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THE POWER OF REOCCURRING REVENUE: landing pages to sell subscription-based products

“Move the needle” my VP’s voice rings in my head about once a week.

Those of us in any online marketing department live by that phrase. What can we do to move the needle more? Well, it’s simple, you get more people to your website or you do a better job of converting them - and hopefully both. In affiliate programs, let’s face it, if you’re getting between a .5% and 1% click though rate on a banner, that is about the best you are likely to get. However you can significantly move the needle on the landing page.

One approach to selling subscriptions is to offer a free trial or at a significant savings to entice the customer. Netflix, Rhapsody, Ancestry.com and many other companies use this approach.

Yet offering a free trial of a subscription-based service is more complicated than selling a sweater online and the landing page needs to answer that challenge. Much more information needs to be communicated during the sales process, but the merchant still needs to keep the consumer on track to purchase.

The “walled garden” landing page keeps the consumer on track to purchase a complicated product. It’s an environment that controls the user’s access to content on a website. In effect, the walled garden directs the user’s navigation within particular areas, to allow access to a selection of material, or prevent access to other material. AOL invented the concept of a walled garden back in the 1980s.

Here is a DVD club affiliate landing page that is not a walled garden:

Mentura

And here is one that is a walled garden:

Disney

You can see the difference easily and what the pages are trying to achieve. The first page focuses on selling individual DVDs (even if they do sell subscriptions) and the latter is focued on the subscription plan.

Here are examples of other walled garden landing pages. (Note if you use any of these services you need to logged out to see the anonymous “walled garden” landing page.)

GoToMyPC
Stamps.com
Zooba
One Great Family

(As a note, MarketingSherpa, just had a great case study on GoToMyPC landing pages. It’s worth buying.)

Subscription products are hard to sell, but there are many tested approaches that can move the needle. A walled garden is just one, but can work wonders.

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