A squeeze page is a landing page designed to collect email addresses for a marketing campaign. There are generally no exit hyperlinks, advertisements, or other additions to the page that can potentially distract a visitor from the sole purpose of the website. In addition to giving a short sales pitch on why the visitor should enter his or her email address, a squeeze page might offer free content in order to further tempt visitors into signing up. Once an email address is entered, the visitor will usually immediately receive a confirmation along with the promised free content. If the visitor chooses not to sign up, there is rarely anything else to do on a squeeze page besides leave.
Distractions are kept to a minimum on squeeze pages to increase the webmaster’s chance of getting sign-ups. In addition to excluding advertisements and hyperlinks, there are usually no comment boxes, contact addresses, or even links to other pages on the same website. Squeeze pages normally consist of just one visible page unless the visitor signs up, in which case a thank you page might be displayed.
Often, a squeeze page promises information that is not widely available on the Internet for free. To get this information, the visitor must first sign up for a newsletter. In order to convince visitors to sign up, the webmaster might set up a voice or video sales pitch to play once the website is loaded to immediately capture the visitor’s attention. Generally, the goal is not to sell something, but to have the visitor get free information in exchange for an email address.
The information obtained from a squeeze page sign-up is hardly free because the visitor signed up for a newsletter. This newsletter will arrive in the visitor’s inbox at pre-scheduled times and gradually attempt to build the visitor’s trust. After a certain number of emails, the newsletter will begin pushing products. Often, these products are described as something life-changing that honestly worked for the newsletter writer or a dear friend. Sometimes, the products are mentioned in casual ways, as if the newsletter writer recently discovered the product, gave it try, and thinks his or her readers can also benefit from it.
Generally, the ultimate goal of a squeeze page with a newsletter is to eventually sell the visitor something. The information that was given in exchange for an email address might actually be valuable and hard to obtain, but the newsletter writer generally expects to be paid back in the long term through sales of products he or she has yet to mention. In many cases, a person can simply unsubscribe from a newsletter by clicking a link at the bottom of the email. Some mailing lists are not honest about removing people, however, and might even sell the email address to other companies.