Buy Button Rate Part 1

Welcome back to the 8 Profit Lever Series!

Throughout this series you will discover the 8 main needle movers inside your business. These are the conversion elements you most directly impact your bottom-line at the end of the day.

The first half of these Profit Levers we refer to as your “Core Funnel Metrics” because they tell the story of your prospect.

It all begins with the Front-Door Factor, aka your optin page. Will your prospect choose or choose not to enter their email address and step through the front door into your world?

Once your prospect comes inside, the next part of the story I like to call the “Buy Button Rate”. It looks something like this:

Now a couple quick notes about this part of the story. First, for simplicity sake, I am using familiar terms here like “front door” and “shopping cart”. Do not be mistaken though, as we cover your “Core Funnel Metrics” I am not referring to a traditional “e-commerce store”, although the same principles do apply. What we are talking about here is a “direct response marketing funnel”. (A series of marketing steps specifically designed to turn a cold prospect into a new customer.)

Also notice the phrase “pre-frame”. This is mission critical when it comes to getting your prospect to buy. More on this in a moment…

The calculation for this step, commonly called “Sales Page Conversion Rate”, is pretty straightforward.

However, do not let the simplicity of this metric undermine it’s importance. It should be pretty obvious that this second step in your prospect’s conversion story IS the heart of the story. To buy or not to buy. And this is not small task…

You see –

Sweet, sunny yellow, tropical treats. They sell themselves. You know when you want bananas. You know what they taste like. Nobody has to pitch or convince you. You buy them simply because they are there. That’s it.

I think sometimes as entrepreneurs we want to imagine that our product or service is so revolutionary, so life changing, so good that we can just plop it a shelf and every day customers will toss them in their basket like clockwork. This is definitely not the case.

Todd Brown, co-founder of ConversionFly, puts it so well when he says, “Never underestimate the task at hand when it comes to moving prospects to buy. It takes extreme, extraordinary measures to compel people to act!”

Grab your mask because we are about to take a deep drive into maximizing your “Buy Button Factor”.

I am going to break this down into 4 separate areas for you…

So you may be asking, or perhaps you have already heard to the term, “Pre-Frame”.

Pre-framing is all about preparing your prospect mentally and emotionally to buy before you ever ask them to. Whether you realize it or not, everything you do before your prospect hits your sales conversion page or message is part of the “pre-frame”.

For example, even little things like a prospect getting a security message on your optin page, experiencing a little technical glitch, or even a careless typo, impacts your prospect’s frame. Consciously or subconsciously your prospect begins to wonder, “Is this website legit? If the website has issues, the product is probably not so hot either…”

When it comes to how you pre-frame your prospect it typically looks something like this. Your first interaction with your prospect may be an email or an ad (pay per click, Facebook, banner ad, etc). That ad typically entices the prospect to click and visit your optin page. And your optin page gets your prospect to enter their email and then drops them onto your sales page.

Both your email/ad copy and your option page both make up the pre-frame and will have a big impact on the success of your Sales Conversion Message. Your pre-frame actually begins BEFORE your prospect even comes through your front door!

To properly pre-frame your prospect so they are most likely to buy, here is a simple checklist:

We can easily spend an entire post or actual several volumes on pre-framing. For now, here is a high-level, high-impact approach for you.

Stop and think about what your prospect experiences before you start making your pitch.

HAVE YOU MADE A COMPELLING PROMISE?

You don’t want your prospect to hit your sales message and bounce. You want them to engage. To consume. You cannot sell someone who isn’t paying attention!

How do you pre-frame your prospect so they are EXCITED to consume your sales message?

In terms of pre-framing, this means BEFORE they ever get to your sales page you make a promise. A good one. Something chockfull of benefits. Create a mystery. Something that draws them in. In copywriting terms, open a “loop”. Make a claim or start a story that your prospect can only find the answer to on the next page.

It is the NOVICE marketer who thinks the only goal of their optin page is to grab an email address and then dump the prospect onto a sales page. Like they’ve been abducted from a corn field.

Your optin page needs to accomplish two goals. Yes, capturing their email. But also getting them excited, intrigued and motivated to consume your sales message (whether it’s a short form sales letter, VSL or webinar).

DID YOUR PRESENT SOME POWERFUL PROOF?

To amplify the impact of your compelling promise add PROOF. We all know a great testimonial sells. We use them on our sales pages all the time.

Try using testimonials and social proof BEFORE you ever start asking for the sale! Adding proof to your optin page or even your ad or email copy is powerful and can create a nice bump on your Buy Button Rate.

IS YOUR MARKETING FREE OF FLAGS?

Next on the pre-frame checklist, make sure your page are free of flags. Technical glitches, security warnings, poor cross browser or cross device viewing (aka your site looks awesome on FireFox on Desktop, but looks terrible on an iPhone with Safari = no good), typo’s… 

Imagine you are out for a night on the town with your special someone. Your tummy starts to rumble. You spot a new restaurant. You mosey on up to the door. Open it up. The door knob falls off! You manage to pry open the door… and your special someone trips over the wrinkly front carpet!

Are you excited to see the menu?

Probably not! Even though the door knob and the front may have ZERO to do with the quality of the cuisine, they say something powerful to you about the place you now stand. They establish the pre-frame that the restaurant owner doesn’t really care about their business. They don’t care about their customers, and they are not very good at what they do.

When you force your prospect to endure many or even just one flag before they get to your sales conversion message, it hurts you. Period. It’s hard enough to get a prospect to take action when everything goes right. Don’t make a difficult task impossible. Be sure you don’t have any flags.

Last but not least when properly pre-framing, be sure what your prospect sees and experiences BEFORE they get to your sales conversion message is CONGRUENT with what they see AFTER.

Your ad, email copy and optin page must align with your sales page. I’ve made the mistake myself of wanting to jack up my click-through-rate on an ad, or drive up my optin rate, while disregarding where I was sending my prospect after they clicked or opted in. I forgot to keep the end goal in mind.

You never want to say things or position your offer in the pre-frame that does not align with what you are selling on the next page. You can’t create a squeeze page for how to meet the person of your dreams and then on the next page try selling them a miracle growing mango tree. It just doesn’t make sense.

Ok, maybe that’s a little ridiculous. The point is, the way your ad or optin page positions the prospect before they get to your sales page should be like a builder who is laying the framework and foundation of a master structure.

As you over deliver, and while you keep them on the edge of their seats with a truly compelling sales message full of surprises… just like a great movie, your prospect should be able to look back at the very beginning of their journey (when they first clicked your ad), and even though the ending was a delightful surprise that moved them to take action, they can sense how they skillfully saw it “coming” from the very beginning.

This is what is means to properly pre-frame your prospects.

This is just the first of four areas we will be covering on boosting your “Buy Button Rate”.

In part 2 of this post, I will cover the next 2 areas, nailing your Audience and dialing in your Offer.

By the end of this 4-part post, you will understand exactly what it takes to not only craft a sales conversion message that converts like crazy, but exactly what steps you need to take to transform any of your under-performing or even broken sales pages and bring them to life with new sales. For now, take a look back at your current marketing funnels and campaigns. Do a thorough review of how you are pre-framing and what you can do to improve it. Then watch for the bump in sales!