Posted in Landing Page Optimization	August 12, 2008

Maximize conversion rates with solo orderflows and independent information products

Solo orderflows maximize conversion rates on a single product. Imagine you are a travel publisher and you offer six books on these topics: cruises, safaris, island getaways, business travel, family vacations and Disney. Since you only have one book on cruises, not several books on the topic, then you should use a solo orderflow.

However, if you offered several books on cruises, you might use a shopping cart. This is because someone who buys one cruise book is more likely to buy another cruise book, and a shopping cart makes this easier than a solo order flow. If you only offer one cruise book, the chances of your buyer also being interested in safaris are slim to none.

Here are 8 reasons why you might use a solo orderflow:

1. You only have one product per publishing topic to sell. Like the example above, if you have six very different topics, and only one product to sell per topic—you should be using a solo orderflow to simplify the check-out process.

2. People who buy this product don’t buy other products. This is common for high-priced items and events; there is no reason to put your users through a shopping cart if they can check out more easily through a solo order flow.

3. Your product has a very limited cross-sell. If you can’t think of half a dozen things that you could recommend to your customers as a complimentary product, then a solo orderflow with a single upsell might be in order.

4. Your products are relatively high value and high priced. If you have an arsenal of low priced products, you’re more likely to have users who are purchasing more than one product. Higher-priced products benefit from salesletter landing pages and solo orderflows.

5. Your product is best supported by a long copy landing page. Information products have the highest conversion rates on long copy landing pages. You can disagree if you want but we’ve split tested this with dozens of publishers and the result is always the same: long copy works.

6. You have more than one medium to offer this product on. If you can offer your product on multiple platforms—such as a CD and book—you can offer a salesletter with radio buttons and three choices: CD, Book, or CD + Book package. Upselling on this kind of landing page is not only easy—it’s very successful for information products.

7. Your product is an event. If the product you are selling is an event, or a series of events, you should be using a solo orderflow. You can always offer your users more than one radio button for different event packages, but you will have higher conversions with a solo order flow with long salesletter copy.

8. You have a great upsell. A very good reason to use a solo orderflow is if you have something great to upsell to. If you are selling a newsletter, that product might be a book; if you are selling an event, that product might be the post-event recording. Whatever the product, if you have another product that is high-priced and complimentary, this is the best place to upsell it.

One of the common misconceptions about solo orderflows is that you don’t have as many opportunities to upsell, since you only have one upsell landing page following the transaction.This is somewhat true—the lower priced the upsell, the higher response rate you will get.

Instead though, think of it this way: If you could get an 80% conversion rate with a lower priced item in a shopping cart, or a 20% conversion rate on a much higher priced item with a solo order flow—which would you choose?