Ever wonder how marketers with no design or programming skills are coming out with these beautiful high converting squeeze pages to capture email addresses and get new subscribers? Here, we are going to dig into how exactly that is done and how you can do it too!

In this post we are going to cover:

• The exact tools you need to build a working squeeze page
• The 6 Basic Components of a High Converting Squeeze Page (Plus 1 optional bonus component)
• Instructions on how to construct a squeeze page very quickly and easily.

So let’s get started…

Squeeze pages, also called Lead Capture Pages, or simply Lead Pages are an essential component every marketer needs. The goal of every marketer is to build an email list of highly targeted subscribers. No matter what kind of marketing you are doing, whether it’s Facebook marketing, blog marketing, PPC, etc, email marketing to a list of people who have willingly given you their email address will yield the best results. What might also amaze you is that you don’t need an email list of tens of thousands of people to be successful with your email marketing. You can be quite successful with a list of a few thousand people and even bring in a full time living if you’re in the right niche where you have things to constantly sell that your list buys.

First, 3 Things You Need To Proceed

There are 3 things you need to start building a functioning squeeze page. They include:

1) Auto Responder Service

Your auto responder service is the mechanism that will allow you to collect the actual emails. You will need something that will house the emails from the squeeze page.  The most popular auto responders are:

• Aweber
• Get Response
• Send Reach
• Sendy
• Mail Chimp
• Constant Contact

They each vary in price and functionality but pretty much do the important task of house the emails you collect from your squeeze pages. Mail Chimp does have a free component to it, but we don’t recommend free unless you don’t have any other choice. You can always pick one and change later, but that could be a pain, so choose with caution and try to choose one you will be happy working with for a long time.

2) Squeeze Page Template

There are various ways you can build a squeeze page which we will talk about a bit later in this post.

3) Understand Conversion Rates

Understanding conversion rates is more of a knowledge base than a tool you need to build squeeze pages. You need to understand the formula behind a squeeze page. When you understand your conversion rates, you will know how well or poor your squeeze page is performing.

Conversion Rate = Optins / Visitors

Visitors = How much traffic is landing on a page in a given time period (a day, week, month, year, etc)

Optins = How many people are giving you their email address (subscribing)

The higher your conversion rate percentage, the better your squeeze page is performing. If you see me using the word “perform” throughout this post, this is what I am talking about.

So let’s look at this example:

Vistors in a Month: 2,000

Optins: 200

Conversion Rate = 200/2000 = 10%

Typically, a conversion rate that is close to 30% is ideal. A Conversion rate close to 40% and even 50% is absolutely amazing! If your conversion rate is only 10%, you’ve got some work to do. Low conversion rates could mean a couple of things:

1) You are not targeting the right audience

2) Your offer is not suited for the audience you are targeting

3) Your target market is spot on but your offer sucks

4) You are not asking people to optin (not telling them what to do)

Those are really the only 4 things. Once you match the right offer with the right audience, you should see the conversion rate start to climb. At that point, you can then start to make simple tweaks to get the rate up even more.

The 6 Basic Components of a Squeeze Page

Here is a very simple squeeze page that we are going to use for our first example.

The simplest squeeze page with a GREAT and irresistible offer is the best squeeze page you can build. You don’t have to make this a complicated process. The more complicated you make this, the worse it will probably perform. With a simple page, you can test the page, and make small tweaks to improve its performance. If you have a complicated page it’s going to be harder to make simple changes to make the page perform better because it will be confusing about what to actually change. Keep it simple.

1) Headline

The headline is the main attention grabber of the page. It should give the visitor an idea of what the page is about and why they should read on. Some would argue it’s the most important part of the page.

2) Subheadline

The Subheadline supports the Headline and gives a bit more detail of what the page is about.

3) The Offer

The offer, also known as the free gift, is an extremely important part of the squeeze page. The offer is what the person is getting in exchange for their email address. A lot of marketers screw this part up and that’s why they don’t see a lot of optins. The offer has to be something enticing because email marketing and squeeze pages are not like they used to be 3,4,5 years ago. The old method was to get some junky PLR (Private label rights) report on, let’s say, getting website traffic, and that would be the free gift the person gets in exchange for their email address. Well, times they are a-changin. Now, the gift has to be over the top. The gift has to be a very high level material. The gift has to be unique and have tons of value. People aren’t so easily giving out their email addresses anymore. They don’t want to be bombarded by dozens of emails every hour from different marketers. When they enter their email address, they expect to get something very good.

Keep in mind your free gift is going to be the first experience people have with you. Do you want it to be a cheap and half ass experience or do you want it to be an amazing experience where you over deliver a ton and the person gets so much value from you they pretty much fall in love with you as the expert in whatever niche you are in? I prefer the latter, and so should you.

4) Call To Action

Don’t assume people know this is a squeeze page and they should give you their email address. You need to tell people what to do. Don’t leave this part out! “Grab This Free Training Now”, “Put in your email address and receive the training right away”. You need to be straight forward and tell people what you want them to do. Don’t be shocked if they actually listen and do it!

5) The “Submit” Button

Of course, you need a button for people to press to submit their name and email, but I put “submit” in quotes because the button doesn’t always need to say submit. The button text is something that a lot of marketers split test and compare results. Other button text options include

• Yes Send Me My Free Gift
• Get Instant Access
• Let Me In Now

Marketers also test the colors of the submit buttons. The most used colors are red, blue, orange and yellow.

6) Bullet Points & Images

Let’s look at another example:

Above is a more modernized example of a squeeze page. This is the new age squeeze page, if you will. As you can see, the basic components of the traditional squeeze page are still there.

Images will always help your case. People like to see images. Whether you have a picture of the report you are giving out or like the image above, you can have a picture of yourself or your family. In this case, the picture portrays the author and his family. This makes him real to the visitors, especially the new visitors who have never met this author before.

Bullets or numbered lists are another helpful component. The bullets should be a brief summary of the best selling points of your free gift. The bullets should be well crafted. They should really hit the spot of your ideal prospect. They should be things that you know your ideal customer will want their hands on and information that is valuable to them that they need to know. They should feel like they will not be able go on another day without knowing the information that you will provide to them in exchange for their precious email. Understanding your target market will allow you to craft bullets that sell your free gift.

Here’s another example of well crafted bullets:

This lead page can be found here: http://benadkins.leadpages.net/semcheatsheet/

As you can see the bullets are laser targeted and specific. The more specific you can get with short descriptions, the better your visitors will understand what you are providing and the higher the chance they will have a positive experience when they optin. This is crucial because if you are just after collecting an email address and providing crap information on the other end, you are wasting your time. The most money is made on the other side with the initial information you are sharing with your new subscribers.

2 Optional Components 

7) The Fake Button (Optional)

The Fake Button is a technique a lot of marketers are using. Instead of the optin form being on the squeeze page, there’s a button that looks like it leads right to the gift. Once the user clicks on the button, it’s considered a micro commitment. The person is that much closer or that much more interested in giving you their information because they actually proceeded to click the button to get what you are offering. When the button is clicked, a light box pops up and an actual optin form then appears. Many times, there will be a message on the light box that says something like, “this will be the only time you will need to enter your email”, which might put the visitor at ease knowing they are one step closer to getting all the goodies. I call this the fake button, but it’s not the official name. You might see optin overlay used as well. Different programs will have different names for this feature.

The optin form example above about The Social Email List Building Cheatsheet is using the Fake Button Technique.

8) Video (Optional)

Sometimes you will find a video on an optin page. Videos are an optional component and they should really only be used when you know how to effectively use videos to sell something. It is highly advised to split test a video squeeze page versus. a written one.  We will get into split testing in another post.

Building Your Squeeze Page 

As marketers, we are so lucky because we have amazing and inexpensive plug and play tools at our fingertips to make very sophisticated and professional looking squeeze pages without having to hire expensive programmers or designers. The first squeeze page you see at the top of this page (about traffic) is a basic html squeeze page. There are now several other tools we can use to make even sharper looking squeeze pages to really knock the socks off our visitors.

Here are 2 simple ways to build squeeze pages:

HTML Squeeze Page Method

I would highly recommend using a template (like our basic first example above) if you are going to make your squeeze page in html. Don’t try to recreate a page because there are hundreds of templates you can get where you will just need to plug your information in. Don’t spend time reinventing the wheel. Simply do a google search for “squeeze page template” and you will find a world of them to choose from.

Editing html templates can be done with a free tool called Kompozer. You can download this tool for free for both macs and pcs. If you know absolutely nothing about html, you will be able to use Kompozer with no problem because it is WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get).

Plug and Play WordPress & HTML High Converting Templates

At the time this blog post is being written (September 2014), we are so lucky because there are a lot of smart developers building plug and play squeeze pages where us non technical users can just put our own information in and have really nice looking and professional squeeze pages. I would highly recommend going this route because they are so easy to use and again, you don’t have to be technical at all. Some tools will cost you a pretty penny, but there are many now that will give you all the features you need and more without having to shell out a lot of money upfront or monthly. Many of these tools will integrate with WordPress which is helpful because many marketers use WordPress as their website platform.

The tools you want to take a look at are:

Lead Pages – Lead pages will give you everything you need and the most up to date highest converting sales and lead pages. However, this comes at a high price tag. Also, a warning is that if you cancel, you might lose the work you’ve put in. So use with caution.

WP Profit Builder – Build professional looking squeeze and sales pages very quickly

• Create amazing marketing pages that capture new leads effortlessly
• Easy to use on all your WordPress sites with ANY theme
• Drag and Drop LIVE editor permits quick on the fly updates
• Get 50+ pre-done, proven marketing layouts for every need
• Plus 50+ instant elements to enhance any page on your site
• Create all types of pages with irresistible features for new leads
• SEO and Mobile Optimized for maximum effect
• Transform Your Site into a massive lead generation tool
• All of this and much more.

Post Roundup

There you have it. Now you know all of the essential components of building amazing squeeze pages that will convert well for you. Don’t skip any of the required steps, otherwise your squeeze pages won’t perform the way you want them to.

Please leave a comment below and tell us and show us the squeeze pages you are building.