If you’re having conversion trouble, check your language!

There’s a problem that I’ve seen a lot of startup dropshipping stores or higher-payout campaigns having lately.

Does this sound familiar?

You’re getting interest in your store, maybe even some adds to cart, but you’re just not getting the conversions. And no matter how many ads you split test or how many apps you add to your store, that remains the same.

There’s a hidden killer that I see on a lot of stores – and it may not even be something you’ve considered.

It’s correct language use. If your language isn’t correct, if your grammar’s bad, if you’ve got spelling mistakes … it might seem like a small thing, but it will often kill your conversions.

Why is correct grammar important?

This is 2018, right? In the age of txtspk, Whatsapp, and Twitch chat, isn’t it only old people who care about “correct” grammar?

You’ve got to think about what your language says about you.

Here’s an extreme example: if you’re signing up for a business bank account, and you notice that half the words on their signup page are misspelled, how confident do you feel giving them control of your company’s money?

Or if you’re paying your taxes online and you see that the front page of what you think is your government’s site spells “taxes” as “taxxes” and “revenue” as “revinu”, how sure are you that you’re on the right site? Do you go check the URL to make sure you’re not being phished?

Correct language use is a professionalism and trust signal. And that’s important if you want people to believe you’re a “real” company that they can trust to do other things, like not steal their credit card information and deliver the thing they’ve ordered on time.

Added to that, language use is also in the category of things that are a first impression trust signal. People spot bad grammar and spelling very quickly – and whilst they might keep reading, they’ll be doing so thinking “this might be a scam”.

And even worse than that, incorrect language use is astonishingly common on sites that are genuinely fraudulent. Think about how much badly-written spam you’ve received in the past! Readers will pattern match bad grammar and spelling straight to that.

Correcting bad writing on landing pages in particular (when you’re at the “Desire” and “Action” stage of the AIDA acronym) can have dramatic effects on conversion rate – up to ...