To Squeeze or Not to Squeeze
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
An interesting little dilemma for which I have put together a little case study with some hard numbers to back up my conclusions.
The question: How will a squeeze page perform as opposed to an optimized review page?
The setup:
Review Page: Big header, strong intro paragraph and 3 short reviews. The reviews are 200 words each about the top ebooks in the niche. At the end of each review are 2 links: one that takes the customer to a full review with several aff links to the vendor page and the other is a direct aff link to the vendor page.
The main review page and each sub review has a slide in popup that asks the user to optin in exchange for a free report. The optin brings them back to the page they were on when they opted in.
Squeeze Page: Standard squeeze page with big header, free report, 3 paragraphs and 10 bullets of the most sought after benefits the prospects are looking for. Upon email and name submit, they are cookied and redirected to the vendor page.
The Traffic: Each page got 600 clicks on the same keywords from Google Adwords. The keywords are fringe traffic for a niche, which means they are basically looking for information and don’t know about any products yet.
The pain level of these seekers is not too high, meaning they are not that motivated to take action. Lots of tire kickers. Over 75% of these clicks are coming from the content network. They are not very targeted but they are cheap.
Performance:
The Review Page after 600 clicks:
31 email optins
0 sales
Cost of Adwords Ads: $72.59
Net Profit/loss: -$72.59
Conclusion: money is going down the toilet since subscriber value cannot make up for upfront loss.
This is a rather surprising result since the page “should” convert well based on a solid setup, attractive layout, long reviews and honest comparison. The customers refuse to confirm this by completely shunning their credit cards on this.
The Squeeze page after 600 clicks:
73 email optins
3 sales: $111.44
Cost of Adwords Ads: $68.16
Net Profit/loss: $43.28
Conclusion: Beyond future profits from the mailing list being built, this is bringing back a 63% profit on every dollar invested. If I can tweak that up to 100% I’ll be very satisfied.
So why did the squeeze page so highly outperform the review page?
Human psychology: First of all on the squeeze page they have to either leave or optin, so naturally the optin rate will go up. In this case it was around 12% which is relatively low, but not bad for this niche and such a large share of content network traffic.
We also need to remember that the traffic here was from information seekers. They’re not in buying mode yet. They haven’t investigated products and are just looking for information.
In that vein, the squeeze page qualifies them. 88% disappear into oblivion, but the 12% that do optin become more qualified than they ever would have been before they jumped through the first hoop. The act of jumping through that hoop has a direct influence on their thoughts and desire to comply with a buying request.
This is directly in line with social psychology which dictates that if you want a large favor from someone you don’t know, you should first get them to comply with a small one. The small favor makes them much more likely to comply with the large favor.
Not only have you just trained them to buy, but you’ve basically extracted a commitment from them to read the page that comes after the optin. They see it with more importance since they gave something up to reach it.
The same reason why people have more respect for information they pay for than that which they get for free…