How The Law of Visibility Directly Grows Your Sales
Listen on the go by downloading the audio of today’s video here.
- The Law of Visibility states that conversions occur when offers are more visible.
- By employing the Law of Visibility for your own business, you could see a sales boost of $200 or more a day.
Welcome to another edition of 10-Minute Matt Hacks, where I teach you how to be more awesome in digital marketing, and accelerate your creativity and entrepreneurial spirit. My name is Matt Ackerson, and I'm the founder of AutoGrow.co.
Today, we're tackling a specific problem, namely that you want to exert maximum influence to directly grow your sales. One of the ways you can do that is right on your website. It’s right under your nose and you might not even know it.
The overall solution to this problem requires an understanding of what I call "The Law of Visibility." I'll also tell you a very practical way you can apply this to your business.
Back in the day, if you wanted to drive sales for your business, you'd go to an advertising agency. That agency would place an ad for you in the paper or they would put up a giant billboard on the side of the road with your name, number and place of business. If people want to buy from you, they would give you a call or they would come in and buy from you directly.
Today, things are much more complex, because there's a lot more marketing channels and competition, since it's easier than ever to get online and start making an income from an online business.
Now, with all this complexity, it's important to understand that there are systematic ways for you to get leverage and control over all this complexity, while eliminating some of the guesswork. This comes back to the Law of Visibility.
What Is The Law of Visibility?
The Law of Visibility, which I originally wrote about in a guest post on Kissmetrics called "The 7 Laws of Sales Funnel Physics," (shared over 700 times on social media to date) says that "offers must be seen for sales and conversions to occur." Offers must be seen for sales and conversions to occur.
I say that twice because it may sound obvious, but it can be very easy for people to forget. The Law of Visibility also says that “people will convert more often on offers that are highly visible and noticeable."
So, people see an offer and it's there, and it remains highly visible on the page, like a call-to-action button or a navigation that scrolls with them down the page. They're more likely to click those links in the navigation or click that call-to-action button, because in this hypothetical case, it's in their face. It's visible and it's noticeable, so they're more likely to click it.
How to Use the Law of Visibility to Grow Sales
How might you employ this to actually get results and grow your sales? Well, at the beginning of 2017, we were trying to make a leap with the business. We wanted to make the business completely focused on selling online products. The truth is we knew a lot, but we just weren't ready to do that. We needed more of a runway and had more to learn.
Although we failed to make that leap, over the course of three months, we did make really good progress.
For example, we had already developed and started the company years prior and then we had launched an info product a year earlier. So we said, "Okay, if we're going to go with becoming a products business, and we need to sell a certain number of copies of this training course that we put together, how do we do it?"
Well, we looked around our website and realized, "Okay, well, people can only get to this offer by going through our email funnel and the links that are in there." That's all well and good.
It made sense, you know, you're kind of making that offer until you've built trust and goodwill and all that. We said, "You know what? We need sales now, because we’re bootstrapping this business and want to grow it, and we have to grow it fast. So, how do we grow it faster?”
We put a link to the landing page for the sales page for this training course right into the navigation. Sales started to go up. We said, "Huh, that's interesting. We thought you had to nurture people and give away lots of free content and then maybe they would check out the offer."
It turns out, people were coming to our website, they were interested in the content that we were already putting out there and they were searching for sales funnels, or all kinds of other related topics that we've written about. Finding that page, and because they trusted us from the content that we had already put out for free, they were ready to invest in the training course with us, to help them grow and further solve whatever marketing problem related to funnels the training course helped to solve.
We decided to make our page even more visible. We made the sales page be our home page. It was kind of a crazy idea but, hey, we wanted to move away from services faster rather than slower. So we said, let's do it.
After we did it, we started making sales every other day, which was a revelation because we were charging $79 to $129 for a copy of our course, the Sales Funnel Blueprint.
It was great because, and maybe this is a little bit of vanity, but a friend was working a couple of jobs at the time. He's working full-time somewhere else now, but he was working in a restaurant, and he used to kind of brag, like, "oh, man, I made like $200, $250 in cash tonight."
But then, when we started to make this transition with the business, I used to remember what he said and kind of compare myself to that. I would say it to myself like, you know, I wouldn't say it to him, because I didn't wanna brag. I kept that private, but I was like, oh cool, like we made $129 today and I did nothing. You know, relatively speaking, you know, of course I was working hard to grow sales by growing traffic in other ways. But it was a cool moment because it was applying this principle, the Law of Visibility, and seeing the results from it firsthand.
One Action to Take
The one action to take from watching this video is to go look at your website and consider the different offers you have in your sales funnel. What are the things you're trying to sell? It doesn't matter if it's a physical product, service or info products. We've worked on all types of funnels, and this rule just applies and it just works.
You don't have to operate on the assumption that you can't sell something without first working really hard to nurture the relationship. Some people just want to buy a product that's a solution to their problem. So remember that, and remember the Law of Visibility when you try to find this opportunity for how you can make your offer more visible to get more people to that sales page.
Here are a couple of ideas to consider as examples. Maybe you're only giving one link in a series of emails that works to sell your product. Maybe you give a link from the second email onward. When the customer clicks the link, it brings them to the sales page.
You could do what we did, which is put a link in the navigation and make it your homepage. If you're looking to get more people to the checkout page, maybe you see that a big bottleneck of people are getting stuck on the sales page. Well, you would actually be very surprised at how many people just won't get to the checkout page because they don't see the call-to-action button.
For example, we recently launched a tripwire and it was selling a batch of files, resources and templates that people can use as a reference when building their own funnel. Customers would arrive on the thank-you page for that, where they could download it. Even though there was a link right there and very little text on the entire page and it says "click here to download," people just missed it and they'd be emailing us. We've since fixed it and now it's in like a big red button that says, "click here to download the swipe file."
People cannot miss it now, but just by increasing the visibility of it, the conversion we wanted was for people to download it and see that the link was right there on the thank-you page. Even in the case of people buying, that's just another example of the Law of Visibility at work. Of course, the opposite effect did occur before we fixed it, where people weren't seeing the button. It wasn't visible enough and it wasn't noticeable enough.
So, from this video, the one action to take is to bring some ways that you can make your core offer or offers, whether it be for an info product or services business, become more visible so you can drive more sales and leads for your bottom line.
Here are a few case studies you can read as well: this one from Jungle Scouts and this one from Business Case Studies.
If you're ready to take it to the next level and you don't want to miss another Matt Hack, where I give away one great tip in 10 minutes or less, then click on the link directly below this video to get our newsletter.
If you're on YouTube, be sure to hit the subscribe button so that you don't miss the notifications when we come out with a new video. If you're watching this on our blog, click on the link to sign up for the newsletter directly below this video.
So tune in to the next video coming tomorrow, and until next time, my name is Matt Ack in the Matt hat, and I’m delivering your daily dose of Matt Hacks. Keep hustling and stay focused. I'll talk to you soon.
