Tips for Building Squeeze Pages that Really Work
Top Tips for Building Squeeze Pages That Convert Like Crazy And Build Your List At Warp Speed
If you use Google Analytics they refer to whichever page a visitor arrives on your site as the 'landing page'. Some people refer to squeeze pages as landing pages, which is understandable as you really do want people to land on them.
However, when discussing squeeze pages within the realm of marketing and advertising, it’s more common to refer to a squeeze page as being a standalone web page distinct from your main website that has been designed for a single focused objective. In this guide when I refer to a squeeze page I am talking about a short page which has the sole aim of getting an opt-in, in other words, a visitor giving you their email address (and maybe other contact details) in exchange for more information.
As I will come on to explain, you can still sell from a squeeze page and also make sales by following up with the subscriber on a regular basis.
Examples of uses for squeeze pages would be -
- EBook or whitepaper
- Newsletter subscription
- Webinar registration
- Consultation for professional services
- Free trial
- Notification of a future product launch
I would like to make a distinction here between a squeeze page and the generally much longer sales page which gradually builds up a compelling case to make a purchase. This guide is not intended to cover the ins and outs of sales pages. In stark contrast to undifferentiated, unfocused home pages, squeeze pages focus specifically on capturing email addresses and maybe making sales for a low cost offer, and make no attempt to give visitors a different option.
Usually, all other site navigation is removed so either the visitor opts in or leaves. So what is important to learn in an introduction to squeeze pages?
First, it is important to recognize that all successful marketers use these. If you plan to sell a product over the internet, you will want to use one, too, rather than relying on sidebar opt-in forms and unfocused pages that do not convey a single point and a single call to action. Another important thing you will want to take away from this introduction to squeeze pages is that every squeeze page contains the same component parts and is focused on a SINGLE goal – getting the visitors to become a subscriber and then to convert them into buyers.
The components of a squeeze page are as follows:
- an opt-in form
- an introduction and list of features/benefits
- a call to action
Determining the structure and layout which will work best for you can only be done through testing. While some will work well with just text, others work better with a picture (such as a book cover) or even maybe a short video.
I would recommend that you start off with something simple and then think about getting more sophisticated with additional media such as video. Your particular niche will have a bearing on this (e.g., maybe something visual for gardeners) and whether visitors are generally exposed frequently to squeeze pages (as in the Internet Marketing world).
If there is anything you absolutely must take away from an introduction to squeeze pages, it is that you cannot create a squeeze page that isn't focused - it must tell visitors very quickly the benefits of your offer.
The Squeeze Page System
Let's start with the squeeze page itself. When your visitors arrive at this page you should have one single intention which is to capture their email address. No matter what you are trying to sell, the squeeze page system you create should be a compelling option to take action, get on to your list, and then probably for you to make an offer straight away.Before we go further let me make an important point about the quality of your offer. You will almost certainly have competition in your niche, your audience has a choice. Everything your subscribers get from you after they opt-in, whether it is your initial offer or follow up activity needs to be of high quality.
If your subscriber is disappointed they will quickly unsubscribe and will likely request a refund if they have bought. Do not put hype on your squeeze page that your product does not live up to! It will come back to bite you. Once your visitors subscribe, the squeeze page system you create should then re-route them to a thank you page or a sales page, which opens up more means through which you can up-sell to bigger and better offers.
On the follow-up page, you can endorse a product as an affiliate if you don't have one of your own, or you can make offers to subscribers who have signed up to your list through an automated email sequence. You may even want to use other products you have as bonuses to incentivise them. The most profitable way in which you can generate revenue through your list is of course by creating and selling your own products to them.
If you want to send your visitor on to a Sales Page, you can deliver the free offer via an attachment or as a link in your Thank You email following their subscription.
What You Need Before Getting Started
Before you get started building your squeeze page, you will need a number of things to make your offer work and facilitate the creation of your squeeze page. One thing you absolutely must have before you get started is an auto-responder. Without an auto-responder, you are tossing potential bags of money in the garbage. Rather than creating a relationship with customers and giving yourself the opportunity to attempt future up-sells, you're allowing them to leave and never return.An auto-responder allows you to manage your list as well as sending out automated sequences of emails. I use Aweber, which is a very popular one, but there are other good ones such as Get Response. Check them out if you have yet to get an auto-responder service.
In addition to an auto-responder, you will need to have an actual offer that people want to buy. You need to research your market and know that you are selling something that people are already looking for. If you don't have the skills to develop a product, such as an eBook or a piece of software, you can always hire a professional to do it for you through sites such as Elance.com or Guru.com. Or alternatively, sign up as an affiliate of products that you can promote.
Another thing you absolutely must have before you get started if selling your own products is a payment service. You may want to consider Paypal or Clickbank, or JVZoo. These services will take payments and make sure you get the money, without you having to worry about processing credit cards or taking orders directly.
Also, Clickbank and JVZoo will allow you to get affiliates to promote your products for you.
You also need a set of graphics for whatever you are intending to sell, which usually includes a graphic header, a check out button, background wallpaper, and maybe a half-decent picture of yourself.
You can probably provide the picture of yourself, but you might want to hire a professional to do the rest. This can be outsourced very cheaply on sites such as Fiverr.com.
Planning Your Squeeze Page Content
Perhaps the most important part of creating a squeeze page is planning your content and the theme. How you select your theme will depend on how you plan to generate traffic. If you decide to generate traffic through search engine optimization, planning your squeeze page theme will entail finding phrases within your niche which have a high demand and a low supply (i.e. a small number of competing sites) and then creating multiple squeeze pages, each of which is optimized around a different phrase.If, on the other hand, you decide to generate traffic through paid advertising methods such as Solo Ads or Pay Per Click (PPC) programs, you can focus your squeeze page theme according to the traffic you are buying.
I will discuss how to drive traffic to your squeeze page in a later section as we go down the article.
Your flow needs to ensure when people arrive at your squeeze page it offers what they were looking for. If you are in the dog training business and people arrive looking for dog products you are going to have very minimal success.
This is actually where most people fail when they create a squeeze page: they don't tune it to fit a specific audience. This is a big mistake. Chances are if you create a quality product or newsletter it can benefit a great many people. So communicate the exact benefits they will derive from subscribing or buying. Be very specific about who your products are meant for. If you have done your research this is where you match what you know the top searches are looking for.
How to Write a Squeeze Page that Converts
Most people have not really considered or learned how to write a squeeze page that converts. Instead, they bundle together elements that they have seen used in other squeeze pages, but often do not put them together in the same way the owner of the successful squeeze page did. The most difficult part of assembling the squeeze page is of course copy. Not everyone is going to be an excellent writer, never mind a copywriter.But as someone selling a product or trying to build a list, it is important that you know your strengths and weaknesses and that you either spend the time to overcome them or hire someone else to do it for you. You can get a squeeze page designed quickly and very cheaply on Fiverr.com if you lack the confidence initially.
With copywriting it is important to use a mix of compelling sales points with powerful psychological triggers. Many people who create a squeeze page miss either one or both of those elements. These psychological triggers include the following, try to get one or more into your copy -
- Reciprocity. This is particularly powerful and often undervalued, a favour given demands a favour in return. Just think about it and how it applies to the rest of your life.
- Fear of loss. For some reason, people are more motivated to prevent loss than to make a gain.
- Scarcity. The fear of missing out. You will have seen this many times in the form of 'Only 10 remaining', 'One time not to be repeated offer', etc.
- Social proof. People follow the crowd and also like evidence. Testimonials, or '10,000 copies already sold', 'Our most popular program, etc
- Similarity. People do business with people they like or who are like them. 'Dear fellow gardener', 'Like you I had trouble for years with acne', etc
- Contrast. Show what good value you offer by comparing your product to others. 'Half the price of xxx' or 'Proven to work twice as quickly as', etc
Don't concentrate so much on building benefits that you don't actually explain what solution you are providing – and for whom you are providing it. If I don't have a specific problem that your product solves, why would I want it? I wouldn't. If you fail to sprinkle in psychological triggers and use phrases such as “scientifically proven,” or “guaranteed,” no one will feel compelled to continue reading, as the benefits will have a low or average perceived value.
Some squeeze pages just lack coherency and direction. The copy looks amateurish and it doesn't at each point break down the visitor's resistance to the sale, every line should help compel the visitor to sign up. Additionally, if there is not a strong call to action (another form of a psychological trigger) then a potential visitor might never feel compelled enough to opt in.
In addition to careful copywriting, there are other important things you must take into consideration when writing a squeeze page that converts. For instance, you might build a compelling case for a time-bound offer. Now, this doesn't mean you have to invent fake deadlines and constantly revise them each week. (this is a good way to guarantee your complete loss of credibility in the shortest amount of time possible).
However, when planning your copy, you will want to urge the reader to act immediately as the chances are that they won't do so later. You may want to consider using fly-ins or pop-ups to create more urgency. Perhaps you can use a countdown to build urgency (i.e., when someone arrives at your squeeze page, they have five minutes to purchase the product at the lowest price). Typically a squeeze page is condensed into not much more than a compelling headline and a series of “benefits" plus a call to action.
You will need to decide what information you are going to ask your visitors for. Bear in mind that the more you ask, for the greater attrition you are likely to get. A number of marketers I know now just ask for an email address (I have been doing the same). The downside of not getting the visitor name is that you will not to be able to address them personally in your follow up emails (eg, 'Hi Fred, ...), but testing has shown that more people will sign up if you only ask for email.
Another interesting tactic that I have read a study about is to ask for just 'Email' rather than 'Email Address'. Testing variations such as this can make a difference. It is all about psychology, you want to get your visitor excited and then be very careful not to frighten them off. In your headline, simply state the exact benefits they will receive for opting in, as always, mixing in psychological triggers.
Always try to include a compelling reason to join now (i.e., the price might go up, the list might become private, you'll get this amazing report).
Focus the main body of your page into a few key benefits, such as:
- What are the absolute top reasons that a visitor might want or need your product?
- How does it solve a problem or otherwise improve their life?
- Is there anything unique about it?
A bulleted list generally works very well here.
As a slight aside, always include a short line under your opt-in form that explains that you will not, under any circumstances, spam them or sell or give away their email address and name. The best way in which you can gain trust is by offering something for free. Everybody likes something free which solves a problem. You can position this in such a way that you need their email address in order to provide access to this.
You can offer a free report or maybe a five-day course, and then use that to generate leads, which you will later up-sell or generate revenue from via affiliate sales. Why is this technique so effective? Quite simply because it allows your customer to judge your work and ideas before they actually have to pay for them. Additionally, it builds trust.
We are all sold to continuously so you have to overcome inbuilt resistance to sales. That is not to say you can't use your squeeze page to also make sales, you can. There are a couple of ways you can do this, but it is better you make the free offer to get the opt-in first.
- You take your new subscriber directly to a longer and much more detailed sales page after they have opted in, here you have the space to make a much more compelling case to purchase. At the same time, you send them an email with an attachment or a link to your free offer.
- You take your new subscriber directly to a Thank You page which explains how to get the free offer and also offers an ' Up-sell' to your priced product.
Either way, you want to follow up with a series of autoresponder messages to build your relationship and also offer other products (the money is in your list!).
Driving Traffic into Your Squeeze Page
Driving traffic into your squeeze page – it sounds easy, doesn't it? Unfortunately, it's not. And no matter how great your squeeze page is, it won't matter if no one ever reads it. Furthermore, if everyone in the world other than your target audience reads it, it also won't matter. This is why you need to find media through which you can drive targeted visitors to your squeeze page.Trying to drive traffic to your squeeze page through natural search engine optimization is going to be very difficult as Google will not regard a squeeze page as a quality visitor experience - it has no content other than sales copy. You can, of course, use social media such as Facebook or Twitter to drive free traffic. Paid advertising is the easiest method of driving traffic to your squeeze page. There are a number of ways of doing this which will be discussed under solo ads.
Paying for traffic is by far the quickest and most reliable way of getting visitors to your squeeze page.
Luckily if you are on a tight budget you do have other options. Chief among them is working with other people. This is what a lot of marketers forget, they don't realize the power of human connections because they are so caught up in the idea of selling directly.
One quick way to get traffic through other people is a joint venture. You can enter into a joint venture by compiling a list of possible “partners”, or people who might be able to assist you in some mutually-beneficial way. This list might include other list owners in your niche, site owners in your niche, and experts.
There's one important thing you should keep in mind when contacting joint venture partners, and that is to make it as quick, easy, and beneficial for them as possible. If they have no incentive for doing it, they probably won't even reply to you. And if it isn't easy, they'll accept other joint venture offers over yours.
Another way in which you can drive traffic to your squeeze page is through blog and forum posting; however, it is important that you do not spam as many people do. Instead, actually participate on the forum, provide people with something of value; and, after a while, post your product in your signature – and try to network with people on the forum who work in similar fields.
Your approach to blog posting should be similar. Include a signature file that links back to your squeeze page, but don't spam. Instead, post useful comments. This is not only more ethical, but it is plainly more effective. Spam gets deleted. Good comments get praised, inducing people to follow your link and check out your products.
Sizes of Successful Squeeze Pages
Successful squeeze pages come in differing styles. There is no 'one size fits all' solution, the key is to make it compelling and to remove any perceived risk. As discussed earlier it is hard to sell things to people who don't yet know you, giving something free at this point will make a huge difference to your opt-in rates.If there are good benefits and no apparent downside you should be able to attain high opt-in percentages.Notice the importance of a good headline, and sometimes subheadings. Also labelling the action button to offer a reward, usually immediate, is an important psychological incentive.
In conclusion, one of the golden rules of marketing is 'Test, test, test'. This is no different, sometimes a small tweak can make a big difference. I have had changes of only one or two words make big improvements to opt-in rates, you just don't know until you try.
If you get something working well try another small variation to it. If you keep on testing you might be surprised how much you can gradually improve. If you have enjoyed and benefited from these tips any kind of Testimonial or Endorsement would be very welcome! You can do this or give comments in the comment section.
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