Fix Your Broken Sales Page (and earn more money)

Today I want to show you my process for fixing a broken sales page.

For those of you not familiar with the term “sales page” or “landing page”, it’s the specific page that people visit to buy your product or service.

And it’s so critical to get these right. Because a sales page…well…sells!

The better it works, the more sales you make. And if you have an awesome product or service, it deserves an equally as awesome sales page.

To show you how I approach fixing one, I’ll break down a 1:1 call I had a few months ago with a creator who sells digital products.

We’ll call him Steve (not his real name). And his product was an online course priced at $297.

But keep this in mind - the process I’m sharing today can be used for a service business, software, or consulting.

Unfortunately, many creators give up on products and services that could have sold more — if they just had the right sales page in place.

That’s the power of a sales page. It can make or break the success of an otherwise good product.

So let’s dive in to the process I use for fixing one.

Establishing baselines

To start, Steve and I walked through some of his numbers to establish baseline metrics for his product.

If you don't understand this data, don't worry. I'll explain more below to make it easier.

• Daily web traffic: 1,072
• Daily sales page traffic: 155
• Percentage of web visits that made it to sales page: 14.46%
• Average time on page: 0:48
• # of products sold: 2
• Sales page conversion rate: 1.29%
• Product revenue: $594.00
• ARPU (average revenue per user): $297.00
• Dollar value of sales page visitor: $3.83

Whew. That’s a lot of information.

But it provides a ton of data that we can use to understand what’s working, what isn’t, and form some hypotheses for improvement.

Here’s what we did.

Hypothesis #1: Wrong Messaging

The first thing I looked at was the amount of time people were spending on Steve’s sales page.

48 seconds.

That number by itself doesn’t tell us much unless we have another sales page to compare it to. We didn’t. But we both had a hunch that this wasn’t good.

So, we checked the messaging on his sales page.

To me, it was clever…but not clear. I couldn’t tell, in less than 1 second, what outcome Steve’s customers could expect from buying his product. It was all about what Steve did, but not what his customers would get.

So we moved his header and sub-header messaging from clever to clear. We made it focused on the impact to the customer rather than being about Steve’s business.

The result?

The total time on page went from 48 seconds to 1 minute and 08 seconds.

We also worked on something critical together that you couldn't see on his sales page: we started aligning his LinkedIn content (a big part of my LinkedIn strategy) and his sales page messaging so that when people came to his site from his LinkedIn content, it was a more natural "extension" of what they just read.

When people spend more time on your page, it’s likely because the message resonates with them, and the outcomes we wrote about were the outcomes they were hoping to achieve.

Key takeaway: Check to ensure that your sales page language is about the outcome your customer's should expect.

Hypothesis #2: Too Many Options

The next thing I noticed was just how many options every person had on Steve’s website.

Homepage, sales pages, newsletter, articles, podcasts, webinars, about section, social links, and a few other links to different businesses that he was running.

How the heck was someone going to get the sales page?

The answer: they weren’t.

Because Steve gave the readers SO many options, only 14.46% of visitors ended up viewing his sales page.

I guided him to move many of the less necessary links (podcasts and webinars, for example) out of the main header and down to the footer. This meant fewer options for Steve’s readers.

The result?

An improvement from 14.46% of visitors to 15.62% of visitors making it to Steve's sales page. While this number may not seem like a lot, every single person who visits these pages matters. And as Steve scales his traffic, it only gets more important.

Key takeaway: Move less necessary information off of your main header navigation. Keep important pages up top. Less important pages can be nestled into the footer.

Hypothesis #3: Zero Urgency

Lastly, Steve was converting a paltry 1.29% of sales page visits into actual product purchases. This meant Steve was making 2 sales per day at $297, for a total of $594 in daily sales.

I asked Steve if he’d be willing to do a week with an “urgency banner”, which is a call-to-action to purchase the product at a discounted rate. He agreed and we landed on a 20%, limited-time discount.

During that week, Steve’s conversion rate went from 1.29% to 2.11%.

We extended the urgency banner experiment and the conversion rate eventually steadied out at 2.34%. Almost double his previous 90 days.

Because he gave visitors a 20% discount, his ARPU (average revenue per user) fell from $297 to $237.60. But the improvement in conversion rate more than made up for it.

He went from 2 sales per day to 4 sales per day and increased his revenue from $594 to $950.40.

Key takeaway: Always be testing. Try something for a week and analyze it. What happened? Was it worth it? Why did/didn't it work? Form some hypotheses and test again.

Two observations:

1. I still think 2.34% is lower than where Steve should be. So we’ll continue to work towards improving that.
2. I don’t know that urgency banners are a long-term play that you can use successfully, so there will likely be more work on sales page structure, messaging, social proof, CTAs, etc.

But all-in-all, Steve’s business is much more successful today. He’s seen a 45.03% improvement in revenue from each sales page visitor.

That means each visitor to a sales page is now worth $5.56 instead of $3.83.

Here are the results:

A great win for a great entrepreneur and for his customers.

Steve’s confidence was restored and more and more people are getting access to high-quality products that they might have otherwise skipped.

If you have a sales page today, consider doing the following:

1. Make a copy of this worksheet that you can fill out. (Choose "File" then "Make a copy" then fill out blue boxes only)
2. Form 2-3 hypotheses about what could use improvement.
3. Execute on them one at a time, and measure your results.

If you do, you’ll have a greatly improved business.

That’s all for today. See you next week.