To explain the importance of sales pitch readability we’d like to start with a short story.

The bestseller on a direct-to-consumer eCom site is generating $100 million in online sales. Serious bloody number.

They hire this incredible copywriter who crafts an incredible product page sales pitch.

The work is loved by the marketing team.

Can the project be considered successful?

No.

Because writing great copy isn’t enough.

There is a very specific metric you need to be looking at:

What percentage of page visitors reached the closing of my pitch?

If, at the close of the project, that number isn’t significantly higher the project is a failure.

If the new content doesn’t get the visitor to read to the bottom of the sales pitch then the visitor will not buy.

What Happens

As the reader is going down your sales pitch they are making sense of the pitch. They will buy only if the overall pitch connects with them.

As a marketer, I need to measure how much of my content this new visitor consumed.

Video Explanation of Sales Pitch Readability

Knowing How Far Down the Reader Went

To do this we need to add digital markers along the length of the sales pitch. Interactions with these markers are a signal that a section of copy was noticed. We call these digital markers Feedback Beacons.

On our test concepts, we add these Feedback Beacons at locations where the main aspects of the sales pitch are being communicated.

In this example, we’ve added “clear” and “unclear” buttons. Click the image to see the zoomed view:

The reader is literally telling you if the explanation in the paragraph above made sense. PS: if the reader says the explanation doesn’t make sense it’s a shit explanation. The copywriter’s opinion doesn’t count.

With these mid-point progress-markers, the business is able to pinpoint where the pitch started to unravel.

This A/B test for GetNeuroMD.com uses a lot of Feedback Beacons.

Dell.com Uses Feedback Beacons

Very few retailers use these feedback beacons but Dell.com does.

On this product page, there are 2 strategic locations where dell.com cleverly allows shoppers to give feedback.

1: At the top of the sales pitch they have a product overview video. At the top right corner of the video (screenshot below), you’ll notice an interface to collect feedback:

Now the Dell team can easily know if the video is helping, or not.

2: At the bottom of the sales pitch there is a feedback beacon. This is a super strategic location. There is no more content on the page (apart from the reviews), which means Dell knows that if the visitor still has questions they will not buy.

To recap: Feedback Beacons allow the brand to know if the information was consumed. And information consumption is a critical step in the conversion optimization process.

Further Reading

We hope you enjoyed this sales pitch readability article.

We’ve spent the last 13 years in our marketing lab, experimenting with ways to optimize conversion rates and grow sales. We’re ready to spill the beans.

The following articles will save you 13 years:

— Before revealing the secret that’ll improve conversion rates by 20% let’s zoom out to see the forest for the🌲: Optimize Conversion Rates: A Totally Different Approach

— For every 1,000 product pitches encountered the shopper buys one item (and we’re being generous). You want this to be your product. How do our brains choose? They rely on a ranking algorithm, not dissimilar to the one Google uses for search results. Our conversion copywriting process is designed to get your pitch to the front of the line.

— The article above revealed how to construct the perfect sales pitch. Now this killer pitch needs to be infused into your product page. We have just one chance to convert this visitor (only 15% of visitors ever return). Read this next: Infusing Your Product Story To Your Product Page.

About Frictionless Commerce

We deliver an unfair advantage to technical product DTC brands (for example, Dyson) by improving advertising effectiveness by 20% in 90 days. This is achieved using a buyer psychology conversion copywriting framework. All paid traffic eventually reaches the product page and this is where we strike. Our process.

If you like doing the hard work yourself, our founder Rishi shares conversion ideas on LinkedIn every day. Connect with him here.

If you want to make your life easier and still increase conversions, jump on a call.