What’s a Squeeze Page? - Building an Opt-In List
Thursday, December 7th, 2006 at 5:52 pm by Matt Van Atta
An opt-in list of email addresses can be the affiliate marketer’s “secret weapon.” With them you have a ready-made, reliable audience for your marketing efforts, including information on new products, email newsletters, special offers, and more.
Best of all, the email addresses on the opt-in list belong to individuals who voluntarily signed up because they want ready access to your content. The larger the opt-in list, the more people to whom you can directly market your products, and - if all goes well - the greater your conversion rate.
So how do you start building an opt-in list?
Easy – start collecting email addresses. (Everyone needs a hobby, right?) One way to do this is by using a squeeze page, a web page intended solely to collect the names and emails of visitors to that page.
Also known at times as a landing page (although many would argue that not all landing pages are truly squeeze pages), the squeeze page brings in visitors through offering information that appeals to the site’s intended target audience.
Say you have a report that ties to a product you are marketing on your site. The squeeze page can provide details on the report and why it’s beneficial to the visitor. It can offer the content to the visitor for “free.”
All the visitor has to do is provide his or her email address, and possibly his or her name as well. (That name could be used as part of the website’s effort to personalize the visitor’s experience on that site, thus making it more appealing. However, if your affiliate business is just getting off the ground, the email address is the nugget of gold on which to focus for now.)
Because the visitor to the squeeze page sought out your content in the first place, chances are that he or she will give you that email address. You can then send those subscribers ongoing high-quality content, such as a newsletter or a product update.
In the process, you establish a sense of trust on which the visitor can make a future purchase either from or through your site. That can be very important given online buyers’ tendencies to visit a site several times before buying.
Need some good examples of squeeze pages? Look no further than your friendly neighborhood Google search on “squeeze page.” You’ll find a number of sites that sell squeeze page-building software and other products – using squeeze pages themselves in the process!
Opinions vary as to what the squeeze page should contain. Some argue that it should contain only the email signup mechanism and the copy to persuade visitors to sign up – seemingly making it more like dangling the carrot in front of the horse. But others believe it’s OK for squeeze pages to include links to other pages that contain information as well as the email signup.
Personally, if I enter a page with next to nothing on it except an email signup, I’m less inclined to sign up than I would be if I could see what else the site has that would interest me. But that’s just me.
Since every audience responds differently, it makes sense to test one type of squeeze page over another, using a script that will rotate two different pages. Make sure you set up two separate mailing lists for each page, so you can see which one pulls the most subscribers.
In fact, how you craft a squeeze page depends on two factors: your understanding of your target audience, and how much content you’re willing to give away without getting something in return.
In other words, you may “squeeze” that email address out of the visitor… but don’t forget to consider the degree to which you yourself may need to be “squeezed” in order to get that information!
For more tips, see page 26 of the March, 2006 issue of Affiliate Classroom magazine.
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