The amazing NameSqueeze™ technique that increases opt-in rate, conversion rate, and visitor value like crazy

A huge mailing list that you own and control of the most
likely prospects to ever become customers!

How would you like that?

A massive list of perfect prospects who have demonstrated interest by clicking through, and then again, by opting in to your mailing list. (That's practically an order to sell them something!)

You can contact them again and again, whenever you want money. If you have - or you can find - additional products to sell them, you can create a recurring cash flow that pays you monthly or even weekly.

The single most important technique you'll ever learn

Imagine the ability to double or triple your opt-in rate, and increase your conversion rate as well. Plus...

• Test traffic sources and know with just a few hundred visitors whether or not they'll be profitable (and whether they are sending BS traffic).
  
  
• Improve your conversion rate and the amount of control you have over affiliate promotions, including adding a follow-up hard-coded with your affiliate link that ensures you get credit for sales.
  

And perhaps the most important thing of all ...

• Deliver a near custom sales piece to each prospect, and greatly increase your chances of making a sale.
  

This process is called the NameSqueeze™, because like a juicer, it is the most effective way to extract opt-in names from traffic passing through your site.

A little history ...

Back in the old days, just 10 years ago, advertising online was quite different. We used to post teaser ads on the various classified sites, newsgroups, ad networks, and mailing lists, and link directly to our site to present the offer in one shot.

That worked well, and frankly, we made a lot of money. But competition soon flourished, and traffic began to cost money. The obvious response was to market more effectively and follow-up by e-mail to people who didn't buy on the first visit. In 1996, most smart marketers added an opt-in form to their sales page, generating 5% - 10% opt-in rates, which were great.

But in 2000, we released The Amazing Pop-Ups course and opt-in marketing completely changed! The ability to deliver specific pop-ups to people based on their actions made marketers think differently about something called user experience.

You see, for the first time ever, if a visitor did something (visited, exited, clicked, etc.), we could respond with an appropriate popup. For example ...

• If someone clicked a word on a Web page, instead of a taking them to an entirely new page and distracting them from the sales process, we used small, unobtrusive pop-ups to deliver specific information, perhaps the word's definition or an explanatory paragraph.
  
  
• If someone entered a Web site, we popped-up special offers or alternate links they might be interested in, increasing revenue (and profit) per visitor.
  

And the most revolutionary ...

• If someone left without purchasing, we popped-up an opt-in form and tried to capture his or her contact info to remarket to them.
  

That was huge!

That's when we finally broke the 10% opt-in rate on a consistent, predictable basis. Our eventual understanding and control over the user's surfing experience was the most revolutionary thing to hit marketing since the start of the Web!

Almost immediately we started seeing and hearing about opt-in rates that were 15%, 25%, even 35% or more! The additional prospects were in the follow-up process, which meant more money from the same traffic. And everything was going along great, until ...

An explosion of pop-up blockers hit the market

That which seems too good to be true often comes to an end.

In 2002, the use of pop-up blockers exploded as many Web users attempted to take back the control we marketers wrested from them with our pop-ups. In doing so, opt-in rates plummeted back down to the mid teens.

Therefore, in 2003, a few sharp folks created "unblockable" pop-ups using techie tricks, and released their software on the world. The pop-ups were definitely cool, since they could move around on the page and attract attention, but there were two big problems ...

1. They couldn't be used on exit. In other words, you risked interfering with the user while they were engaged in your sales letter, and that could definitely cost you a sale.
   
   
2. No doubt about it, they new pop-ups couldn't be blocked. But think about it· If you are a surfer and you don't like pop-ups, and even go so far as to install a special piece of software that kills them, how responsive will they be on you? I'll tell you·
   

You are going to be pissed!

Thus, we needed to develop something different:

• Something that wouldn't be stoppable or blockable.
  
  
• Something that would allow us to collect a large number of opt-ins so we could remarket to users who didn't buy.
  
  
• Something to replace the ubiquitous "landing page," which was often just a short paragraph or two and a link. (Who came up with that brilliant idea anyway?)
  

And most importantly ...

• A process that would enhance the user's experience, rather than force them to fight for control, a battle most marketers eventually lose.
  

Thus was born the Amazing NameSqueeze™ process, which was originally a flip-flop of the exit pop-up formula. In a nutshell, a Squeeze Page is defined as:

Of course, not everybody opts in, and for those people we generally test one of three things: 

• When the user exits, we pop-up the sales letter: Though this could get blocked, it's worthy of a test, especially with cheap untargeted traffic and a general-interest product.
  
  
• When the user exits, we let them go: A lot of marketers feel if the prospect won't give you their e-mail address, they probably won't give you their credit card number. Our testing tends to confirm that fact.
  
  
• We offer a "soft squeeze" option: Put a link to the sales letter below the form that says something like Take me directly to the details or I prefer to give my address later.

That's what we thought too!

When we first started toying with this process, we reckoned hardly anyone would participate, and instead of capturing a bunch of names, we'd waste traffic like crazy as people refused to opt-in, and then kill our pop-up with their pop-up blockers too!

But test it we did, and on our first attempt, it blew away everything else, generating a 49% opt-in rate!

What! Must be a bug in the software I thought! Nobody gets half the visitors to part with their precious e-mail address.

• So I re-tested, and the next time I got a 41% opt-in rate.
  
  
• So I tested again. 45% opt-in rate.
  

Not possible, my brain kept saying! There's got to be a bug in Hypertracker, our stats program. So I counted the clicks up manually, and went into my Aweber account to count opt-ins manually ...

But there was no bug. There was no error.
There was no mistake of any kind!

The NameSqueeze™ was in fact generating nearly 50% opt-in and it still works like crazy! In fact, as unbelievable as it sounds, we have clients who get as many as 65% of all visitors to opt-in to their NameSqueeze™, based on the traffic source. 

They are then free "remarket" their products, leading to conversion rates that are double or triple those of "old school" marketers, and visitor values that distinguish a hobby from a very successful business.

Let's look at some sites that use a NameSqueezeú process so you know exactly what we are talking about.

• http://www.ebookgenerator.com/ (Armand Morin's lead site)
  
• http://www.publicdomainriches.com/ (Yanik Silver's hot product)
  
• http://www.doubleyourdating.com/ (hot relationship site)
  
• http://www.perrymarshall.com/google/
  

If you look around, you can probably find hundreds more, with dozens of variations on this theme. The key is that the site asks for an opt-in prior to making the sales presentation, which establishes a commitment from the user.

Four unique twists on the NameSqueeze™

Below you'll find four twists on this amazing process that can help you make more money and reduce your advertising risk, no matter what you are selling or how you are promoting it.

1) Use the NameSqueeze™ to test your traffic

If you ever wondered whether or not the traffic you are buying is worth anything, just run it through a NameSqueeze™ and see! The simple truth is, if they aren't opting in, they aren't going to buy. And if they do opt-in, but don't buy right away, you have an opportunity to follow-up since you have their contact info.

We generally look for at least a 15% to 25% opt-in rate when we test a new traffic source, and we have seen as high as 35% with PPC engines like Google and Overture. No matter where you are testing, you can "Squeeze It" to determine its quality, including:

• New banner and pop-up ad sources
  
• New email ad sources
  
• New PPC search engines
  
• New Contextual sources
  

You can even test headlines, bullet points, and other creative tweaks to see if any motivate a higher percentage to opt-in.

2) Using the NameSqueeze™ to take control over affiliate promotions

Stephen Pierce explains how he uses a NameSqueeze™ to completely override, and at the same time, drastically improve the sales process of nearly any affiliate promotion.

Take a few minutes to review his Accelerated Affiliate Sales Model and see how he builds an entirely new front end to the typical process used by most online merchants.

3) Using the NameSqueeze™ to qualify visitors

If you want visitors with a certain demographic characteristic, it's easy to build a question or two into your form. We have seen pages that qualify prospects by ...

• Age
  
• Interest
  
• Ability to pay
  
• Gender
  

And much more. Using the fields built into most autoresponder systems, you can even feed some of this information back to prospects when you follow-up with them, creating even higher response rates and building a relationship with potential customers before the sale.

4) Using the NameSqueeze™ to personalize the sales process

Since you are collecting the name and e-mail anyway, why not take it all the way and personalize the sales letter? In addition, you can also ask a few demographic questions, which allows you to build a custom sales piece tailored to those who opt-in.

Use personalization techniques to create a targeted letter based on qualifying questions. This tweak, and the fact that there is consistent follow-up means the conversion rate can climb to over 300% higher than without this process!

The odds are 10 - 1 the NameSqueeze™
process will improve your profitability

In almost every case, we found that the NameSqueeze™ process did not hurt initial conversion, and nearly always increased the opt-in rate. However, there were a few notable exceptions.

Where the target market was considered advertising intolerant, in a head-to-head split test, the process was often matched, even beaten by a plain sales letter with an opt-in form. The markets that felt this way were:

• Technical people
  
• Academics
  
• Non-profits
  
• Privacy advocates
  
• Anti-spam advocates
  

However, in some, the NameSqueeze™ won handily. That's why you need to test this process for yourself, in your own business and with your own traffic.

Conclusion

By now, you have probably realized that we are big fans of the NameSqueeze™. In fact, it's the first thing we do with new clients since it's often the easiest way to improve profitability.

Therefore, I hope you'll do yourself a favor and try out some of the things you learned in this article. You see, as the Internet matures, and the cost of advertising continues to rise, the folks with the biggest customer lists will be the ones who survive and thrive.

They'll make the sales because they started the relationship, made on that first fateful day when their NameSqueeze™ generated the prospect.

Respectfully submitted,


Jonathan Mizel