The only role of a sales page is to make readers deeply associate a single idea with the product. That's the conclusion I've reached after spending countless hours researching, writing, and relentlessly optimizing dozens of sales pages over the last four years.

Isn't the only role of a sales page to sell products? Yes, but that's like saying the goal of a company is to make money - while technically true, it's too vague to be useful or actionable. On the other hand, if we make people emotionally associate a single specific concept with our product, we can sell anything.

Apple laptops are beautifully designed and expertly crafted. Evernote is your second brain. Moleskine notebooks are for creative and hip people. Slack makes team communication effortless. These are very simple ideas that have driven millions of purchases. The trick is to find the right one that resonates with our product's target audience.

I think the most common mistake that people make when writing sales pages is that they say too much. In product design, when we don't have a specific idea of how people will use our product, it's tempting to just throw in tons of features haphazardly. Similarly, if we don't know the specific benefits that drive purchases when writing a sales page, it's much easier to just list all of them so we don't miss anything. Unfortunately, this puts emphasis on the wrong things.

Think back to the last product page you read. Can you remember the benefits list, feature set, or technical specs of the product? The answer to this question probably depends on whether you felt like you needed the product or not. You'd remember everything if you really believed that it could help you find love, close more sales, or lose 20 pounds. But if the sales page didn't make you care, you might not even remember the product's name.

When we buy an Apple computer, it's more for the "Apple" than the "computer". People used to buy PowerBooks because they "just worked", which tapped into the latent frustration of constantly getting BSODed in Windows. Now the same people buy Macbooks because of the overwhelming emphasis on superior craftsmanship, an ideal that users themselves aspire to.

The image above offers zero information yet still occupies a huge spot above the fold on the MacBook Pro page. If you're another computer company, putting up laptop photos everywhere would just be a waste of space. Nobody else features such a ridiculous number of glossy high-resolution photos of the physical product, but it works for Apple because it reinforces the idea of great craftsmanship and beauty.

This is even more apparent in their wording. A lot of copywriting books advise us to talk about benefits instead of features, but Apple's copy barely mentions either. Instead, we get phrases like:

• "Precisely engineered down to the nanometer"
• "Result of an obsessive focus on detail"
• "We pushed the limits of technology"

... all of which say nothing substantial, but somehow makes you feel like the product was carefully designed and lovingly built with superlative craftsmanship.

Now, some people don't necessarily care about all this design stuff in their computers. (Gamers don't buy Macs.) That's okay, though, because our sales page doesn't need to appeal to everyone. It just needs to but appeal very deeply to a subset of the market.

A football team uses the combined efforts of 11 highly skilled athletes to propel a single ball down the field. Similarly, each word and image in our sales page should focus on propelling a single idea into the customer's mind. It's not just the "main idea" of the sales page - it's basically the only idea that matters. There's two steps:

First, we figure out a single specific idea or benefit that means a lot to our target customer. Apple's message of superb craftsmanship is large in scale, but they also have a huge target market. Slack's message of effortless team communication is slightly more constrained. Niche product pages can feature an even smaller - but still incisive - idea. It'll take us a lot of work to figure out the right message, so this step might not be as simple as you think.

Then, we must make the customer believe that our product delivers it. Apple does this through overwhelming social proof and by using aspirational copy and imagery in everything it produces. Slack showcases other respected teams that use it to simplify communication; if it's good enough for NASA it's good enough for you! With much more limited resources, we'll use memorable stories and evocative copy on our product page to achieve the same goals.

That's all a sales page needs to do! Although these two steps are simple to understand, they're very difficult to execute well. In a later post I'll lay out a detailed framework that might help. For now, though, please tell me how you feel about these ideas. Do you agree or is my thinking incomplete? Let me know below!