You’ve probably heard many Internet marketers extol the virtues of “name squeeze” pages - pages designed to force a visitor to give you their name and email address - and join your email list - before allowing them to enter your website. I’ve certainly discussed the benefits of doing so too - the major one being to yield a much higher optin rate than is typical for an “open” website.

But here’s a timely newsflash: a name squeeze page may be killing your sales.

For a few of our own sites we tested (a) having a name squeeze page fronting the website and (b) providing open access to the site i.e. allowing visitors to navigate all public pages in the site, and to choose to optin to a mailing list if they wished. We found that while having a name squeeze page certainly yielded substantially more optins, sales were much higher when we did without the name squeeze page.

Looking at customer orders in these particular niches gave us a clue as to why sales were higher - the vast majority of customers bought when they visited such sites for the first time. It seems that having a name squeeze page caused a lot of people to sign up who were curious about what lay within our site… or wanted the free offer available as part of signing up (i.e. each of our name squeeze pages had a free report, email mini-course or something else to entice subscribers). But not necessarily customers.

Meanwhile, legitimate customers seemed deterred by our name squeeze page. Perhaps, in these particular niches, our name squeeze page undermined the perceived trustworthiness of our site and product/service offering among potential customers.

We are certainly not alone in finding that most of our customers in these particular niches were more likely to buy on their first visit to our site rather than later. The head of a large corporate Internet marketing department told me that 60 percent of his company’s online purchasers bought when they first visited the company’s website. Furthermore, 80 percent of customers bought within two days of visiting the website for the first time.

So… what is YOUR sales data telling you about your customers? If they tend to buy on their first visit to your site… and if a name squeeze is likely to detract from your perceived trustworthiness or legitimacy… you may be better off ripping that name squeeze page off your site. Sure, it may mean you build a smaller list… but if your main aim is to generate sales, it may be the way to go.

Of course , a name squeeze page may still be optimal in other circumstances - for example, where your primary goal is to build a list. One site where we have kept our name squeeze page is the website of our motivational newsletter, Success Accelerator at http://www.successaccelerator.net Because the main aim of that site is to build a list of subscribers and to subsequently promote various of our own products, affiliate products and advertiser products, a name squeeze works best.

All this just goes to show that, as Internet marketers, we can’t afford to blindly follow what others - even experts - advocate. By all means, try lots of things, but always look at results and data to work out what works, and what doesn’t, for your particular niches and offerings.