Selling natural health supplements online requires a very unique and sophisticated approach. There are lots of Federal Trade Commission (FTC) restrictions on what you can and can’t say and often times it feels like the FTC does not want you to sell at all if you read through their dietary supplements advertising guide. As if the only statement they would be okay with is simply “here’s my supplement product” with no call to action or salesmanship at all.
That may be 100% compliant but you won’t sell any bottles that way. These pitfalls don’t exist in other industries. And conversely the salesmanship required to sell supplements is vastly different than any other sale because selling supplements comes down to knowing how to leverage trust and belief.
But sometimes that salesmanship can easily get the better of health marketers and the legal team squashes all the beautiful hooks, headlines and intensity out of the sales page.
This results in many health marketers taking an overly conservative approach, weather they like it or not, leaning on the side of not selling at all. Because of this, many health entrepreneurs are leaving money on the table, and not selling as much as they can and thus not making as big of an impact on the world. Some, but very few are taking an opposite approach and pushing the boundaries too far, hoping not to get caught.
The root cause of this problem is not the FTC or the legal department, but rather the midst of selling health supplements online. Most marketers think of marketing and selling as the same thing and thats where the trouble lies of the online supplement industry, resulting in an over the top sales page with claims that will make a lawyers skin crawl and light a fire under the FTC or the exact opposite, just the bare minimum with not enough salesmanship.
But there is a better way.
The key is to separate the marketing from the selling.
But you must first understand the difference between them. The simplest way to think about marketing is that it is oriented towards helping people buy, think of it as the education, whereas the selling concept is more orientated towards helping the seller.
This goes back to the other parties self interest in our accelerated trust formula:
Accelerated Trust Online = (Logic + Belief) +
(Anxiety x Credibility) – The Other Party’s Self Interest
Self interest can be defined with the question, how much interest does the party that is trying to influence you have in the selling message? This is the only element that is negatively weighted in the accelerated trust formula. If the self interest is too heavy handed in the sales pitch this could shift all of the elements on the left side of the equation, logic, belief and credibility down and trust can be easily lost along with the sale. We can’t eliminate all of self interest, if we do we eliminate the sale completely.
So separating marketing and selling is not only good for building accelerated trust, which closes the sale but it’s also good to keep the FTC at bay and your legal team happy. It’s a win – win – win.
So how do you do it?
One way to separate marketing and selling is with a bridge page.
A bridge page is a web page that goes right before your sales page in your funnel. In the case of health marketing this is usually in the form of an advertorial page where all of the marketing and educating can be done on it’s own, devoid of selling, which happens on the next page, which is the sales page.
This separates the goals of your two web pages as well. Before your sales page had to do all the heavy lifting, now your bridge page bears the sole weight of getting your visitor to the next step in your funnel, the sales page. Leaving your sales page to focus on closing the sale after the education has been done on the marketing bridge page.
Often times lumping both of these functions together results in a really, really, really long sales page, causing the visitor to have information fatigue. Visitors literally bail out of the page when they are feeling overwhelmed from length. Although this usually is a symptom of a copy and design problem, not really one of length. Or the visitor skims the page frantically looking for the offer, or for you to get to the point. In either case, the marketer never knows if the visitor really absorbed the education / marketing portion of the page or simply didn’t read it because of friction due to the length.
Granted there are a few exceptions where you do want to combine the marketing/education and selling in one go.
One is where the visitor is highly motivated to solve their problem. In situations like these, the prospects desire and self story usually always outweighs the challenges they need to surmount.
If motivation is high enough, and they are desperate for a solution, a visitor will be more willing to overcome the friction of length in a long form sales letter and or a video sales letter. In such a case, you’ll likely have a sale.
Another exception is when a visitor leaves a video sales letter (VSL) page early and is presented with a “wait don’t go” exit pop offer that takes them to the long form sales letter with the marketing and selling combined in one long page. In that case, the visitor is usually suspicious about some alternative agenda, i.e. an offer for sale, or is feeling trapped and or has the impression that the other parties self interest seems like it might be too high, as outlined in our accelerated trust formula.
Accelerated Trust Online = (Logic + Belief) +
(Anxiety x Credibility) – The Other Party’s Self Interest
Or the visitor has fallen victim to friction due to the length of the VSL, in any case you want to at least try to get them to stick around a bit longer and at least present your offer. Heck the reason they could be leaving the VSL page is because they just don’t like those sort of videos, in which case they could be readers rather than viewers, so a long form sales letter might just be the preferred medium for them.
But regardless of the method you’re using, video sales letter or long form sales letter the approach of separating the marketing from the selling is the same.
Let’s examine one way of doing this using the three act play as our guide.
Where the education marketing is to be done in acts one and two, leaving the critical role of selling to come in at act three.
Next, we’re going to break down what goes into each act of our three part structure…
First You Want To Set The Stage
First you want to set the stage in act one. This is the marketing / education part where you talk about anything and everything related to the problem. This is firmly planted in the (Logic + Belief) portion of the accelerated trust formula.
Let’s take arthritis as an example. In this first section, or act one, you can discuss things like:
- What is arthritis?
- What causes arthritis?
There is absolutely no selling at this stage, it’s all education marketing. You’re literally setting the stage for the act two by educating the reader in act one about the condition.
A more advanced technique that you can use for act one is to layer in the pain of having arthritis by discussing things like:
What are the physical consequences of having arthritis as related to cartilage and bone?
What is life like with arthritis pain?
Then You Want To Star The Product
Then comes act two, where you star the product. In this section you want to build on top of the stage you set for the product in act one. You don’t want to actually present the product just yet, you just want to prepare the audience to be acceptive of the product when it’s time for the big reveal of your offer.
Continuing with our arthritis example, you want to talk about things like:
- What is a healthy joint?
- What are the components of the joint?
- What does a healthy joint need to remain healthy?
- How does a healthy joint function?
- How does nutrition and the ingredients in your health supplement or solution, support a healthy joint?
Talk about each ingredient one by one, not the product itself. This allows you to also support the (Anxiety x Credibility) portion of the trust formula with proof of scientific studies for the ingredients or features in your product, without having a study commissioned for your product itself.
Accelerated Trust Online = (Logic + Belief) +
(Anxiety x Credibility) – The Other Party’s Self Interest
In this stage you’re building the case for a solution which is your product, so that you can present your offer in act three.
Finally Comes The Bridge
We finally come to act three, where the reader will bridge together the final piece that will allow you to properly make the offer in the best light.
The (Logic + Belief) portion of the trust formula comes back into play here in the visitors mind, where they leap from…
Accelerated Trust Online = (Logic + Belief) +
(Anxiety x Credibility) – The Other Party’s Self Interest
If this is what causes arthritis and if this is what a healthy joint needs to remain healthy, then this product must be the solution.
In act three you want to talk about things like:
- If we can maintain joints then degenerative joint pain is a non issue.
- The symptoms are not what we want to treat, we want to get to the root cause of the problem.
The visitor then presupposes the product as the solution to the problem you’ve set up in acts one and two. At which time they are ready to be presented with the offer to buy.
Putting It All Together
Building a health business is hard enough, you don’t need to make it harder by hoping to get your page in front of only those visitors that are highly motivated and ready to buy. You need to set the stage, star the product and bridge the gap.
Bridging the gap in the prospects mind by skillfully separating the education from the selling is part of the secret sauce to crushing it with natural health products online.
Visitors need a trusted guide to get over the bridge of presupposition to the solution that is best for their long term health. The three act structure along with the accelerated trust formula of:
Accelerated Trust Online = (Logic + Belief) +
(Anxiety x Credibility) – The Other Party’s Self Interest
Are two frameworks for setting up your health offer in the best light possible to effectively initiate an online purchase that can be used regardless of the modality or method, long form sales letters (LFSL) via reading, video sales letters (VSL) via audio and visual, or advertorial pages leading to either a LFSL or VSL. Regardless of the way you educate and sell health products and natural supplements online it always comes back to compliance, trust and belief.
Better health products truly make a bigger impact on society and the world but only if your prospects can get over the hurdles of trust and belief and those placed before us by the FTC in order to buy and become customers.
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