June 20

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Should Your Music Website Front Page Be A Squeeze Page?

By Keith Livingston

June 20, 2016

autorepsonder, email, exit pop, landing page, squeeze page, wordpress theme

Yes. Well, probably. Well, what’s a squeeze page, anyway?

The numbers are sobering. The vast majority of people that visit a website don’t go back again. Unless the site is Google, or eBay, or some site they have a reason to visit regularly, they probably won’t return. I’ve seen articles that say 95% of first-time visitors will never return. That means, every piece of social media you post, every time you link to your website, every YouTube video that you put up that links back to your site — is 95% wasted.

What do you do about that?

You do a couple of things . . .

  1. You make sure the material on your site is aimed toward people wanting to come back. You tell them what your music will do for them, and what kind of experience it will create. You get them wrapped up in your story.
  2. You get the ability to keep reaching out to them.

Reach Out And Touch Them — Over And Over

You’ve probably heard the old saw that it takes the average person 7-10 contacts with a product before they buy it. That’s 7 ads, seven exposures, 10 posts, 8 YouTube views. You’ve got to have the ability to contact them, if you want to get in front of them 10 times. Now, maybe you can afford to buy ads on TV, to get exposure. But it’s a heck of a lot cheaper to do it by email.

Now, getting someone to subscribe to your YouTube channel, Facebook fan page, or Twitter feed, are also ways to maintain contact. But none of those are nearly as powerful as email. At this point, email has a far greater return on investment than any other medium (with the possible exception of SMS messaging, and personal phone calls).

So, we want to get as many qualified email addresses as possible. What do I mean by qualified? People that probably like your music. How do we do that? We get really clear about the kind of music we play, and the kind of experience our music can give them, and we use a squeeze page (or an exit intent page — more on that later).

What’s A Squeeze Page?

A squeeze page, is a page with one point — to collect contact info (usually an email address). A good squeeze page can convert 20% (or even higher) of visitors. That’s a tremendous boost. If you have a form somewhere on your front page that says, “Enter your email for a free download of my music”, chances are that will perform at 1% or less. A squeeze page may (you won’t know, until you try it) increase the number of contacts you collect by 20, or even 40 times!

Squeeze pages usually have two options — fill in your email address, or close the page. That’s why it’s called a squeeze page (or landing page).

The squeeze page should have as powerful and enticing an offer on it as you can muster up. The headline will be responsible for the vast majority of the results, so make it good.

A squeeze page usually connects with your autoresponder (a service that automatically sends out the email once they’ve subscribed). Now, you’ve got their email in your autoresponder, and you can email them next time you have something to say!

You Hate Them When You Hate Them

When you go to one of those sites that has a form that pops up before you even read anything, you hate it. Everyone does. And you probably hate ads in your Facebook feed, except . . .

Except when it’s something you want. If I happen to be mixing a song, and I’m struggling with the bass guitar sound, and I happen to see an ad that says, “This video will show you how to get an awesome bass guitar sound”, I go, “Cool. Let’s see what they have to say.” You want to get as close to that feeling as possible, for your potential fans.

That’s why you have to take time to figure out how to best describe what you do, and the experience listening to your music is going to have on them. Then, when they hit your squeeze page, they go, “Cool, I’ll just download this track, right now!”

Exit Intent

You can also have what’s called an exit intent strategy. That’s a signup offer that pops up, only when people are about to leave the site (hopefully). You can do the same sort of offer there.

Where Do You Get Squeeze Pages and Exit Intent Pages?

I currently build my sites on WordPress (including this site). There are a bunch of autoresponder companies, and companies that sell plugins that help you build squeeze pages, and/or exit pops. Right now I’m using ThriveThemes. These are WordPress themes. Themes control the look of the sites — WordPress provides the structure. ThriveThemes also has the ability to build squeeze pages and exit intent popups, with additional plugins. But ThriveThemes is probably overkill, if you’re just going to build one music site.

I’ve used Layered Popups, to build exit intent popups, and it works just fine. I’ve also used OptinMonster. If you already have a WordPress theme, it might have the ability to build squeeze pages (they may be called landing pages, in your theme).

ReverbNation and FanBridge both provide landing pages for email signup, I understand (I haven’t used them myself). If you’re on one of the other website building systems, or have a website built on HTML, you can search for “Stand-Alone Website Popup Tools”.

There’s also something called “Action Gating”, when you can use to get email addresses from Facebook folks.

Keith

Keith Livingston

About the author

Keith Livingston started recording his own music in the late '70s, on a 4-track. He worked his way into live sound and studio work as an engineer -- mixing in arenas, working on projects in many major studios as a producer/engineer, and working in conjunction with an independent label.

He taught audio engineering at the Art Institute of Seattle, from 1990-1993, and in '96, contributing to authoring several college-level courses there.

He was General Manager of Радио один (Radio 1) in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Now he spends his time recording his own songs wherever he roams, and teaching others to do the same.

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