I was recently hired to rewrite a sales page for a really smart online product. It’s been selling for a while and the owner wants to revamp the copy.

Knowing the product pretty well, I still had a few questions to dig deeper into the benefits and selling points of the offer. As I jotted them down, I thought it would be useful to share them with you, explaining why I look into these areas.

So, if you’re rewriting your sales page, why don’t we sit down and work through these together.

1. What are the alternatives to your product?

It’s important to know what the competition is for your product. This isn’t so you can rubbish anyone else’s product. What we’re looking for is a comparison to see why yours is more suitable to your target market.

If you ignore the competition and pretend that your product is the only solution, you’re missing an opportunity to win people over to you.

Let’s say you’ve just created a 4 week online sales course with live group coaching, 1:1 mentoring and homework for attendees to practice closing the deal when they’re working on sales in their business. Identifying alternative solutions gives you a chance to show how your product shines in comparison. So you might come up with alternative products such as:

• Books teaching sales
• Live sales workshops

The next step is to explain why your product would be more suitable. In the above example, this might be:

• Much more hands on and interactive than a book
• More follow up support than a one-off course

When you review a sales page ask yourself if you’ve identified alternative solutions and justified why yours still makes the most sense.

2. How do people find your sales page? What keywords do they search for?

If you’ve had your sales page up for a while and have analytic software tracking search terms, it helps knowing what your visitors are searching for when they reach your page. Or it might be that you have a specific page, or webinar that then funnels traffic through to the sales page. This helps you visualise your customers’ journey and imagine their mindset when they reach your sales page. This can influence your copy.

If you’re selling an online fitness course, and people are finding the page through the term ‘sports injury prevention’ consider using this term somewhere in your opening copy (providing the product does of course cover this). That way your visitors will know straight away that they’re on the right page.

If your visitors are coming from a referral page, make sure you review this before rewriting your sales copy. You want to make sure the flow from the referral page through to the sales page is smooth, and doesn’t repeat too much information or suddenly change style and tone.

3. How are current customers using your product and how many have you sold?

Good old social proof works a charm on sales pages, so if you have examples of how other people are using your product it does 2 things:

• Shows the customer is not alone in purchasing this product (builds trust)
• Provides illustrations to help your customer ‘visualise’ what your product looks like in their life (sells the benefits)

For example, in our above fitness course we might explain:

We’ve helped hundreds of athletes like you prepare for 10k sprints, marathons, triathlons or just keep in peak condition for regular training. 

If you’ve got examples of how customers are using your product, let new visitors to your page know!

4. What questions do people ask you about the product?

If it’s been a while since you revamped your page, it’s a good chance to include answers to any questions you’ve received about the product since the initial launch.

Have a dig through any prospect emails and see what enquiries have come up in the past. You might not have thought about including them in your sales page if you’ve responded personally, but if one person’s asking, it means others are probably thinking.

Not everyone will email you. Quite often if people can’t find the answers or help they need, they’ll just leave your sales page.

5. Other than the testimonials you have, what do people say they love about your product?

Again, if you’re spring cleaning your page, you might want to update your testimonials with the feedback you’ve received from customers since the initial launch.

Alternatively you might want to pull out some common threads and explain on your new sales page that:

Current customers of [product] love how easy it is to use, and how quickly they see results. Even business owners with little to no design experience have been able to create beautiful looking websites, often in just a weekend!

Have you ever revamped a sales page to include new details? Did it improve your conversions? Let me know in the comments box below. Want to see a before and after shot of a revamped sales page? Just click here.