffic to your landing page but struggle to convert a sale?

This article will give you five proven strategies of selling your product without spamming – or pushing a sale without pushing your customer over.

Landing pages can provide you with a delicate balance between promoting enough to encourage a sale, and little enough that the lead doesn’t feel pressure and bounce.

Let’s take a look at five ways you can sell without selling.

1. Offer Benefits, not Features

This is the most important thing to keep in mind when writing up the sales points of your business or products. People get sold on how a product or business can solve their problems. They don’t get sold on your self-centric product features.

Let’s face it, though, promoting the benefits is harder than promoting the features of your product. Selling benefits means you have to identify the problems of your target audience. Then, you have to come up with how your product or service solves those problems. You have to leave the safety of jargon and technical details and venture into the real world – if you want to get the profits.

To help you understand the difference between features and benefits, here are a few examples:

Selling Features:

The AcmeTikon12 has 300 gigabytes of space!
Our AcmePad2000 has a 1.7GHz processor!
Our AcmeWebTool’s templates have over 5000 color options!

Selling Benefits:

The AcmeTikon12 has enough space for 75,000 songs!
Our AcmePad2000 is our fastest than ever, making browsing a cinch!
We guarantee our AcmeWebTool’s templates will have your business’ brand colors.

Features still have their place on your product landing pages. To cover all your bases, use your product or service’s features to support the benefits to your target audience. Or translate the sexy-sounding (if somewhat obscure) feature into a concrete benefit for the consumer, like Wishpond has done below:

2. Use Customer Testimonials and Reviews

Face it, to most visitors to your landing page you’re not exactly a trustworthy source. They recognize you’re the slightest bit biased when it comes to this particular subject (your own product).

So don’t sell your own product, have someone else do it for you. Since Amazon took over online selling about 20 years ago, internet users are increasingly trusting the word of their peers over any other sources.

By the way, did you know Amazon accounts for more online sales than the next 12 competitors combined? I didn’t.

Needless to say, reviews have never been more important, nor have customer testimonials. Yes, visitors to your landing pages know that these testimonials come through your business, but it doesn’t matter. Not only do customer testimonials function to make your audience trust your business, it gives them the assurance that someone has engaged with you before – so they’re safe to do so.

Here’s an example from Wishpond’s Facebook Sweepstakes App landing page – from our friend Josh Beaty:

For ecommerce businesses, test offering product reviews like Amazon does. A/B test stars or a 5-point system, or whatever creative method of reviewing you can think of. Be aware, though, that the review process also opens up the chance of negative feedback.

Whatever you do, don’t fake reviews. If your products aren’t awesome enough to earn more positive reviews than negative, pull the review until you’ve stepped it up.

3. Make it Beautiful

This should be an obvious one, but I can’t tell you how many times I see an appealing product portrayed in an ugly way. Put time and effort into framing your product in the best possible light. A/B test a model with your product. A/B test the gender of your model. A/B test the colors behind your model. A/B test no model but a beautiful abstract collage that resembles a Kandinsky piece. I don’t care – just make it pretty.

To illustrate my point on the most basic level, which one of these do you think will sell better? Same sunglasses, one with a white background, one with a Johnny Depp background:

But making it beautiful isn’t just about your picture.

Words can also be beautiful, and the words we use can make our products just as appealing as a great picture. A quick look at the Lexus homepage and you’ll know what I’m talking about. Head to their ‘Automobiles’ tab (notice that Lexus makes ‘automobiles’, not ‘cars’). Each class of automobiles has its own slogan, from the IS’s ‘Driving in Every Sense’ to the GX’s ‘Expand your Possibilities’.

Do these slogans have any real relevance to the car they represent? No. But do these words create a certain desirable feeling in their reader? Absolutely.

Lexus also makes it a point to frame their products in terms of an ideal customer – a customer their customers want to be. For instance, their LX (SUV) ‘enables you to venture where few others can while surrounded in unsurpassed interior comfort and refinement’, which sounds like something I might want to do.

Words have a huge impact on us. Of course putting your product in the best possible visual light is vital to making a sale, but don’t neglect the importance of the words you use.

5 Phrases that Make your Product Sound Desirable:

Sleek and sophisticated
Pinnacle of artistry
Premium technology and unparalleled innovation
Reinvention of [relevant field-focused term]
Faster, newer, affordable, exclusive

4. Make your Landing Page Chill

I was trying to think of a better word than ‘chill’ but I think it’s actually the most accurate. Don’t be needy. Don’t be pushy. Let your product or service speak for itself through clear benefits, awesome images and appealing text. Sit back a bit.

If you’re ever feeling like ‘ol Gil from the Simpsons, remember to chill – your customers will thank you.

Keep a personal touch in all the written parts of your landing page. Test out framing your product or service in terms of ‘you’, or the idealized customer I referred to above.

Converting should be your visitor’s idea, not yours. They should be sold by the value they’re receiving. When creating your optimized landing page, keep in mind the ratio of risk over reward. Is what you’re offering worth what you’re asking from your customer?

CTAs:

Remember to keep your CTAs appealing, rather than demanding. Use ‘you’ or ‘my’, ‘free’ and ‘get’. Tell people what they stand to gain, not what to do.

Here are 5 appealing CTA formulas:

Start your/my free [trial period]
Get your/my free [focus of landing page]
Increase your/my [beneficial result of your service/builder] today!
Learn more today
Try [service/builder] for free

5. Sell the Deal, not the Product

Are you one of those people who finds themselves buying things they don’t need just because it’s a great deal? I most definitely am (damn you IKEA). Offers and contests are my favorite strategy for lead generation and to encourage a sale (genuinely, not just because I work for a company that sells a landing page builder for small businesses).

The right offer is sellable simply as an offer – the product itself is actually secondary to the deal.

The best strategy for using offers is to target well with a Facebook Ad. This way, the traffic you’re generating to your landing page is already half-nurtured, whether because of their interests, job title, relationship status, etc. A half-nurtured lead will be better informed of how good a deal they’re getting, making conversion more likely.

Remember, however, deals work best as value propositions. You need to back up your offer with some substance.

Don’t necessarily prioritize the offer over visuals, benefits, and an awesome overall product. An offer won’t always work entirely on its own. (At least, unless your deal is just insane. I mean, who hasn’t brought home bean-bag chairs to their already fully-furnished tiny apartment? They were buy one get two free!)

The best strategy is to use great images, sell someone on the product, every benefit, every facet of the thing, and then wow them with the fact that this amazing, state-of-the-art, life-changing product is only $29.99 for this month only.

Conclusion

So that’s how you sell a product without selling a product. Focus on letting it speak for itself through beautiful images, a great offer, clear and simple benefits, customer testimonials and language that appeals.

Remember that the more a landing page builder allows you to customize your own page, the more you can implement adjustments to improve its conversion rate.

Further Reading:

Have you tried implementing any of these strategies? Did you find success, or frustrations, with optimizing your landing page for a sale? Start the conversation below.

wishpond

Leave a Reply Cancel reply