Get More Sales with Trigger Links & Personalized Copy

"Your product is only as good as the problems it can solve for someone. What I want to hear during a demo is what problems you are solving and for who[m], not a laundry list of features in your product."

That's from Ryan Leask, who manages data engineering over at Facebook. (A company that does personalization very, very well.)

In that quote, he's talking about live product sales demos. The best demos are tailored to address the specific needs of the people on the receiving end.

But we can do the same for our product sales pages, which are sort of like hard-coded sales demos.

The following tactic has helped increase sales of Double Your Freelancing Rate by ~1.7x. 

Most people who visit the DYFRate sales page come from an email course, Charge What You're Worth.

The very first email you used to get when joining that course asked you what you were hoping the free email course would help you do:

And to opt-in to the course, you had to tell me what kind of freelancer you are:

By the time you've gone through the email course and you're pitched on the paid course, I have a minimum of two segments defined:

• I know what kind of work you do
• I know what struggle led you to "buy" (opt-in) to the free email course

Let's look at what I've done with this data ...

Personalization can (and should) be subtle.

I'm not a fan of Intercom-style popup boxes that scream, "Hey FNAME!" Because hey, no one wants to know they're being sold to.

Really good, really effective personalization is going to take into account the context we know about the person we're speaking to and makes a series of slight adjustments.

So in the case of the DYFRate, the person viewing that sales page initially paid for the preliminary free course with their time and an email address.

By understanding why someone "bought", I could better understand how I'd ultimately present the paid product to them at the end of the email course. 

Someone who is losing every single proposal they send is in a much different spot than someone who just wants to start value-pricing their work.

I did this using trigger links, which is a feature that Drip and a number of other email marketing platforms provide.

A trigger link is a link in an email that, when clicked, will do something - like apply a tag to the subscriber or write to a custom field.

Then, I sit on the data I get from that trigger link until the pitch. And once the email course wraps up and they're pitched on the paid product, I take what they told me they need help with *RIGHT NOW* and use that in the pitch emails and the sales page I link them to.

To achieve a 1.7x increase in email course conversions, I really didn't do that much.

I changed:

• The headline of the page
• The usage of the word "freelancer" on the page (you can see more about this in this video)
• How I pitch the offer

What I'm not doing (yet):

• Change the testimonials to be from successful people like them (e.g. freelance designers who were struggling to win proposals)
• Change anything more than a handful of words

While the effort was small (just a few tweaks to language), the payoff has been great. And it will only get better.

It makes sense why this works so well... what do you think is more appealing for a designer?

• A course on pricing for freelancers
• A course that helps designers learn how to rethink the way they sell and price themselves so they can close more proposals

Pretty obvious, right?

But here's what many of you I've been meeting with have told me:

"Brennan, I get the upside to smart personalization. But 1) I don't have the time and 2) it would be a lot of work to get setup."

Hopefully, point #2 is now a non-issue. An hour of work in your email marketing app and RightMessage can, quite literally, help you double the performance of a common funnel like email course -> sales page.

But point #1 still stands...

We're working on a white glove service for qualified customers (you have traffic and a decent customer lifetime value).