When you have a business purpose for your website or blog you need to have goals. Usually the goal is to drive sales; or at least drive actions that are going to lead to sales somewhere down the line (such as building an email list).
But most people are missing one single page that gets results at extremely high rates. And I’m going to share it with you here today.
The Usual Suspects
The normal checklist of pages that you need to publish usually looks something like this…
- Homepage (or blog home)
- About Page
- Contact Page
- Privacy Policy
- Etc…
If you have taken it one step further you will likely have pages that lead directly to your desired results. These are usually sales and landing pages.
Most people link to these directly in their navigation or sidebar. I do this at CSH.
I have a link to my consulting and services page in the top navigation. I also link to two of my products in the sidebar: The Strategic Content Launch Pad guide to content marketing and blogging and my Content Optimization Guide.
I even have a link to a landing page where people can sign up and get free access to the Marketing Toolbox I assembled.
But these are all out in the open for anyone to see. You can see that I do this with some quick observation.
But there’s something you can’t see unless you have recently signed up to my email list…
The “Hidden” Money Page
Not too long ago I implemented something that in the internet marketing community is called an OTO (a “One Time Offer”).
This is an offer you make to new buyers or new subscribers only once. It is a deal that they won’t ever see again; one that people have to act on right away if they want to take advantage of it.
In most normal scenarios when someone purchases a product or subscribes, they would be taken directly to a confirmation page.
But in this instance, the OTO page is inserted right before this confirmation page.
Normal scenario: Subscribe >> Confirmation Page
New Scenario: Subscribe >> OTO Page >> Confirmation Page.
Let’s take a look at why this works so well…
The Psychology of the OTO Page
There are a few reasons that a “one time offer” like this works so well.
The first reason is the audience.
At the point where your OTO is displayed, you have a captive audience. They just subscribed to your list or purchased your product. You may never have as much of their attention as you do at that point.
The second reasons is scarcity.
When you offer a great deal, but it is truly limited (i.e. only for first-time subscribers), the likelihood of someone taking action and taking you up on your offer increases exponentially.
Note: The makers of Market Samurai just released Scarcity Samurai. A great plugin that really helps you communicate the scarcity. In early testing results, people have doubled their normal incomes from sales pages using this tool. Very cool!
And the third is the reason for the offer.
Have you ever noticed how big sales usually happen around the holidays? The holiday gives companies a “reason” to make the special offer.
Well being a first time subscriber provides just as good a reason as any.
What Should You Offer?
The array of offers you can make is unlimited.
Anything you normally sell can be offered at a special discount of some sort for your “one time offer.”
In my case I prefer to offer the digital products that I normally sell. This is obviously my preferred offer because it doesn’t cost me any more time or money to deliver on the offer.
However, there’s no reason that you can’t offer a service instead.
A while back I ran a special offer for my website audit service. If I had no products to offer, I could run this as a continuing special for first-time subscribers.
For people that generally provide a service, you can always offer a free first consultation of some sort.
Further Testing
Like anything in marketing, everything requires testing.
If you have multiple offers you can provide, then by all means test them all out to see which converts best.
However, the slightest changes can have enormous effects.
For example, try running a split test on the price of your offer. You would be surprised, but it’s not always the lowest price that converts best.
So…what are you going to offer?