The Art of the Squeeze Page

Have you ever been browsing through a website and found yourself in front of an offer you just couldn’t refuse? More likely than not, the offer was presented to you in the form of a squeeze page. Though their name may sound funny to you, squeeze pages are a serious and extremely effective way to get visitors to take action on your website. That’s why they’re the topic of today’s post. A squeeze page is a specific type of landing page that focuses on getting the visitor to take action. Though they can be used to encourage purchases, squeeze pages are more often used to get visitors to submit their personal information, whether for the purposes of joining a mailing list or for lead generation. Now for the part you’re probably most curious about: the reason the page is called a squeeze page is because it’s meant to “squeeze” the customer into taking action. This happens partially by removing all distractions, and partially by providing the user with an incentive—everything on the squeeze page directs the visitor to the Submit button at the bottom of the page. One element that every squeeze page has is the offer, or value proposition—the thing the page offers to the visitor in exchange for his or her contact information. This offer can be for a one-time product (such as an e-book download), or it can be ongoing, such as the promise of quality content delivered to the visitor’s email inbox every week. Aside from having a compelling offer, there are things you can do to make a squeeze page more effective. Here are a few best practices to follow when creating your squeeze pages:

• Keep the page simple and focused on the single action you want the user to take
• Avoid linking out to other pages, which may distract the user from taking action
• Take advantage of color to draw the eye to the areas you want to highlight
• Create scarcity or a sense of urgency (i.e. “Limited Time Offer”) to encourage visitors to sign up now instead of later
• Use a pop-up to grab the user’s attention (but also make it easy to close to avoid frustrating the user)
• Include a counter of how many users have already taken action or use an element of social proof such as testimonials or Facebook Integration
• Keep the form fields simple to increase form completion rates
• Use an autoresponder to email newly signed up users and thank/welcome them

Following these best practices should help you increase conversion on your squeeze page, but keep in mind that even after you implement them, you’ll likely have to test out a lot of things to see what works and what doesn’t. For example, we recently created a squeeze page for a client and ended up making over a dozen changes to it before receiving the first conversion. The things we tried included (but were not limited to):

• Adding or removing service details
• Revising the value proposition
• Adding or removing pricing
• Adding or removing form submission fields
• Repositioning buttons
• Changing the colors of the buttons

As you can see, a big part of the art of the squeeze page is the process of trial and error that helps you find what works on your unique visitor demographic. But once you have a squeeze page that works and the submissions start rolling in, you’ll be glad you spent the time to get your squeeze page just right. [templatera id=”10396″]