I don’t know your business but I’m going to make a few predictions. Let me know how well I did:

• Visitors are multitasking and/or distracted.
• They wish your prices were slightly lower.
• They don’t realize how much you know about their problem.
• They don’t see you started this journey to save them from inferior alternatives.
• Your conversion rate is near 3% but your solution is the perfect fit for 7% of people who enter the site. It’s a shame they didn’t give you a chance.
• Visitors don’t want to invest 15 minutes understanding your unique approach. These same visitors have never bought anything within 15 minutes of discovering it online.
• They are skeptical of your marketing claims.

The job of the sales pitch is to address these questions.

After running 100s of A/B tests we’ve identified nine fundamental truths about shoppers. Here are the nine truths:

Why marketers care about the nine truths: the nine truths are the mental checklist shoppers use to evaluate new purchases. Marketers who know this selection criterion have an unfair advantage. It’s like preparing for a job interview, once the interviewee knows the list of questions that will be asked the interview is a breeze.

Ready?

Marketing runs on claims. Claims like “removes 99% of allergens.”

Trouble is, shoppers have seen so many, they accept them with a lump of salt, as they should.

So the marketer needs to scan the sales pitch, sniff out anything that sounds too good to be true, and add extra explanation around it so it addresses the skepticism the reader may be feeling.

And this doesn’t just apply to only headline claims.

Here’s how to think about it: look at your sales pitch as a chain of connecting blocks of trust.

To close the sale you need to create a long chain. When the shopper encounters a casual but unbelievable statement it creates a gap in the trust chain. That gap is a conversion killer.

Click here to dig deeper into “Too good to be true” strategy.

We are living in a highly specialized world where shoppers are looking to buy from uber experts.

It helps to think of our relationship with doctors. When I visit mine I pay close attention to everything the doctor says. You may not be selling a medical product but this is the feeling we want to evoke in readers.

The reason I love this expertise strategy is that most brands don’t use it effectively. And this means it lends an unfair advantage to anyone who understands the awesome power it carries.

To dig deeper into this topic read this article: Demonstrate Expertise.

Fact 1: The value of something is proportional to the difficulty of producing it. This psychological principle is called Labor Illusion.

Fact 2: When you admit to encountering a challenge you are showing vulnerability. This makes you authentic. 88% of audiences value brand authenticity (2021 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report).

Think about your journey and combine facts 1 and 2 above into this narrative structure:

“We started in this direction, thought it would be easy, encountered a problem, nearly gave up, and then, in the end, solved it.”

Next, we’ll talk about the two flavors of difficulties.

Internal Difficulty

This is where the creator is overcoming their own internal challenges. Classic Rocky movie story arc. Think back to all the product prototypes you worked through before discovering the one. That’s your Rocky story. Talk about it.

The Casper example shows a struggle (testing 60 different pillows).

Consumers are most attracted to people who have been obsessed with a problem for years. People who have broken their heads before finally solving the riddle.

Think about how satisfying that is for the buyer— pay a few hundred dollars for 1000s of hours of effort.

This is why you need to stress the amount of effort that’s gone into the project. Here is another example from thuma.co:

External Difficulty

This is the classic David versus Goliath story arc. Why did you start your company? Was there an existing brand that wasn’t doing a good job? Talk to your site visitors about this struggle.

Skiplagged.com helps you find cheap flights. To drive home that point they used this copy: “Our flights are so cheap, United sued us… but we won.“

Educating buyers does a few things:

1: Creates a halo effect where they look at you as an expert on that subject.

2: Makes them feel good knowing they have gained knowledge for free.

3: Generates a burst of energy. Learning something new is exciting. A clever marketer is able to channel this excitement by getting the reader to continue reading the sales pitch (here’s why that’s important.)

So here’s what we do– at strategic locations along the length of the sales pitch we insert interesting details related to the problem our product solves.

Example

Say I’m working for a brand that improves indoor air quality.

To unearth surprising details related to this problem I’d Google things like:

— “Interesting facts about indoor air quality”
— “Surprising details about indoor air quality”
— “What do most buyers not know about home air quality?”
— “Is indoor air quality getting worse?”

Google will link to a bunch of articles and I’ll make a shortlist of favorite facts. I’m looking for things that the reader isn’t likely to know and will find surprising. When crafting my sales pitch I’ll place these interesting facts at strategic locations to nudge the reader to continue reading (here’s why that’s important.)

Looking to dig deeper into People are fascinated by surprising details strategy?

Our brains are designed to absorb visual data. The occipital lobe is the visual processing area of the brain (image). It is associated with visuospatial processing, distance and depth perception, color determination, object and face recognition, and memory formation.

Therefore, to maximize conversions use your sales pitch to evoke mental images.

Help buyers imagine owning/using the product. Help them visualize the pain of the problem. The clearer you can help them see the higher the likelihood of them buying from you.

Card found in a hotel bathroom:

MGM Resorts has saved 794 million gallons of water in the past 5 years, which is the equivalent of 1,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Did the swimming pool flash in your mind? Without the aid of a photo, the writer was able to evoke a mental image.

Looking to dig deeper into People are visual animals strategy?

Consumers might flirt with the idea of change but it’s always easier (and less risky) to continue doing what they were doing.

Scientists have a term for this: status quo bias and it’s defined as a person’s innate preference for not doing something different from what they’re doing today. Over the years, a number of psychological studies have shown that when faced with a decision, the majority of people tend to stick with their status quo. So while you may think you are losing sales to an annoying competitor, in reality, you’re losing out to the shopper not taking any action at all.

Shoppers use creative tricks so they don’t have to buy your breakthrough product. Two creative tricks:

— Ignore the problem
— Use workarounds

Having a killer sale pitch is pointless if you can’t create a path for the shopper from her current situation to the plan you’ve made for her.

Ignore the problem:

Imagine you sell long-term food storage (this is freeze-dried food with a 25-year shelf life).

Here is an example taken from 4Patriots.com (not a client):

People buy your product because they are concerned about one day being in an emergency situation without access to food.

Basically, you are selling an insurance policy for an unknown future event.

A potential buyer may look at the offer above, feel compelled, but ultimately conclude, “What are the odds I’ll be in an emergency situation? Seems unlikely.”

Note: the shopper is already on your site so at some level they realize they need your product. If they were 100% sure they didn’t need it they wouldn’t be here. They are just looking to you to give them a few compelling reasons to pull the trigger.

To counteract that thought the retailer should consider using a line like this:

It’s tempting to hope one is never in an emergency situation.
And 9 times out of 10 this strategy works.

Workarounds:

Imagine you sell a hybrid exercise bike:

It’s reasonable to assume many people considering a hybrid bike already use other exercise techniques— like running outside or on a treadmill.

So if you want to convince them to buy your bike it’s a good idea to talk about how running adds a lot of pressure on the joints. You need to attack their current workaround solution.

There is a way to write so the reader feels the sales pitch was constructed just for them.

The trick is to talk about second-order things related to the purchase. Example: you sell a cast iron skillet. Skillets are heavy and inconvenient. But people buy them because they care about cooking. And they care about cooking because they appreciate the taste. So talk about taste.

It’ll feel like magic to the shopper because they didn’t say they cared about taste– you just connected the dots.

Interested in learning more about Personalized Experiences?

We like the feeling of discovering something others have yet to discover.

As a conversion copywriter, I need to evoke this feeling in my visitor.

A few examples:

— Most people hunting for the perfect emergency medical kit give up in frustration. They never make it to this page.

— In the past week, only 37% of our site visitors discovered this page. That’s a shame because this is our bestseller.

— Over 63 million households own a dog in the U.S. Only 1% of those households buy raw pet food for their best friend.

Try adding something like this to the opening of your bestseller product description.

As buyers are going through our sales pitch their brains throw up negative thoughts to counter our marketing claims. This is a protective mechanism.

If by the time they reach the bottom of the pitch, a large number of negative thoughts remain, it could derail the sale.

Therefore, as marketers, we need to anticipate and address their main negative thoughts.

Here are four things that trigger negative thoughts:

— Missing features
— Inferior features
— Price
— Confusing elements

Go through your product page sales pitch and ask yourself:

— “Could the reader perceive something as a missing feature?”
— “Could the reader interpret something as an inferior feature?”
— “Is it possible they might have concerns about my prices?” The price is a huge deal. It’s the 🐘 in the room, which is why we have a whole article on the subject: Increase Conversions With Price Justification.
— “Is there anything on this page that might confuse my visitor?”

In the list above, for any item where the answer is yes add an explanation to stop the negative thought the moment it arises.

Example

The year was 1906 and Van Camp had a problem.

Their evaporated milk cans weren’t selling.

Evaporated milk has many advantages over milk. Because it’s sterilized it doesn’t go bad.

But buyers didn’t like it because evaporated milk has a weird aftertaste.

Their advertising agency had done a great job kicking off inquiries by pitching evaporated milk— a relatively new category— with the catchy Now a cow in your pantry headline.

Now the advertising agency had to figure out a way to address the strange aftertaste puzzle.

So they did a karate chop and converted the perceived flaw into a benefit.

The copy they came up with:

‘Be sure and taste the milk and see if it has got that almond flavor. If it has not the almond flavor, it is not the genuine.’

Sales soared 30%.

Taken from the book:

Healthy Skeptics and the 9 Truths

We’ve just covered two very important topics. It’s important we understand how these how ideas relate. Here’s our process— when working on crafting copy for the 9 truths about online shoppers we’re looking at it from the Healthy Skeptic’s point of view. In fact, all copy we write is written for Healthy Skeptics.

The reason we focus so much on Healthy Skeptics is that any copy that convinces them (they are hard to please) will be 10x more impactful on our general site visitors.

Next Steps

We’ve overcome one of the biggest mountains– we now understand the 9 core levers of the decision-making process our potential buyers are using. You are already ahead because none of your competitors know this secret. Now you need to buckle up so we can reveal how you can start constructing a sales pitch that vibrates at the same frequency as your shopper. That’s covered in Chapter 3: Conversion Copywriting.