If you want to sell your products directly from either a long-copy landing page, also called an online sales letter, or a video sales letter (VSL), the way you go about it depends on your primary source of traffic.
The two types of traffic are hot or warm traffic, and cold traffic. Hot/warm traffic means you are driving traffic to your landing page via e-mails to your own e-list or through e-mails your affiliates send to their lists.
Because of the relationship the people on the e-list have with either you or your affiliate, they will be more inclined to read long copy and buy from you, which is why conversion rates are highest with hot or warm traffic.
Cold traffic is clicks generated through Facebooks ads, pay-per-click ads, and similar short-copy media.
Because the cold traffic does not know you or have a relationship with you, they are less inclined to read long copy or buy from you, which is why conversion rates are lower for cold traffic than for long traffic.
Here are my recommendations for marketing with landing pages or VSLs to both warm traffic and hot traffic:
Since hot/warm traffic knows you, you can get the best results with a powerhouse long-copy landing page. Make it as long as you need to close the sale. Don’t worry about it being too long: if it is interesting and compelling, hot/warm traffic leads will keep reading. And the more they read, the more likely they are to buy.
To maximize results, you should create an exit pop. This is a window that pops up on the screen when the visitor attempts to leave the landing page without making a purchase.
The exit pop offers a free bonus such as a special report; to get it, the prospect has to enter his e-mail address. This way, you at minimum are building your opt-in e-list, giving you future opportunities to market to this person. You also have an immediate opportunity to get an order with an auto-responder series (see below).
If your primary source of clicks is cold traffic, make the landing page a little more concise and less wordy. Remember, these people don’t know you, so they are less inclined to read a lot of copy.
It is often better to convert cold traffic with a two-step process. First, you send them to a squeeze page – a short landing page where you capture their e-mail address by offering a free report. This works because the short, simple copy doesn’t overwhelm the cold lead. The second step is to then use an auto-responder series to drive the prospect to the full-length landing page for product purchase.
When you get visitor e-mail addresses from either an exit pop or a squeeze page, send them an auto-responder conversion series. This is a series of e-mails, typically between 3 and 7 efforts, that are sent to the prospect automatically via auto-responder software, usually every other day. The e-mails have a link to the long-copy product landing page, and the copy motivates the prospect to click on the page and order the product.