Ugly Squeeze Page Gets 66.22% Opt-In Rate

This morning my Manager of Member Services came in, quite disgusted at something that I had done.

The night before I had sent out an email with a link to a squeeze page that I had created, and she was completely repulsed by how ugly it was! She told me that with the fabulous graphic designer that we have available in-house, I could have had a much better looking squeeze page created for the campaign I was doing.

She even went on to say that my web designer was hurt because I had created such an abomination! (It turns out he wasn't hurt, he was actually happy to see me create such a piece of dirt as it secures his job further)

I patiently listened to her continue on about how I need to provide better quality websites for the experience of my readers. After she was done and had gone to work, I looked at the stats that the squeeze page had produced overnight:

66.22% conversion rate!

Why on earth would this ugly squeeze page get a whopping 66.22% conversion rate when well designed pages struggle to get 20%? Well, I'll let you in on the secret. The visitors were "sold" before they even got to the squeeze page!

You see, I was emailing my own readers about an affiliate program that was happening within the next few days. In my email I explained all the benefits of using this program, and told them that if they wanted to learn more then they needed to sign up at that squeeze page.

When people went to the squeeze page they already knew they wanted to sign up. Obviously some backed out (33.78% to be exact), but that could have been for various reasons, one maybe being how ugly my page was!

So what can we learn from this interesting experience?

1. Relationship building is key

If you don't have a great relationship with your readers then selling will be VERY difficult.

2. Pre-selling is king

As my good friend Todd Gross says, pre-selling is key to making a ton of cash through affiliate marketing (or through selling your own products).

Where do you pre-sell? Everywhere! In particular your emails, your videos, your blog posts, your articles, and anywhere else before the visitor is asked to purchase.

Because the visitors to the ugly squeeze page were pre-sold, they didn't care how poorly written and ill conceived the page was - they already knew they wanted it.

3. Prettiness is not always important

In fact, I have found that the more "good looking" a website is, the lower it performs.

Maybe this is due to the fact that the graphics are distracting, or perhaps it is because little (or no) time is put into delivering a useful, consistent, valuable message. Whatever the reason, I suggest you try removing the header graphics, fancy animated gifs, and other "pretty-factors" from your squeeze and sales pages and see what happens.

You may be rather surprised.