Hey guys, I've got a new product I'm going to be launching in the following weeks, and in the meantime I will be using a squeeze page to gather a mailing list. This is my first draft. I definitely see room for improvement, and I'd love to have a bit of help from some of the pro's. Here is the URL: http://www.fearexterminator.com As time goes on, this is the URL that will be updated. If I make any changes while this thread is active, I'll make a note of what they were as well.
I'd add a little color. The whole thing looks like a white splash. Even an off-white on the outside would help. The headline could be a little punchier too. Also, you say "we can show you" then you say "give me." Make sure you fix that. It's either you or more than you. And since I like to nitpick, put periods at the end of your bullet points, since your last one has an exclamation mark. Keep your style consistent. You've got the right idea about the size. Don't overwhelm the visitor. I forget what market research report I was reading, but it talked about a significant improvement in email subs when the visitor wasn't presented with tons of information. Imagine you're walking on the street in NY and a hotdog vendor asks if you want a hotdog. You might be interested (smells good). It's an easy, quick transaction. But what if he started talking to you about the history of the hot dog and then whipped out loads of literature about hot dogs. you'd start to think that these are $50,000 hotdogs or something. And you'd get angry. The transaction process becomes complicated (far more than it needs to be). BTW, have you done any market research? What's your typical visitor like? (age, financial status, likes, dislikes, etc). If you have an older crowd, the linear components definitely need attention. Good luck!
I'm not saying that the copy is bad, it isn't. It's just that I would have tried to evoke this sort of fear in a more organic manner. When you talk about fear of flying, you talk about it as it is something abstract, you should make it real and tangible. It's some nice copy, but nice copy doesn't convert too well... from my experience at least. Hope this helps. Regards, George
Hey guys, thanks for the help. MarketJunction, thanks for noting the discrepancy in tone. I made a few changes to some similar things like that the other day, didn't catch that one, so thanks! Great hotdog analogy btw. Geegel, would you happen to know of a good sales letter that talks "organically" in this way? I'm not exactly sure what you mean about it. I'm sure that I can add more 'feeling' words in there to evoke the emotions a bit more, if that's what you are referring to.
Erm, of course I do, the ones I write . Seriously though, evoking emotion is exactly what I mean. After reading it the persons suffering from this phobia should have their knees trembling and should be barely breathing. What you need are the gruesome details. How the panic attack sets in, the symptoms etc. I know that this might seem a bit far off, but you would get attention and a much better conversion ratio. Regards, George
I think the census has been pretty much the same so far. I've gotten a number of "it's good, but not good enough" responses. All of which elude to grabbing the readers emotions and riding on their coattails with them while they read. Tonight I'll be making edits and going through my research to find out exactly what I need to target.
*shrugs shoulders* Eh, I'm not much for squeeze pages. If you don't give me enough info, and I have to give you my e-mail address, JUST to get it, I back out of the site. I'm afraid a lot of people are like that. Squeeze pages lose a lot of potential customers for a webmaster. But on a sidenote, and not to contradict myself, it is a good, nice-looking page.
Hey Perry, Thanks for your opinion, but I think that it may only feel that way to you because of your knowledge of advertising. Then again, I could be completely wrong about that, but I have seen some great successes in the past with squeeze pages for me. However I have also seen a lot of signups from just an itsy-bitsy box on a sidebar too. I feel they can go either way, but for the majority of the people out there, squeeze pages work well. It might be a good idea to do some testing on my part to see what sort of pages work better, squeeze pages, or an article with a sign up box.
These pages work all day long. You'd be hard pressed to find a solid (money wise) IMer or copywriter (specializing in online stuff) that didn't use squeeze pages, lists, etc. I'd never buy beer because of a stupid ad, but obviously someone is. I find that in business most people that fail to reach their monetary potential do so because they begin to project their own personal limitations onto the market, such as "no one will do this, because I wouldn't." We all do it to some degree. And it's wrong. Forget your own opinions. Do research and go with the market, not against it. Good luck!
Some thoughts are below. If it were my page, I'd spend a lot longer than the 5 minutes it took to hammer these headline/subheads out. But they are ideas that illustrate what geegel says when she means "organic". You need to tap into how this target feels about this disability. You can even try out some headlines regarding the fact that airplane anxiety is a disability. And explore the thought about how the primal fear of flying grounds you and deprives you of exotic vacations. It depends on the personality traits of your target market. You are about to get on a plane and your knees shake, your heart races, your mouth goes bone dry and you grip things until your knuckles turn white. Easily overcome being a prisoner of your airplane panic and learn to waltz on a plane with the greatest of ease. Is the anxiety-gripping primal fear of getting on an airplane so real and debilitating it feels as scary as someone holding you at knife point? Easily overcome being a prisoner of your airplane panic and learn to waltz on a plane with the greatest of ease. Does getting on a plane evoke panic and fear equal to someone holding you at knifepoint? marketjunction has some good points about trying not to apply what you'd do and keep in mind what the target market will do.
I've got a new page of copy that I'm working on for this page. I was given some great pointers on another forum and will be putting them in place either tonight or tomorrow, depending on how my night falls tonight. This new copy should be much much better. Thanks for all the help thus far everyone!
Being that most people don't like them, and will back out of the site, how can it be "successful"? Say, for example, you get a half a dozen e-mail addresses a day. What may seem to be good in actuality isn't, because you could have over 500 daily visitors. All of those left your site, rolling their eyes because they don't like the idea of having to give their address, just to see your site, or to see the info. Even if you got, say, 50 addresses, the average 10% who give their address, you still turned away 450 from that daily 500. And, you have to get many of them in the heat of the moment. How are you going to do that if some of them open your e-mail the next day? Sometimes they have lost the interest, and they will delete it. I'm sorry, cousin, but turning away potential customers isn't a very smart thing to do. And a good, smart IMer or copywriter knows this. On top of that, of the few who do give you their e-mail address, and if it is a REAL address, many of them will not read the third e-mail sent to them. When it comes to the Internet, we are not a nation of readers. But I'm derailing your thread. Sorry. If you think it works for you, more power to you. Good luck with your site. I like the design of it, and it is good sales copy.