Sell more by giving your best advise

o start off this article I would like you to know that I hate selling. I like the outcome of a sale but I don't enjoy to be like the pushy salesman.

When I started my career in marketing more than 10 years ago we used marketing techniques like copywriting to sell products online. I soon realized I was pretty good at it, but I didn’t enjoy that my success came on the fundament of putting other people into debt - just for my own financial success. 

I mentioned this to one of my former CEO's. He then told me that I should think about selling as giving people advise. If you advise people, you will make it up to the them to decide whether or not to buy a product. When I realised this, I also realised that I became better at selling. 

The technique I am about to explain will only bring you success if you believe in your product and, if you believe that the best product will always win in the end. This is the reason I have changed my career path in the recent years to not only focus on marketing and eCommerce, but to also focus more on the product through UX and UI Design. 

Remove the barriers to buy

Instead of trying to force people to buy we should think of selling as removing the barriers to buying. Ask yourself why your users accept one offer and reject another. Instead of pushing the customers through your landingpage telling them what to do, you should focus on removing the barriers for people so they won't leave your page. There is a huge difference between what I see as push communication and pull communication. We wan’t to pull the users towards our call to actions buttons rather than pushing them. The reasons for this are very clear. You are probably well aware that many users add products to baskets (Shopping carts) just to find the delivery costs or save them for later. Many of these people are actually looking for information because they were pushed into your sales funnel. When we use pull copywriting we will plan our communication so people naturally will take the decision of buying a product or not based on what they know. If they know enough about the product and service, they will make their decision before they drop off on your checkout page.

See your target audience as real people

I think that many online marketers over the years become too attracted to their data, but I believe that we must never forget that what we look at as users are real individual people with real feelings. The key here is to communicate with empathy. People will never trust you if they don’t feel empathy. You need to be credible and tell them the truth.

Create identity

I would like you to do something. Not for me, but for yourself. Go to your most important landingpage. Now remove your product and brand name from the landingpage and replace it with your competitors (You should actually not do this, but imagine this). If your copywriting still makes sense, you lack identity. You are not giving your users enough reason to choose your product over your competition.

Bring value or keep quiet

Your information should be useful. If not it is better to keep it simple. Writing just for the sake of it is an expression of anxiety that strips away the value of words and prevents good copywriting from happening. Keeping in mind Hicks law; that the more options a user is presented with, the longer it will take them to make a decision. This follows the K.I.S.S model; Keep It Simple, Stupid. If we look at Miller’s law, a former professor in psychology, the average number a person can only keep in mind is 7 (plus or minus 2) items of information in their working memory at a time. This is especially important for first time users visiting your landingpage.

I hope these tips will give you the tools to communicate better. After all, your communication should bring harmony between the business goals and the desires of the business audience.