To understand the importance of sales pitch readability we should start with a short story.

An eCom site has a bestseller that’s doing $100 million in sales. Serious bloody number.

They hire this incredible copywriter who writes an incredible product page sales pitch. The work is loved by all.

Is that enough? 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 that number isn’t significantly higher the project is a failure.

And 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 this list they are deciding if they should continue reading or leave:

And in order to know how far down the prospect reached you need to add digital markers along the path. Without these progress markers, the only way to know if the new copy worked is to look at completed sales. That’s not the best metric.

Completed sales are binary indicators— zeros or ones. The sale either happened or didn’t.

You need pre-sales signals.

That’s what digital markers give you.

Three possible solutions

There are a bunch of ways in which these markers can be embedded into your sales pitch:

— You can use GTM (Google Tag Manager) to track how far down the product page the reader ventured.

— You can identify the most important two or three parts of your sales pitch (things like “why we exist”) and instead of showing them on the page by default hide that content behind buttons. Set tracking for button clicks. Now you’ll be able to see if those elements of your sales pitch were read. If they weren’t you can tweak the flow and design of the content. In the Further Reading section below we show a case study where we used this strategy (we use this strategy for all our A/B tests).

— You can even add little feedback beacons along the pitch. These are typically added after important content blocks. They read “clear” and “unclear”. 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.

Here is how the “clear” and “unclear” interface looks. Click the image to see the zoomed view:

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

Video explanation of this idea

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. If you’re interested we’d like to share our key insights:

— The most important page on your site is the product page. Why is that and why focus on product pages?

— On the product page (also called PDP) the most important element is the product description. This is where we present our product sales pitch (also called product story). This product story presentation needs to be perfect. We have just one chance to convert this visitor (only 15% of visitors ever return). Learn how to construct the perfect product story.

— The opening of your product description really matters. We call it the art of the start and you can learn more about it in this article: The Art of The Start.

— The Myth of the Perfect Product Page

— Once the basic product story has been developed it needs to be reframed to influence the psychology of the buyer you are trying to convince. Everyday shoppers encounter an incredible number of ads. As a result, they rely on a mental checklist to decide if they should consider a brand, or not. We’ve identified these 9 checklist items and developed a conversion copywriting process. To learn more (and see examples) visit our most important article of all: Conversion Copywriting: How to Craft a Product Story That Converts.

ABOUT FRICTIONLESS COMMERCE

We deliver an unfair advantage to technical product DTC brands by improving their advertising effectiveness by 20% in 90 days. Our secret? A buyer psychology copywriting framework. The 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.