Somebody has asked me how I personalise a lot of my sales pages, and I thought it was a good topic to discuss here. Personalising sales pages is an important technique to use with relationship marketing, and it’s a technique that can increase conversions.
Obviously, you need to know the name of the person visiting your website before you can personalise your pages. My pages therefore only become personalised when the name of the person has been revealed to the system. This usually comes from a subscription to Aweber. Whenever somebody subscribes to a mailing list of mine, I ask for their name and email address.
Next, in Aweber’s web form generation interface, I check that “Post CGI variables to the thank you page” is selected. This means that Aweber will send a list of query parameters to the “Thank You” page, in which I also include my sales page. One of these query parameters is called name, and it includes the name entered by the user. In my sales pages, whenever I wish to use the name and personalise the sales page, I use the following code somewhere near the top of the page:
<?php
// Get first name.
$firstname = $_GET["name"];
$firstname = ereg_replace(" .*", "", $firstname);
$firstname = ucfirst(strtolower($firstname));
if ($firstname == "") {
$firstname = "Friend";
}
?>
The first statement retrieves the name from the list of query parameters. The second statement strips out names beyond the first one supplied. The third statement capitalises the first letter, and puts all other letters in lower case.
The purpose of the last statement is to provide a first name of Friend in the case that the page was visited somehow without a query parameter for name.
You can then place the name in your sales page directly, by including the following code wherever you want the name to be used:
<?php echo $firstname; ?>
Note that your page must have a php extension, or you must otherwise inform your server that the page is to be processed through php. In all other respects, your page can be the same as a standard static page with a html extension. Also note that the code that sets the $firstname variable (the main part of the code) must be reached in the source code of the page before the name is printed.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
