Squeeze pages work, first and foremost, because it forces the serious to step up and be serious. A properly designed opt-in page, well matched to your market, should get a 10% to 30% opt-in rate. Any worse than that and you’ve got a message to market match problem. If your match is super-good, you’ll sometimes see 50% opt-in rates or better.
And if you’re trying to optimize your sales process, then you need to break it into pieces and make the pieces work. This is the first step.
When I was struggling to make my first online sales letters work and getting coaching from John Carlton, he instructed me: Don’t give people any distractions, links to click on, rabbit trails to go get lost in. Send them down a straight line and just sell the thing.
That is very good advice if the advice is required to be simple and if you cannot see what people are doing on your site.
BUT… and this is a big but – if you can see what people are doing live, on your site – if you give people links to click on, detours, rabbit trails that help them tune into specific concerns – those visitors will tell you exactly what makes them buy.
The point here is not to engineer distractions into your site, but paths that address
different, distinct concerns.
I discovered this through Ari Galper’s Unlock The Internet Game program, and implementing it on my site. (The tools are there even when the chat boxes aren’t visible, and we can engage people to chat any time we want to.) Just this morning I captured this screen shot from the www.LivePersonFreeTrial.com software.
I want you to look closely at this, because it tells you a lot of interesting things. These are all the people on my site at this particular moment. (All the pages we have LivePerson code on, anyway, which is maybe ¼ of the site.)
The list is sorted by the number of pages people have visited. Another useful way to sort them is by how much time they’ve spent on the site. Naturally the ones who’ve visited the most pages have also been there the longest.
And you know what? Them are the buyers. Notice the box on the lower right, it tells me what five pages that visitor has been on in the last 27 minutes and 38 seconds. Does that tell a story? You bet it does:
When people are in heat and hot to buy, do you know what they do?
They go click on everything they can find on your website, looking for reassurance they’re making the right decision. They wanna know who you are… they want to see evidence that other people like them have been satisfied… they double check guarantees… the read and re-read articles… then they come back and buy.
I’ve watched this happen, in real time, again and again. It’s almost as reliable as the sun coming up in the morning.
Now if all you have is a one page website, how are you going to learn anything by watching your visitors? They come… and they either buy or leave. That doesn’t tell you much.
But if there are other places they can go, you start to see which places convince them to buy and which places don’t. Then you start to engineer things. You design pages that address specific concerns, you watch people click on those pages, get persuaded, and then buy.
This is just fascinating. It’s like having a store where you could only watch customers come in and out and suddenly being able to turn on the lights and see what they do while they’re inside.
Gee, what a concept! Now you can do it on the web. You’ve got a manager’s window with silvered glass, and any time you want to you can come down onto the floor and talk to the customers.
I recommend that you test this out with www.LivePersonFreeTrial.com. Just the ability to see what people are doing alone is worth the effort. But I also needed to add that Ari has turned this whole process into an art form that is a wonder to behold.
Ari and I just completed a coaching program on this and Unlock The Internet Game is on embargo while we fine tune some things. Stay tuned for more information on this in early 2007.
One final, vitally important item: Screw all this bland, colorless “Happy Holidays” crap, and all the intolerant, ethnocentric, white-boy cowards who wanna shove all their political correctness and ‘cultural sensitivity’ down your throat.
I would like to suggest that you send the ACLU a Christmas Card this year, and share with them your good cheer. Oh, and be sure and include a dollar bill with it, so they have to spend some postage money to send you a receipt: 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor New York, NY 10004.
Tell ‘em I said Merry Christmas.
Perry Marshall
