I wish I had a dollar for every email I’ve gotten that began, “My copy isn’t working. Can you help?” My first response is generally, “What makes you think your copy’s the problem?” Which sparks an enlightening conversation.
Truth be known, there are dozens of elements at play when trying to make sales from a website. The copy is just one of those elements. In order to understand whether your copy is to blame for your lack of sales, you have to look at the whole picture.
Here’s a short list of suspects to review:
1. Shopping Cart – All too often people will dump out of a shopping cart if it is difficult to use, confusing, slow or returns error pages. When they’ve had enough, they will bail.
2. Price(s) – Especially in a down economy, price can make or break the sales funnel. You could have your visitors eating from your hand copy-wise then spring an unexpected price on them and lose them just like that. Prices that are far above or way below expectations can have a negative effect. People who insist that you get what you pay for may view your product as less-than-stellar if the price is far below what they think it should be. On the other hand, bargain hunters may baulk at premium price tags. Testing is a necessity.
3. Shipping Rates – Depending on how much the product costs, shipping can be a big deterrent. Shipping rates are one of the most common complaints with ecommerce shoppers. Make sure you keep shipping costs as low as possible. If you can’t offer free shipping all the time, run a few promotions where customers get free shipping.
4. Keywords – If the keywords you use for search engine optimization (SEO) aren’t targeted to your particular clients, you could be driving loads of unqualified traffic to your site. If you haven’t done so yet, check your keyword choices by searching them in Google. What other types of sites are coming up when you enter your keywords? Are they similar to yours? Are your keywords too broad? For instance, you might do better optimizing for “buy gourmet cookies online” instead of just “buy cookies online.”
5. Your Product – Yep… the product itself could be to blame. It’s a frightening thought (especially if you’re the product creator), but if others don’t hold the same fascination for your product(s) as you do, sales will suffer.
The copy on your site could be the best ever written and your visitors could be drooling to buy what you’re selling. But if something else trips them up on their way to purchase, they’ll click away never to be seen again. (And it won’t be your copy’s fault.)
Yes, it could absolutely be that your copy is a pitiful mess. But there are plenty of other aspects that contribute to a loss of sales. Just make sure you understand where the problem truly lies before spending a lot of time and money on a solution that won’t fix the real issue.
Context context context. I’ve always thought that if you can’t put your copy in context, you may as well not be writing it at all. The clearest, best-written email in the world can’t make up for a bad UI in the buy process or the fact that it was sent to the wrong person in the first place.
I agree, Sam. Lots can go wrong other than bad copy.
The sales process is a system; a chain of links completely dependent upon one another. With so many aspects to manage, it can be overwhelming. But if one link is broken, the entire sales funnel is severely damaged.
Yes… too often people site down and write each page of copy as if it were a standalone entity. It all has to work together.