Since moving into digital products, I’ve had to learn a few cold hard facts about the difference between sales letters and traditional websites.
First off, the biggest difference between the types of websites is the header. In traditional websites, we are taught to have interesting graphics, logos, nav buttons and sometimes even text… all in our header.
However with sales letters, my multivariate testing reveals the same site design (without a header) converts almost a full 0.57% higher than my original design, which had attention-grabbing images and even a line of sales text. But when I had my designer remove all text and buttons from the original design, the difference between the two styles was substantially less, with the header-less design selling 0.23% better.
The small percentage points don’t sound like much, however it means I make an additional sale for every 200 visitors with the header-less design, as well as one extra sale for every 400+ visitors with the plain header. In turn, this makes the adwords bill much easier to afford, especially if you are selling someone else’s product with a landing page.
My theory behind this is that attention-grabbing headers tend to compete for attention with your heading text, which dulls any punch you may be able to deliver with it. Also, having navigation links or buttons in the header draws people away from your sales letter and into sub pages where you often end up losing their interest.
October 22nd, 2007 at 6:32 pm
I don’t have experience with sales letters but I know you’re right. Thanks for sharing the stats.