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Where do you link from your articles? If you’ve gone to the trouble of writing a great article do you want to send the reader to a capture page so you can sign them up to your list? Or is the pre-sell in the article so good you’re confident of sending them straight to your sales page?
By showing customers a capture page, you can get their details and build up to the sale over time? The alternative is to take them immediately to the sales page where you persuade them that they need to act fast or risk missing out big time?
The only reason for having a capture page is to get folks onto your list of prospective customers/partners, so that you can earn money from them. Either you want them to buy your products, sign up for your services, or take some other action that will ultimately result in putting money in your bank account.
You don’t put up a capture page to get more friends. It’s not a friend finder. It’s a sales tool.
But if it’s a sales tool, why not just go straight to the sales pitch and miss out the capture page altogether?
In truth, you should be using both capture and sales pages in your business. But you should always take your prospects through your capture page first.
And here’s why:
* Building trust – one of the biggest hurdles to earning money online is the fact that the customer doesn’t know you from Adam. It’s not like they’re popping to their local store, where they know the owner and the owner knows them. Business on the Internet is often faceless. Getting someone to trust you is a big factor in whether they will buy from you.
* Timing – people use the Internet to search for stuff all the time. That doesn’t mean they are searching with their credit card beside them just waiting to spend their money. So in order to buy from a sales page, they would need to put down their laptop, or get up from their desktop PC, go get their credit card, and go through the sales process. You can bet they’ve changed their mind before they’ve even got the credit card out! After all, they don’t know you so there’s no trust.
* Risk – in this day and age, everyone is keenly aware of the risks involved with identity theft, online scams, etc. Offering something that is related to what they’re looking for, but doesn’t require them to take the risk of inputting their credit card details onto an unknown website is much more likely to get a response.
* Relationships – by using a capture page you can build a relationship with potential customers/prospects and in so doing you discover whether what you’re selling is actually right for them. If it isn’t, that doesn’t mean you’ve lost money. If you’ve built up a relationship with them and established trust and credibility in their eyes, there’s every chance they’ll recommend you and/or your product or opportunity to anyone who they think would benefit from it.
Don’t think about whether you should be using a capture page or a sales page. Think of your sales funnel as an article. Your capture page is the introduction, the emails / phone calls that you use are the body, and the sales page is the conclusion.
