This optin landing page does an excellent job of combining curiosity with urgency to attract signups. I came to the page on December 26, 2008 from a text ad with the headline “3 stocks you need to get into before Obama takes office.” The date is obviously important because it is just a few weeks before Barack Obama’s inauguration. Urgency is explicit in the timing.

It’s worth taking a look at why it is so effective
The headline is to the point and compelling to investors (I like the headline of the text ad even better because of its specificity). The design of the landing page is clear and spare. You see the headline then “Enter Your email” and just one field to fill out – your email address. It sits there in the middle of  the screen surrounded mostly by white space – like a tempting piece of candy to someone with a sweet tooth. Hard to resist. See screenshot below:

 There are many examples of spare opt-in pages. But this is about as spare as it gets, depending on the strength of the headline and the simplicity of the layout for its power.

A small logo in the  upper left corner tells you it’s from the Motley Fool, a brand name in the investment newsletter field. It’s all that’s needed to tell you this is coming from an authoritative source.  

What happened after signing up
It’s also interesting to see what they did post-signup. Once I signed up I came to a detailed 3 page article/report. It goes into the historical relationship of stock movements and presidential administrations. 

It then transitions into talking about the sectors that should benefit from Obama’s policies. The report then revealed all 3 stock picks. There is certainly good marketing reasons to give away this information.

1) It follows the give-away free information model on the Internet. The idea is to get people thinking: if I get all this for free, imagine what I’ll get with their paid product.”

2) Theory of Reciprocity – one of the principles developed by noted social psychologist Robert Cialdini. The premise is that when you give people a gift (e.g. valuable Free Report), people feel obligated (and may pay for your newsletter).

Still, I wonder  . . .

The text ad and landing page headline were exceptionally compelling.
I believe the power of the curiosity and the urgency generated here would immediately stimulate a  good conversion rate to a paid membership. In that model, you would not  give away all 3 stocks (remove the word Free from the headline), and reserve this valuable information for those who buy the newsletter (preferably a Free Trial).

There is the risk people would resent that you teased them again. But I believe it’s worth a test. I’d experiment with a shorter article or report  that gives away some of the prized information, possibly 1 or 2 of the picks. Then lead them to the Free trial to find out the rest.

In any case, in the model they applied here, they still have time  to convert me. After all, they now have my email.

Whether you go for the conversion right after signup, or later during email followups, combining curiosity and urgency is one of the top combinations for getting results.

For another powerful opt-in technique, go to squeeze page advice.
For copy and marketing consulting, go to www.altmancopypro.com

Behavioral targeting is fine as long as it is confined to the the website that the browser opted in from. Following the browser beyond the site he opted in from, and using that info should be a no-no.

There is no doubt that formulating and delivering  ad messages according to browsing behavior is a massively effective advertising weapon. The key to making behavioral targeting work, of course, is getting people to opt-in. Once you have that, you have access to a mountain of useful data.

If you want to see a powerful, advanced technique for getting opt-ins, check out my article Squeezing More Juice Out of Your Squeeze Pages. Or check out my services at www.YourMarketingRoadmap.com

Postcards reach an audience where email might be filtered out or just overlooked. If the postcard is good, it attracts attention. In addition, many recipients hold on to them for awhile. If you have a memorable message and an easy to type url on the postcard, recepients are also more likely to go online and check it out.

But the creative work on the postcard – the marketing message and the graphics – are crucial.

The problem is, almost all postcard printing requires a minimum of 500 or 1,000 cards. The best deals typically would run you a few hundred dollars for printing and mailing.

And once they are printed, that’s what you have and you can’t change it. Think another headline or graphics would do better? Then you have to do a whole new printing order.

But what if you knew beforehand which creative works best…which headline and graphics happens to get more response than others, even before mailing your postcards?

There is no sure way to know other than mailing test postcards…but there is a way to come close and good idea of what creative works best. Use a flyer marketing test campaign before going ahead with your postcard campaign.

What I’m talking about is using the same headline, the same text, and graphics in a flyer that you would on the postcard. Flyers are much easier to design than postcards. You can have a headline and subhead at the top, insert the image below that and then the text below that. As simple as that and you’ve approximated the creative and the marketing message that you’re thinking of for your postcard. Since even the cheapest desktop printers now print color, you will have no problem in printing color images.

Flyers enable you to test creative in whatever small numbers you want.
Now, instead of printing all 500 or 1,000 postcards, you could test a sample of 100 people on your list. You could send one headline to 50 people (group A) and the other headline to the other 50 (group B). Or, use one image for group A and another image for goup B.

You would then need to set up a different landing page for each group. So the flyer for Group A is directed to url A, and group B is directed to url B. Then you can track which creative work draws the most people.

The cost for the test? Postage is 41 cents. Let’s add another 9 cents for paper and envelope. So sending out out 100 flyers would cost you $50. For that amount you could get an idea of what creative works best for your postcard rollout.

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Need help in testing or rolling out your next campaign?
Click here

There’s probably nothing more crucial to the success of your Internet business than having targeted traffic opt-in to your list. It’s so important that squeeze pages, which did little more than ask for sign-up to a list, became widespread.

Not only did reader frustration with this grow, but google stepped in and did something about it, instituting their google slap and landing page quality scoring. In other words, you now have to provide value and relevant content on the landing page or you will suffer the consequences: In Adwords this means paying more money ( a lot more) for keywords. It also affects your natural search engine rankings in google.

So with opt-ins so important and now harder to achieve, what do you do? This is where the technique I’m about to tell you about comes in. It worked beautifully pre-Google slap, and works even better now because it plays right into the new landing page necessities.

I call the technique: Contentus Interruptus

I first became fully aware of it years ago when I was writing sales copy and guiding marketing communications efforts for one of the biggest online financial websites.
We tested all sorts of techniques to attract signups for paid as well as free services, but the approach of interrupting valued content consistently outpulled other efforts.
While the idea is not new, the success of this particular method is in the details.

Here is how I came to discover the power of Contentus Interruptus, and how you can use it to squeeze more juice out of your squeeze pages….
To read the entire article, click Squeeze Page Juice