In previous steps, I’ve gone over this topic at some level. Still, optimizing your squeeze page plays such a critical role in the success of your mailing list campaigns that you need to go through specialized steps to ensure your optimization efforts are correct.
It’s extremely important that you follow the steps below. Don’t miss any detail. Make sure you implement each of the items below; otherwise, you’re going to be leaving a lot of money on the table.
You have to understand that these optimization steps assume that you have already set up your squeeze page and have set out your updates. It also assumes that you’ve already optimized your squeeze page at some level.
Here are further optimization ideas to try to maximize the conversion ability of your e-mail list recruitment page.
Ask, And You Shall Receive
Do direct outreach with your list members. These are people who have already signed up to your list and are in the best position to know about the things you can do to improve your squeeze page. They’ve already gone through the conversion process.
They’ve seen your squeeze page, obviously liked something that they saw, and they signed up. Now is the time to reach out directly to them and ask for suggestions. Pick their brains regarding the things that you did right and any areas for improvement.
Believe me; this is no time to assume that everything you’ve set up is perfect. You have to set your ego aside and ask for suggestions. There is always room for improvement.
Make sure you offer some incentives for the feedback. This is critical. You have to understand that people have better things to do than to respond to your e-mail. With everything else being equal, most people would probably just read your email and not bother to respond because there’s nothing in it for them. They have other more important things to take care of.
You have to make it worth their while to respond. With that said, you also have to be careful. Some people might give you sloppy or even misleading information just to get the incentive that you’re offering. Pose some sort of incentive that is attractive enough for people to want to respond to your outreach; however, it shouldn’t be so attractive that you get fake results.
What should you ask feedback for? Ask for how your squeeze page can be made better. However, you have to break down the squeeze page elements one by one.
You can’t just say, “How can I improve my e-mail list recruitment base?” That’s too broad. Instead, you have to look at the different elements that go into your squeeze page. Ask them, “Am I using the right graphic? Is the text easy to understand? Is the value proposition behind the incentive I’m giving away very clear?”
Similarly, you should ask about the quality of the updates you’re sending out. More specifically, you should ask your list members, “What improvements should I make for you to forward my e-mails to people you know?”
Don’t neglect the power of feedback because oftentimes, the cheapest and most efficient way to get from point A to Point B is a straight line. Ask your list members, but offer an incentive.
It’s also very important to make sure that you don’t just jump on the first suggestion you get. Look at the total amount of responses you get, and pay attention to the most common theme.
If people keep talking about the picture on your squeeze page, and only a handful of people mention the incentive that you offer, chances are quite good that if you change your squeeze page graphics, you might be able to increase your conversion rate. Look for these patterns. Don’t get thrown off track by outlier responses.
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WARNING
I wish I could tell you that you only need to rely on people’s direct answers to boost your conversion rate. Unfortunately, that is not the case. At the back of our heads, when people ask us a question, we tend to try to give them the answer to that we think they’re looking for. This is always the case. This applies across the board.
These suggestions can lead to all sorts of problems if you use them to guide the changes to your squeeze page. You have to pay attention to the most common answers that you get. Next, you have to cross reference these responses with the actual actions people take.
Actions Speak Louder Than Words
When you look at your squeeze page, please understand that you’re not looking at a one, unified element. A squeeze page is actually made up of many different parts. There is the picture of the incentive, the text offering the incentive, the font, the size of the font, the colored the layout among others. There are many different elements that go to that page.
Change each element one at a time, and pay attention to the conversion statistics. Make many different variations, and then test these variations against your traffic. You should quickly see that at least one variation has a higher conversion rate than others.
This improvement might be fairly small. It might even be one percent or a couple of percentage points. That’s okay. You need to isolate that variation and make more variations of it. Run traffic through all the variations, and see if you can improve your conversion rate.
Keep going through this process of making variations, testing with traffic, picking the winner, and making more variations until no further conversion rate improvement is possible. At this point, you should make variations of another element on your squeeze page.
It’s important to make sure that you change only one element of the time. For example, you can optimize the image of your squeeze page. Once your squeeze page converts at a higher rate and can’t improve any further, then start changing around the text and see if that has a positive effect.
Move from one element at a time until the squeeze page converts at a fairly high and end predictable rate.
Cross-reference these element changes with the actual feedback that you get from your list members. Using these two pieces of data, you should be able to come up with a statistics-driven modification strategy.
Otherwise, you’re just going to be taking your list members’ words at face value, and it’s anybody’s guess, whether their suggestions will actually improve your squeeze page’s conversion rate.
Use Social Proof
There’s one simple trick that you can use to push people psychologically to sign up to your mailing list. We’ve all seen squeeze pages before. Typically, there’s an e-mail field, a call to action, and a submit button. There also might be a nice-looking graphic on the side.
Unfortunately, these squeeze pages are so common that people usually become blind to them after enough exposure. However, people can and do sit up and pay attention when they see that their other Facebook friends have signed up to the list. Alternatively, they become slightly more interested to see that a large number of people on Facebook has liked the page that they’re viewing. This is called social proof.
Few people like eating at a restaurant that is empty. At the back of their mind, they’re thinking that the food must not be very good because there’s nobody eating at the restaurant. On the other hand, if the restaurant is full, and there are people lining up to get in, chances are quite good that people would want to line up even more because all these people simply can’t be wrong. Do you see how group psychology works?
You can use that the psychology of social proof to boost your squeeze page conversion rate by adding the developer code of the biggest brand in your niche to your squeeze page. Facebook allows you to include the URL of a site on the code that it gives you to show Facebook likes.
Embed that code onto your squeeze page to give the impression that a lot of people already like your squeeze page.
In fact, this trick is so effective it shows the viewers’ friends names along with the thousands of other people who have liked that page. Piggy back on this social pool, and give the viewer the push he or she needs to sign up to your list.
What is segmentation? Segmentation means separating your list subscribers into smaller sub-lists based on their specific interests or preferences.