General Marketing - Squeeze pages

The money is in the list right?

It certainly is. And if you don't have a list then it's your job to learn how to start building one because a well worked list can be a serious revenue generator for your business.

But how do we get those names into the list in the first place? And how do we increase our sign up rate?

There are three parts to this equation:

Eye catching PPC advert + Enticing offer + Squeeze page = List building success.

When managing a PPC campaign most people just send the traffic to the home page of their site and hope for the best. Even fewer people do any type of traffic analysis using an analytics program and that's what makes this method so successful. By implementing the above formula you immediately jump to the front of the queue.

How can you build a mailing list if you don't direct people to sign up for it? How do you get people to sign up for a list when they know you will be using their details to keep contacting them?

To make this work I'm taking it that you have a good understanding of what your offer is or your Unique Selling Proposition and you know your audience. If you don't then it's to the back of the class for you and step forward when you know what these are.

In the PPC workshop we discussed how to set up multiple ad groups and so now we can start putting these to good use and evaluating which adverts are bringing home the bacon.

Let’s get busy with an example:

We have our PPC campaign to set the adverts rotating evenly. If you don't then you need to change that setting so that they do (do this on the front page of your campaign). With adverts rotating evenly we can happily test our ideas without destroying our return on investment.

For Ad group one we have an advert which is achieving a 1.2% CTR. This is our CONTROL ad.

Now we create a second ad with a slightly different wording. This could even be as slight as moving or adding a full stop. Yes really, this can make a big difference to your CTR.

We run these two ads side by side for several days then check the CTR.

Wow! Advert two is achieving a 1.5% CTR! Fantastic!

Delete advert one.

Advert two now becomes our CONTROL ad.

Create a new ad and repeat the process. If the new ad does not beat the CTR of the CONTROL ad then delete it and try again. Keep doing this regularly and your CTR will climb steadily and surely.

Now we need to give the surfer some enticement to click on our ad. We need to give them something more than the usual "click here" to get the click. The way to do this is to design something that you give them for free - but it's not really free. In return for getting your "free" report they have to give you their email address - it's a trade off, you give them a free report or white paper (there are many other give always you can design as well) and they give you their email address in return.

So your Google ad will look something like this:

Free Guide to starting

A BouncyCastle business.

Great summer business.

http://www.bouncycastlesellers.net

So far so good. We have an enticing ad, we are offering a free guide (obviously you have to write it and it has to be good) - this should be enough to induce the click.

But wait! More work to be done! Does this seem like a lot of work? May be it is, it depends what you are used to. If you spent the last two years stacking shelves in Tesco or doing a McJob then it's not a lot of work at all. Simply creating a PPC campaign and pointing it at your homepage will not suffice. You DO need to work harder than that to succeed.

So now we get the click. Where are we sending it to? Well certainly not our homepage. We need to capture the email address so we make a landing (squeeze) page for the job.

Sign up for an auto responder service and use this to embed the form on your page which will capture the email address. Once the surfer has entered the address and clicked "submit" then the free guide is automatically emailed to them. Then they get forwarded to the homepage to continue browsing your site.

Finally, to make your squeeze page more effective you need to remove all distractions from the surfer. Remove the hyperlinks from the menu. Remove the footer and remove any exit hyperlinks from your squeeze page. This will leave the surfer with the options of clicking the back button or closing the browser OR signing up for your offer and seeing the next page.

That's the essence of a squeeze page - to squeeze your visitors into your mailing list by getting them to sign up for your free guide and then forwarding them on to your site once they have signed up!