The 3 Most Important Elements of a Health Sales Page (And Which ONE Can Double or Triple Your Online Conversion Rate and Revenue)

Since health buyers are very different from other types of buyers online… When optimizing for maximum revenue in the health and wellness market, most marketers, even seasoned pros, all put way too much emphasis on the copy.

This is likely because of the copywriters have taught us to think that way and the majority of books in the direct response marketing world are about how to write copy that converts.

But the truth is, copywriting as NOT the most important element of a high converting page. It is an important element but it is actually third on the list of elements that every health marketer should focus on.

Your main focus should first be on “the list” that is ensuring you’re targeting the right audience. Next comes “the offer” and finally “the copy”.

When it comes to selling health products online, the copy is so far below the offer. In fact, the offer ALONE has the ability to increase your response rate by double or more, if done right.

The copy is not to be overlooked though and they work together but their relationship is different… the offer has an inverse relationship to your copywriting.

So, the weaker the offer is, the better the copy needs to be. And inversely, the stronger your offer is, the weaker your copy can be. (This is not a case for weak copy however, all three elements, list, offer and copy, work together in this broad stroke view of selling health and wellness online.)

So What Exactly Is An Offer?

Many marketers, get the offer confused with the product, and this is why in my opinion that they place so much emphasis on copywriting and undervalue the importance of the offer. In short, they THINK they’ve got the offer covered because they THINK it’s the product….The offer is NOT the product. But it is what you’re actually selling, to the prospect. The product itself, is only one piece of the offer but it’s NOT the offer itself. Nor is the offer a list of features or even benefits.

The product is the actual deliverable. That is, the thing the prospect gets. And the product is composed of one or more features, which are elements of the product.

Each feature should express why that feature is valuable to the prospect. How a feature articulates the “why” should overcome an objection the prospect may have. Sometimes this is called the Feature Advantage: Feature > Advantage > Benefit.

The benefit of each feature can be broken down the functional benefit, the dimensional benefit and the emotional benefit.

The functional benefit is what the feature specifically does for the prospect. The question in the prospects mind is, “What does this supplement or medical device equipment actually do?” or “what will it do for me?”

The dimensional benefit brings the functional benefit to life in the prospects mind. This taps into the prospects beliefs and desires allowing them to imagine the future state of their life because of this individual feature.

The emotional benefit expresses how the dimensional benefit is going to make the prospect feel emotionally. This is the emotional component of the copy that acts as a motivator for the prospect to buy to satisfy the inner emotional payoff of their desire and belief.

So the offer then is the packaging of value that the prospect is buying.

This includes things like:

The product (across functional, dimensional and emotional benefits)
Bonuses and premiums that aded on to increase the overall offer value
Free shipping
The discount structure i.e. 20% OFF and or BOGO’s (Buy One Get One) deals
Positioning of the price against the “Retail” price
The guarantee (risk reversal)

I covered how to best express the value of the offer as the visual expression of the value proposition in a previous article for further reading.

Now let’s look at some specific offer types as examples…

7 Different Offer Types

The following is NOT an exhaustive list of offers. It is meant to give you a starting point to see how you can structure your offer. Feel free to try each of them.

Hard Offer – This is the typical offer that you’ll see on every standard E-commerce website like Amazon. Here’s the product, here’s how much it cost, you pay in-full up-front and your item gets shipped.
Soft Offer – This is an offer where the prospect can get your product and pay later, or pay for a part of the total price. For example pay half now and pay the remainder later, after experiencing the product. (Soft offers will almost always out perform a hard offers, but the risk is in collecting the remaining about at a later date.) There are other iterations of this, for example pay a small shipping and handling fee now and we’ll bill the rest later or the classic infomercial offer of pay in three “easy installments” with just the first installment due today. Essentially you’re adjusting the terms of payment but not the actual cost. (Although in some cases you may add on a finance charge for installment payments.)
Free Plus Shipping Offer – In this offer you’re just collecting the shipping price or shipping and handling and the price of the actual product for the customer is free. This is a low ticket offer that is used to just get a buyer then capitalize on an OTO offer, explained below.
Limited Offer – This is a pure scarcity driven offer. The trick to making it work is to have a legitimate reason why it is actually limited in some way, for example a limited supply of items in stock, or the number of seats available are restricted and out of your control, etc. This offer as well as the Limited-Time Offer below are critical part to Trust in our Trust and Belief framework for optimizing health, wellness and beauty offers.
Limited-Time Offer – This is different than a Limited Offer above. The Limited-Time offer is a deadline driven offer, where the prospect must act now because the time is limited and will expire soon. For example a 24 hour flash sale, again a reason why, that makes sense is critical.
One-Time Offer – This is an offer that a prospect will see only once. They make up for any loss-leaders on the front end of a funnel. (One-Time Offers are also known as OTO offers in the direct marketing space.) These are typically used in an up-sell slot after the initial front-end purchase to increase the average order value, which is critical to making a cold traffic funnel work.
Combination Offer – This is a mix and match, combination of two or more types of offers above. The opportunity to create unexplored offers by combining these is virtually limitless.

The Part That Most Every Marketer And Copywriter Misses by a Mile…

It’s becoming almost standard procedure when working with any copywriter that they give you two or three alternative headlines to test out and sometimes they even give you two or three alternative leads (the first 100 – 300 words or so of a long form sales letter or video sales letter) to test to get a higher lift.

But as you now know, the bigger leverage point directly above the copy is… the offer. What nearly every health marketer and copywriter misses is, testing the offer ITSELF. They default to trying different headlines, and leads overlooking the offer compleatly.

And now that you understand the difference between the product and the offer, the good news is that you don’t need to change the product to come up with a new offer. You can literally come up with an almost unlimited amount of offers for the same product using one or a combination of the different offer types above.

But even above your offer, your main focus should first be on “the list” that is ensuring you’re targeting the right audience. Then “the offer” since it alone has the ability to increase your response rate by double or more, even above the copy, which comes last in this triad approach to maximizing revenue for health and wellness sales online.