Introduction

Everyone knows that building a list is absolutely vital if you want to really send your online marketing to the next level, but most people seem to fail to fully absorb the information. They may start a list and then just ignore it, or they piddle around with it, and it never gets fully off the ground.

But let me give you a little example to ponder…

Let’s say you own a little hometown grocery store. Imagine 100 people all coming into your store at once. You watch eagerly, anticipating all the money these customers are going to bring you, and you see them filling their carts to the brim.

Now you have your cashiers at the ready as people begin making their way toward the checkout lanes. The first couple of people filter down the lanes, and you hear the cheerful chirp of the scanners ringing up purchases.

Then suddenly, things change. First, one-person abandons their shopping cart and just inexplicably walks out the door. Then another, and another, and soon 97% of your customers flood out the door, leaving their full carts sitting in the aisles, frozen food dripping onto your formerly spotless floors.

Would you just sit by and watch as your customers flooded out the door, or would you rush toward the crowd and beg them to stay, asking them what was wrong, pleading for another chance?

Would you set up new end caps to encourage extra sales, send out coupons, hire new employees to ensure lanes were always open, and do everything you could to ensure the best possible shopping experience?

Of course, you would!

The trouble is that online businesses have come to thing that shopping cart abandonment rates of 97% are normal. They think, “Oh well, what can I do about it?”

Stop the madness!!!!

The fact is there’s plenty you can do about it. You don’t have to be satisfied with 97, 98, even 99% of people leaving your site without buying. You don’t have to watch helplessly as 80% or more of your squeeze page visitors waltz away without giving you their email address. You certainly don’t have to let 80-90% of your website or blog traffic bounce away without clicking anything!

In this report, you’re going to learn how to capture these people onto your mailing list and ensure yourself a captive audience that won’t just walk away!

You’re also going to learn how to really maximize the effectiveness of your list building and your email marketing.

So, let’s get started!

Capturing Exit Traffic

Just like you’d rush after those 97 customers in your grocery store, you should also capture those people who are leaving your websites and blogs. You don’t want to just let them go, because once they go, they are likely to never come back!

You need to capture as much of your exit traffic as possible onto a mailing list. That way, if someone is leaving your site without buying anything, you still have a chance to sell them something later.

You’ll want to set up a squeeze page that makes them some kind of compelling offer. You’ll want to include a great freebie that seems incredibly valuable, so that very few people could refuse.

Once people are convinced to join, you need to start making use of them right away. The best way to do this is to create an email series that will be sent to your prospects on an automated basis after they join your list. This is usually a continuous series that presents a large amount of information spaced out over seven emails, one sent each day.

The main reason you want to space these emails out daily is so your list members get to know you and don’t forget about you. They will start to be conditioned to receiving regular emails from you, and they may even look forward to them if you’re giving them good information.

Interest in your newsletter is almost always at its highest right after someone subscribes to your list. As times goes on, your emails will probably become less effective. So, you’ll want to make the most of your subscribers as soon as they join.

For this reason, you want to keep the content (and offers) coming regularly so they don’t forget you or lose interest. Pitch your product in the very first email you send out and keep pitching it often.

You’ll hear some marketers telling you not to promote to your list right away. They say you should send them a lot of content first. But that only accomplishes one thing: to make your subscribers expect everything free.

Plus, why would you withhold products from them that could really change their lives? Why would you knowingly keep these people from getting help with problems they may be having?

Obviously, you’ll want to start building a meaningful relationship with your subscribers, but you don’t have to forgo promotion to do it. Just include your promotions along with your content.

Use a Thank You Page

You must maximize every single bit of real estate you have, and the page prospects see after they subscribe to your mailing list is no exception. Most people simply send people to a simple page thanking them for subscribing after they join and reminding them to check their email to confirm their subscription, but instead, you should use that valuable space to promote an offer.

An interesting way to do this is to make them an offer they can’t refuse. It needs to be more compelling than whatever they just saw, because they’ve been captured upon exiting your site, meaning they did not buy. This should be a product that has very high perceived value, but it priced so low it becomes a no-brainer.

Redirect Unresponsive Traffic

If someone hasn’t responded to your initial sales page and didn’t join your mailing list, you still shouldn’t give up on them entirely. You have one last option to try to get a sale out of them.

You can either redirect this traffic to another single offer, perhaps an affiliate link that ties in with the theme of your original sales page but presents something differently than you do, or you can send them to a “Recommended Resources” page that lists several other products they may be interested in.

Basically, this is your last-ditch effort. It’s now or never, and it’s time to try to get them to respond in some way. You can test and tweak this page and try to get it to convert as well as possible, but any response is better than just letting all that traffic go without a fight.

Maximize your Opt-In Funnel

Okay, you’ve learned the basics of capturing your exit traffic onto your opt-in list. Now it’s time to really get into the nitty-gritty of how to maximize conversions on your squeeze page

There are two main elements for this:

1. A compelling and valuable product that will be irresistible to prospects.
2. A convincing squeeze page.

Baiting the Hook

The first thing you need to do is bait your hook. This means crafting a quality product you can give away in exchange for people opting into your list. This can’t be some throwaway. It must be compelling.

Let’s take a look at the best ways to craft a truly effective giveaway product for your offer.

1. It must be easy to deliver on an automated basis. Never offer a service or something that must be shipped. If you happen to get thousands of subscribers at once and can’t deliver, you’ll ruin your reputation.
2. It must tie in closely with your paid products. It’s no use putting up a weight loss freebie if you’re selling acne treatment products. Sure, some crossover will happen, but your list will be vastly more responsive if you keep a tight rein on your niche.

1. It must be valuable. Yes, it’s free. But people aren’t going to give you their information if you aren’t giving them something they find useful or valuable. Make sure you’re giving away something people might be willing to pay for, because remember, they’re still paying you by trusting you with their email address.
2. It must be desired. Sure, you shouldn’t give away your best secrets in your freebie, but it should still be something they want. Otherwise, they aren’t going to bother subscribing to your list to get it.

Creating a Compelling Squeeze Page

Once you’ve got a product, it’s time to create the page that will entice people into giving up their email address to get it. This page must use compelling copy just as if you were asking for money for the product, because they are still paying with their email address.

Unlike standard sales pages, you don’t need pages and pages of copy. A single page is usually plenty.

Here’s what you need:

1. A really killer headline
2. A few benefits in a bulleted list
3. A strong call to action
4. Your opt-in box

Something you must keep in mind is that this particular squeeze page is being set up to catch exit traffic, so you can’t just poke and prod them to buy the offer they just passed up. Instead, you have to condense your information into a smaller bite.

Remember, they’ve likely just read through at least part of your sales letter. They probably don’t want to read another long page. So, keep it short, simple and to the point. Just let them know a few short benefits of your product and ask them for their email address.

Remember, you don’t need anything complex. A simple page with some professional, eye-catching graphics, a quick headline, maybe a bullet point or two, and your opt-in box is really all you need.

If you’re not a designer, don’t panic. You can actually use a pre-made template as a solution to make quick sales pages without needing design skills or shelling out money for custom design.

Post Registration Magic

Now that you’ve crafted a killer squeeze page, it’s time to think about the page that visitors see after registration. Usually, people just add some simple text that thanks people for subscribing and reminds them to check their email for the link to confirm their subscription. This is a waste of precious space!

Yes, I know it’s critical to remind people to click that confirmation link, but this page could be so much more!

There is a way to ensure you don’t lose out on that valuable ad space. Instead of simply saying thank you and reminding prospects to confirm their subscriptions, add a message that says something like:

“WAIT! Before you go, we have a special bonus subscriber-only discount on one of our bestselling products. Just click below for access.”

Then create a simple button that says, “Click to continue” and link that to an offer that is truly a no-brainer. It should be something relatively inexpensive that is offered at a deep discount so that it is practically free.

The main goal of this is to get prospects that you can move to your “proven buyers” mailing list right away. This list should be much more responsive than traditional lists because they are all proven to buy from you.

Monetizing Those Tire Kickers

If you’ve properly implemented your exit traffic and opt-in funnel, you’ll be seeing more profit quickly, but you shouldn’t stop there. There are further strategies you can use to turn those tire kickers into cool, hard cash.

By the time you get to this stage, prospects have been through several different layers of your sales funnel. These could include any of the following:

1. The primary sales page or squeeze page
2. An exit pop squeeze page or offer
3. A catch-all offer after the squeeze page
4. A thank you page (post-registration) with additional offer
5. The post-thank you offer

Now you can use a few extra tips to get those tire kickers to convert into buyers and put cash into your pocket that you’d otherwise have just left lying on the table!

The Last Resort Offer

By now, you have the majority of responsive individuals on your list, but you may still manage to gather a few of those people with a “last resort” offer.

There are a couple of ways to do this. The first one is to send traffic to one of your own products. Of course, by now they may have already seen most or all of what you have to offer that relates in any way to your initial offer, so this may not be possible or feasible.

Your second option is to send people to an affiliate offer. This could be for a product related to yours, or for something else, they may find useful. For example, you might send internet marketing traffic to a hosting company, or you might send weight loss traffic to a weight loss product on Amazon.

The obvious downside to sending your traffic to an affiliate offer is that you won’t be able to capture those people onto your mailing list. And you’ll be getting a smaller portion of the sales price because you’ll be getting commission instead of getting all of the profits. But remember, this is a last-ditch offer. You’ve already tried everything possible to get some money from these people and failed, so you’re not really losing anything.

Another drawback to this is that your prospect might not be interested in the specific offer you send them to. So, there is one more option to consider.

The third option is to send this traffic to a list of various offers, some could be your own, and others might be affiliate offers. You might even have links to your blog or other site to make use of the traffic in that way.

There’s no easy way to decide which of these options you should choose, so you’ll have to test multiple options to find out which works best for you specifically.

Testing and Tweaking

Now it’s time to test and tweak the system in order to ensure you reach the highest possible response rate overall. This is a critical element, because without this step you’re likely to lose a large number of prospects you don’t have to lose.

Here are some of the things you need to test:

• Your squeeze page text, including the headline, benefits, and call-to-action
• Your squeeze page graphics
• The text on your post-registration page
• The product you’re offering on the post-registration page
• The sales copy for the product (headline, opener, benefits, testimonials, guarantee, call-to-action, price and PS)
• The product or offer you make to people who don’t subscribe
• The wording of the offer

Now, here are some important tips for testing these elements:

1. Test only one element at a time. If you change several items at once and you see a change (positive or negative), how will you know which item affected the change?

Use tracking tools. It’s very difficult to track changes on your own, because you need to change one element manually, wait until you’ve had a significant enough number of results to be relatively sure of the accuracy of the test, and then change something else and track that manually.

1. Don’t make assumptions. Never jump to conclusions too quickly. You must have a statistically significant sample in order to ensure accurate results. Wait until you have at least 30-50 actions before you make a decision. It might be tempting to jump for joy because the first six visitors to your updated squeeze page all opt in, but what if the next 300 don’t? Wait until you have enough of a sample!

Never underestimate the power of testing and tweaking. The smallest changes can often have the biggest results, and without making these changes you’re potentially leaving BIG money on the table.