If you have a slow down in sales, just do a special offer using scarcity. So say, ”I’m only giving five more slots available of this coaching package or of these DVD’s or of this webinar.” Limit the price. Tell them the price is about to increase by $5 tomorrow. Or limit the time to create a sense of scarcity. Tell them that the offer will close in five days and after five days they will never be able to buy this from you ever again at any price.
You can introduce scarcity into pretty much any offer and get more conversions than you would have with the same offer and no scarcity.
You usually get options as to what happens after the countdown timer expires. Among those options are redirecting the visitor to another page, removing the countdown from the page and re-starting the countdown.
Adding testimonials to a sales page can be another game changer. I never like to do an initial launch for a product without testimonials. You want to have proof but not necessarily testimonials. You have proof that things work, you have video proof, and you have pictures and you have graphs and charts and data or whatever. You make people believe that it works, but you don’t need testimonials until later. I know people who will delay a product launch and give out free copies of their product just to get reviews, but I prefer interviewing the people who’ve had time to digest it. I prefer going back to my best customers over and over because those are the most responsive and those are the ones who would probably buy my stuff at any price.
So I don’t want the cheapskates. I don’t want the people who are looking for a freebie. I want the people who chose to buy from me, and if I said I’ll give you your money back if you will delete the e-book from your hard drive they would never do it. I want the people who just like my stuff that much.
So you interview your best customers and if you can make it an interview over e-mail and you keep going back and forth, you can turn this into a really good case study. So you can say this guy took the script and did something that I never had ever thought of. Or this guy how to win at video poker technique and won $75,000 in Las Vegas.
You do stuff like that. You do stuff that shows real results from people instead of just the usual cheesy testimonials that have people saying, “Oh, this is the best thing ever. I really liked what was on page 72. Well, good luck to you.” You know, stuff like that. It’s so generic and people are always looking for the hypey generic stuff because that’s what’s on all the other sales letters, and they tell themselves that’s what they need to make something sell. And that’s not what you need. You just need proof, and case studies are better than testimonials.
So to get a good case study or a testimonial, you need to ask people these three questions: What’s your immediate takeaway? What’s your biggest benefit? And what was the physical result of what you did?
So if all you ask is, “Can I get a testimonial?” or ”What did you think about it?” you’re just going to get the usual stock answers because a lot of these people they’ve already given reviews for stuff. They’ve probably given reviews once a week or once a month. They’ve already given all these testimonials because they know that it gets them traffic, and they’re used to just giving the usual stock answers.
So to get a good testimonial, a lot of the times you’re going to have to e-mail them a few times and kind of edit it all together into one big thing. It’s not that hard. Usually you can just copy and paste a few sentences and put them together. You don’t have to totally rewrite what they said. You just ask, “What was the immediate takeaway? So the very first time you looked at this, what did you go for first? When you looked at the table of contents, what was the first thing you went to, and what did you get out of that personally? And how did you apply that to your site? What was the biggest benefit? When you had time to read through the whole thing, what was the most important thing? And if I had to strip down everything from this book and just leave this one page and this one important point, what would it be?” And then the physical result, so how did you apply it?
The guy learning video poker goes to Vegas and wins a bunch of money, or the guy learning how to make your dog run fast applies it to puppies, and the puppies grow up a lot healthier than they would before, and they end up being a lot bigger and stronger, and so on.
And then you can take these results and work them into headlines. So you can say, “This guy from San Diego went to Vegas just for a weekend with his buddies and happened to read one single page out of my video poker guide and won all this money, and here’s how he did it. And then you don’t bring up his testimonial until later on in the sales letter, and you just get people to read the whole entire thing from the headline to the testimonial. And hopefully by the time they’ve read that testimonial they’re willing to read the whole entire thing all the way down to the order button.
You get them to answer those three things and then you ask for their name, their picture, and their URL. Sometimes people tell me they don’t have a picture, and what do I do? I immediately go to FaceBook and look them up, and if I see that we have a lot of the same friends in the same niche I’ll know it’s that person. I add them, grab their picture off of FaceBook. I say, “Is it OK if I use this picture?” And they’re like, “Oh, that’s my FaceBook picture.” And I say, “Yeah, I know.” And they’re like, “Well, I’m not wearing a business suit” or “I’m not holding a shovel” or whatever. I’m like, “I don’t care. I’m just going to crop it so it shows your face anyway, and no one will know the difference.”
And then you’ll have this testimonial from them and even though they might have left a testimonial in other places, you’re the one that has the picture of them. And then you ask for a URL because they should be getting something out of it, but it’s important that you don’t have the live hyperlink to the customer site. You just say John Smith from example.com, and you don’t make example.com a link because you don’t want to lose your traffic. But if people really want to they will type in example.com to see who is this guy. Is he real? Did he really use your stuff? So when I sell my PHP scripts, I will have the URL in there and people will type in the URL and check and see if they’re using any of my scripts on their sites just as more proof.
So that’s how you get testimonials: Interview customers; get the takeaway, benefit, and results; and you get the name, picture, and URL.