Tag: squeeze page

The Ideal Clickthru Rate for Your Squeeze Pages, Sales Letters and Blog Posts

When creating your forced optin pages or e-commerce sales letters, or even blog posts... how do you know if it's fully optimized?  How do you know whether or not you are throwing away e-mail subscribers, sales, blog commenters, and fans without even realizing?  I want to tell you what kind of conversion rate you should expect when testing out your pages using Google Website Optimizer or Google Analytics.

A forced e-mail optin page, or squeeze page, is a web page where the only thing a person can do is subscribe to your e-mail list or leave.  I like to put these in front of my sales letters, so people need to commit to a small action (subscribing to my list for more information)... that way I can follow up with them even if they don't buy.

But Most People Overcomplicate This Process!

Your forced optin page should only contain one headline, three bullet points, and instructions about what to do next.  (Opt-in to your list.)  If you do this correctly, you should expect 50 percent, or half, of your targeted visitors, to subscribe... all while your competition overthinks the process and only gets a 10 to 20 percent conversion rate.

After they have opted in, even if you are mailing them a free gift in exchange for signing up, send them to an offer page (or sales letter) where they can buy something from you.  Similar to the forced optin page, this should be a site where all they can do is either buy or leave.  There are no other links in this long, one-page web site.  Even if you don't think you are any good at convincing someone to buy from you... tell them a quick story, your argument for why your solution is best... and a set of bullet points telling them why they should get it now, and what benefits they will receive once they get their hands on it.

If I experience a 1 to 5 percent conversion rate, I'm happy. Even if you experience a little bit less than this, you can split test your web site and even get it critiqued by a professional copywriter at a fraction of the cost that it would take to get it done from scratch.  The copy will actually come out better because you know your product better than anyone else.

That covers forced optin pages and sales letters, but what about other kinds of web sites such as blogs?  What kind of conversion rate can you expect from alternate sources of traffic such as Twitter or article sites?  The answer is that you shouldn't care.  Your time is better spent optimizing your squeeze page or sales letter than worrying about your free traffic sources.  They are tough to measure, and after all, it's all "extra" traffic.

Those are the results you should expect from your well-optimized web pages: 50 percent conversion on your squeeze page and 1 percent conversion on your sales letter. As for your traffic sources, worry about your own sites.

What's your conversion rate? Do you even know (it's ok if you don't) ... just post your answer in a comment below.