A few weeks ago I had the pleasure to work with Karyn Greenstreet, a successful small business consultant from Passion for Business. Karyn had launched a brand new group-mentoring program and came to me for the Make Your Sales Page Sizzle coaching package to help sell the benefits of the offer. Karyn was happy for me to share with you the before and after shots of her sales page to show you the copywriting coaching worked. You can find more copywriting case studies here.

For space, we’re just going to look at the headline, opening and lede, but these are the most important parts of your sales page as they catch the eye of your perfect customer and persuade them to read on.

Sales Page Before:

The headline before

We wanted the headline to do more to sell the great benefits of Karyn’s program. Although it does a good job of identifying a specific audience, we needed to do something to make the headline unique to her offer.

We ended up using the Headline Shaker Maker process to pull out various selling points of the offer, and combined them to create the following headline:

The headline after:

Here you can see the specific elements we’re using to catch the eye of our target market:

Time sensitive – this is not a program run all year round
Small group – straight away our customer knows there are only 6 in a group
Identify the audience – it’s clear that this is for small business consultants
Irresistible promise – to grow a thriving, successful practice

The subheading before:

Again, we felt that the subheading could work harder for us on this sales page. We wanted to make sure that between the headline and the subheading, the audience would know:

Who this program was for
How it was different
What it would help them achieve

The subheading after:

We really wanted to emphasise that this was a chance for a small group of business owners to get business mentoring help. We also wanted to make it clear that this was for people who sold their services as a professional as not everyone identified themselves necessarily as a ‘consultant’.

The lede before:

Karyn’s experience working with small business consultants means she really knows what areas her customers need to focus on to find success. However, for the rewrite I suggested a stronger impact by opening the sales page with:

An illustration her target market could relate to
Examples of what her customers wanted to achieve
The problems that stop them doing this

The lede after:

What we’ve done here is:

Create a subheading that appeals directly to our customer’s interests
Further emphasise who this program is for (strategy consultant, a copywriter, a market expert etc)
Prove credibility by showing an understanding of growing businesses (the focus is on getting your first few small clients…)
Identify the problems / challenges (how to increase your income…without feeling stressed)
Outline a desire (creating a business and marketing model that will build your business in an efficient and effective way)

Final before and after shots