The Art Of ‘Squeezing’ in Email Marketing

In those days when newbies first get involved in internet marketing, the first thoughts they had was putting PPC ads like Adsense in the blog, and linking keywords with affiliate links will do the trick in making money. But the truth is, real internet marketers invest their money not only buying ebooks, but investing in autoresponders. Autoresponders also known as mailing lists or newsletters.

The truth to be known is – if you are not squeezing the email addresses out of your visitors, you are missing out on new customers and profits. Big earning  internet marketers actually earn from mailing lists, and not the ones littering affiliate links in the blogs!

This method is not the traditional way of grabbing emails with email, but the tactics links closely with the use of  thematic squeeze pages that behaves as a specific campaign in promoting something. For example, an internet marketer wishes to promote a product from Clickbank with a niche of his/her choice.

They will normally launch the campaign by offering some freebies, such as a small ebook or report, with excerpts of some information and tips RELATED to the niche they are campaigning for. Once the ebook is completed (completed as in self-written or outsourcing from PLR sources), they will draft out a squeeze page. A squeeze page is a sales pitching page that funnels users to sign up or opt-in. The objectives is to grab their email for later use.

a typical squeeze page

To be effective, they will get a specific domain name for the squeeze page. Its best to have dot com but if you are on a tight budget, dot info suffice as well. Some even use them in their subdomain. Its entirely up to you.

A typical flow of a squeeze page will normally have:

1. A single paged sales pitch (mostly) and the page is non-scrollable, which means the entire page is visible wholly in your monitor screen.
2. Content – brief information of what the freebie offers in bullet points.
3. The op-tin lead box – typically name and email address of course with a submit button.

Once the information has been fed in, it will enter the database of the marketer’s autoresponder such as Aweber, Getresponse, Inspire etc to name a few. A confirmation will be emailed back to the subscriber’s inbox to confirm the address.The confirmation is done on the second page. This action is also termed as ‘double opt-in leads’ as the actions taken to confirm is twice. Once confirmed, they will be forwarded to a new page, which is the third page.

On the new page where the marketer thanking the subscriber, these links will be made available as well:

1. Other thematic squeeze page offerings
2. Extra (surprise) freebie – enticing subscriber further, and add value to the campaign
3. Bonuses, encouraging them more and this action will eventually lead them deeper in deeper into your affiliate networks such as JV with 3rd party marketers etc
4. This is the part where the actual product that you are promoting from Clickbank or other affiliate sites can be included.

To market your squeeze page URL, you need to do PPC via Adwords or equivalent. If you don’t mind waiting, you can build up traffic from blog linkings, SEO, social media, article writing and hubpages.

What factors that made a ‘squeezing’ campaign a success? The factors that you need to pinpoint are as follows;

1. Well designed theme – most themes out there are crap, but if you focus these abit more, you will be surprised of how the attractiveness of the squeeze page converts to leads. Example of good ready made themes you can buy – Squeeze Theme.
2. Clear and non-distracting – avoid images and text cluttering and state your point clearly so that the subscribers knew what to expect from their opt-in and downloads later.
3. Avoid other links out of the squeeze page. A squeeze page was meant to be a dead end. The only way out is the opt-in or the ‘x’ on the windows. From here you can gauge the probability, its obvious that 50% will convert into subscribers, because they had only 2 choices – opt-in (50%) or close the window (50%). Eye opening huh?

Here is a trivia that I randomly observe from other marketer’s campaign:

1. Almost 50% of the traffic that was funnelled to your opt-in box will end up subscribing compared to 0.5-1% who actually clicked on an affiliate link.
2. 50%-75% of the list that you have captured are people who is ready and willing to buy.
3. By having a second chance opt-in pop-up will add up at least 25% to your remaining 50% who have already opt-in. This is the squeeze to the max!

Just some words of advice:

1. Autoresponders are expensive – only invest in them if you know what you are doing or if you have the money to do so
2. You need to understand privacy policy just to ensure that you are not being labelled as a spammer.
3. If  they are willing to let you grab them, you must be willing to release them if they opt to unsubscribe. To remedy that, give them beneficial links for every circulation, say 60% freebies + informational stuff, and 40% sales campaign stuff. At least, it will tell them that you are not a desperado in selling stuff all the time.

Guerilla tactic don’t work, safeguard your list for your internet marketing cycles!