Haven’t we all wondered what took us so long after we made some (really great) purchase that we procrastinated on for months or even years?
And this happens with items we’d likely have said we were “almost” ready to buy!
Isn’t it amazing how long most of us can want something that’s well within our financial reach before we actually pull the trigger and buy it?
Well, your Website visitors are doing the same thing! Especially for items or services that cost over, let’s say, $50.
And that ain’t good. Here are the problems with this situation:
- eventually, the buyer will forget about your product or service in order to focus on a new want
- “almost convinced” visitors don’t increase your conversion rate or put money in your pocket
- those customer just might buy from someone else — someone who could convince them to pull the trigger
If you want to increase your conversion rate, you have to help those buyers overcome their procrastination. And this Dumb Little Man article can help you do that. The article tells you how to beat your own procrastination, but the principles apply to copywriting as well:
1) Eliminate Fear
Buyers don’t procrastinate out of laziness. If they’re procrastinating, they’re usually afraid of parting with their hard earned cash and not receiving full value for their money. Re-check your copy to ensure that you:
- Have material that preemptively answers buyer questions and concerns
- Use risk reversals, or at the very least a guarantee
- Employ user reviews, or at least have authentic sounding testimonials
- Provide adequate substantiation and proof for your claims
- Demonstrate that your product delivers benefits despite normal human frailties
- Reveal your company to be solid, reputable, and trustworthy on your About Us page
2) Cultivate Desire
“…start with the end in mind. How will things look when they’re all done? What will you see and how will you feel?
If you can associate strong emotions with the end result, you can cultivate a burning desire.”
Steve Martile wrote this about personal procrastination, but simply switch the “you” to “your reader,” and you can easily apply this to copywriting.
- Are you acting as the movie director of your readers’ dreams?
- Are you helping them see how much your product or service will allow them to kick butt, both immediately after purchase and long-term?
- Does your copy cultivate desire?
It’s not uncommon to find copy that does one or the other well — either cultivating desire or eliminating fear. But copy that does both is much harder to find, which is why those companies and Websites that do manage to do both enjoy a competitive advantage.
* Hat tip to @copyblogger for tweeting the link to the Dumb Little Man article.
