AL 002: Are Huge Sales Pages Worth It or Just Too Much?

AL 002: Are Huge Sales Pages Worth It or Just Too Much?

Liz Wilcox: What up, Liz Wilcox here, and welcome to Ask Liz, the Bite Size Weekly Podcast to answer all your questions on online business, entrepreneurship, lifestyle, design, and personal development. Remember, these episodes are a new format of the Smart Passive Income Podcast, where you bring in the questions. The link will be in the description for you to record a question. And I, Liz Wilcox, will answer them.

So this week’s question comes from Patricia.

Patricia: Liz, how big does my sales page need to be anyway? I just created a new product, and I see all these sales pages out there, and I just don’t know what exactly is necessary and what’s overkill.

Liz Wilcox: Alright, so Patricia didn’t give me a lot of info on her sales page, or I mean on her product.

But here are some criteria for how I determine the size of my sales page. So, first of all, a small sales page is, you know, like, probably 400 words or less. And I make a small sales page when the price is a no brainer. You know, something like maybe under 20 bucks. I’m in entrepreneurship, right? So anything under 20 bucks is usually a steal of a deal, right?

Also, I make a small sales page when all the heavy lifting is behind the scenes. For example, I just did a training that’s $150, but I had used my email list to work up that topic. It was all on list building, right? How to grow your email list. And so I’d worked up this topic in the email list for a long time.

I had spent probably four weeks talking to people about how to grow your email list, ways that it would be effective. And then I said, Hey, you know, I’ve got this workshop. Why don’t you come to it? I’ve also spent, well, my email list at this point is six or seven years old, and so I’ve also built a lot of trust there with the email list, and I do workshops all the time.

And so, again, all the heavy lifting was done behind the scenes, so I was able to create a small sales page. And when I say small sales page, I mean something like, you know, when you go to Amazon, and that’s like a product description page with the cart right there. It was kind of like that.

Also, you or your product has notoriety. That’s when you can create a small sales page. So again, I mentioned on my email list, it’s like six or seven years old. I’ve got a reputation for creating workshops and trainings that people love. And so I was able to, or I have that notoriety already. And then of course, if you’re an e commerce brand, so if Patricia, who sent in the question, if she’s created a new product that is e commerce, I could see a small sales page really working.

Now, when we’ve got a medium sized sales page, 400 to 800, maybe even 1000 words, this is when I feel like the reader needs more information to make a decision, right? You know, I’ve got to address the problem that these people have that, you know, my potential customers have. I’ve got to address the possibility, right?

So, if I was selling a product on list building, right? The problem would be, oh, you know, it’s getting harder with ChatGPT to just have a freebie that contains information. You know, you’ve got to be a little more strategic with your opt ins. And so that’s the problem, and then the possibility is What if you created different ways of growing your email list so that you could go from 100 to 1000 in the next 30 to 60 days?

So that’s going to take a little bit more wording. Also, the price could justify more information, right? If my price for this workshop or 30 You know, maybe it’s a course on list building, if the price is 200, 300, 500, that’s going to justify more info. Most people, even in my industry, are not just going to shell out that kind of dough, even though I’ve got a great reputation for teaching list building, right?

Also, if the reader is new to your world, so if you’re getting a lot of, let’s say you’re making sales from affiliates, let’s say Patricia, she’s got this product, but she’s also got a lot of affiliates, people that promote for her. She’s going to want a medium sized sales page because other people are promoting her product.

So the reader, the reader of the sales page is sort of new to Patricia, right? New to you. So you want a little more information on the page. And then last, I always create a medium sales page when the price differs from my normal range. So, normally, you know, my main offer is 9 a month as a membership. And so if I was doing a workshop for 100, 200, I might think twice about making it small, and I might say, hmm, I need a little more information. I need to give my people a little more information. And so I’m going to make that medium sales page.

Now, a large sales page is anything above, I would, I would say 800 words, a thousand words or more, right? And I know I just said the medium was like 400 to a thousand, but you know, use your discernment here.

You know, it’s semantics at this point, uh, but the large sales page, Patricia might need a large sales page if the reader needs a lot of info. If her new product is a course, right, and it’s this, for example, you know, Pat and I just released a course inside the SPI Community called Sponsor Me, right? If we had launched that, like, if you could buy that, you can’t buy it.

You can only get it inside the community, but let’s say we were selling it to the SPI email list. All right. And we were charging $1,000. The reader would need a lot of info to make that decision. $1,000 is not a small fee. Even, heck, let’s say $500, $350. I would say the reader would need a lot of help here, they would need that problem and possibility we talked about in the medium sales page.

They would need a self identify section, which is where it’s, you know, this is for you if this is not for you if. Right? The reader would need a lot of info also you might need some confidence building. So again Let’s use the Sponsor Me sales page, hypothetical sales page, because again you can’t get it if you’re not in the membership.

Some people just need, you know, they might be convinced, yes, Pat and Liz, they’re experts at sponsorships. I believe them when they say they’ve both made, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars with sponsorships, but I don’t think I can do it, right? So a sales page is oftentimes It’s about the product, sure, but we’re really selling them on themselves, right?

The confidence building. I see this so much with email marketing, like, yeah, I believe that works for you, Liz. That works for you, Pat, but nah, I’ve tried it. I can’t do it, right? So in the page with the sponsorships, it would be, you know, even if you have only a hundred followers, you’ve flubbed a sponsorship before, right?

This is for you because, and then we would talk about all those reasons why, to build up their confidence. Pat always talks about this in his Superfans book and inside the Superfans System. He says, you know, you got to learn their language. You got to give them quick wins. And so if you can do that on a sales page, that’s awesome.

And that happens on the large sales page. And again, Patricia would need this large sales page, if the reader needs a lot of info to make a decision or needs a lot of confidence building.

Also a large sales page. If the price is higher than expected, right, let’s say, and there’s nothing wrong with this.

Let’s say most of our competitors are charging 99 for a sponsorship course, but Pat and I decide to charge 400, right? We might need a large sales page because we’re doing it differently. We’re pricing it differently, right?

Also, bigger promises. If Pat and I say on this Sponsor Me sales page, again, hypothetical, you have to be in the membership to get it, you know, if we’re saying, hey, we’re going to get you X amount of dollars in sponsorships from this course, we would need to back that up.

We would have to have, you know, the proof is in the pudding right there on the sales page, which would mean lots of testimonials. You know, a money back guarantee if we didn’t hit that goal for you, et cetera. Right? And then of course you need a larger sales page if you’ve got a cold audience. So Patricia, if you’re running ads to this new product and those ads are a cold audience,Then I would suggest having a larger sales page because those people don’t know you. You have none of that notoriety we talked about at the beginning of this episode, it’s just a cold audience. We need to give lots of information. We need a bio section in that case.

Hi, I’m Patricia. This is why you should trust me with this topic, right? Pat and I. Hi, we’re Liz and Pat. This is how much we’ve earned in sponsorship dollars. These are the mistakes we’ve made. This is what we’ve learned, and this is what we’re passing on to you, right? Those are a lot of words. That requires a large sales page for that cold audience.

Alright, hopefully Patricia and you listening have learned a lot about sales pages in a short amount of time. Maybe you’re gonna go and revamp some of your sales pages or maybe you realize you don’t have to have such a big sales page and you can go and cut some stuff. Either way, we’re making sales and I’m excited for you.

Thanks so much for listening.