You have traffic. People are seeing your site, your product. You’ve nearly perfected your headline writing skills, and you present your product well throughout the body of your salesletter.
Now it’s time to get the prospective buyer to part with some of their hard earned cash. It’s time to close.
In traditional sales, person to person, the close cannot be effective if it’s never attempted. Rule number one about the close, or “call to action”…it must exist. You CANNOT leave your salesletter hanging on the details of the product and the sales pitch…and an order button. You must ask for the business. Demand action…make it desirable…make it necessary.
You know the drill from every commercial advertisement you’ve seen on television…
“Operators are standing by … place your order NOW!”
Don’t delay. Quantities are limited. The next 10 callers get “xyz”. Yada, yada, yada. Blah, blah, blah. Reminds me of the teacher on the Charlie Brown cartoons: “waaa, waaa, waaa, waaa, waaaa.”
Now as every good copywriter will tell you: it’s all about creating urgency. In other words, you don’t want them to delay in making the decision to buy … they might not ever be back again. You’ve got their attention RIGHT NOW, so you want them to make their decision RIGHT NOW.
Perhaps the best way to get them to do this is to impose some kind of deadline or limit which makes it necessary to order soon in order to take advantage of a special price, extra incentive, availability, or opportune time frame.
Special Price. By offering a discount to all who purchase within a specific period of time (or to a selected number of people who order … I.E. The first 100), you can create a sense of urgency. This is more effective if you are offering a premium product at a higher price point, than if you are offering something in the $15-20 range.
Extra Incentive. You may want to consider offering an additional bonus to those who order within a specified time or specific number. This CAN be an effective option for you to use. For example: If your product is about “setting up a mini-salesletter” you might state, “The first 100 people who order will receive a free copy of a legal disclaimer you can use on your website to protect you from FTC lawsuits and seizures…”
Availability or Restriction. Another option is to remove the special report from circulation after a specified date or a specified number of units are sold. Or, one other strategy that like is taking a special report “off the market” for an unspecified period of time. In other words, you “retire” the report for several months and then bring it back later – or even add more information to it and convert it into a larger product. Another idea is to no longer make it available from your website and only offer it as a backend to a second report you create later, etc.
For a restriction you could make a time frame appealing…like “make enough for another vacation before Christmas”, or “lose 15 pounds before spring break”.
The point is, you want to create a desire to act now. If they’ve read to the end of your salesletter…they’re interested! Close the sale. If you’ve created a product you believe in, you deserve to ask them to buy…convince them to buy. You don’t lie, or cheat. You make it better to act than to wait.
That sums it all up…make it better to act than to wait…
