In an earlier blog post around Permission Marketing we talked about why email marketing is more important than ever before, the next question often surrounds how you can improve your email opt-in rate in order to get better at converting visitors into email subscribers.
For most people, sticking an opt-in form in the top right hand corner of their webpage or blog is their entire email list building strategy.
They then wonder why they are getting absurdly low opt-in rates of .05-1% when they could easily be converting far more visitors into hungry subscribers.
Just think about how big a difference this really can be?
We convert 1-5% of direct traffic that visit our sales sites into customers – that means 1-5 out of every 100 people that visit our sales pages will buy the first time around. That’s not bad, fairly standard for top end sites – most do not even convert to this level consistently.
On the other hand, conversions of driving someone from our email list to a sales page are more in the range of 10% over time, not to mention the fact that we continue to sell other products and services to these subscribers.
That’s a 500% to 1000% improvement in conversions and can amount to BIG profits for you in your business.
As you can see, you want to do everything you can to improve your email opt-in rate because the flow-through profits this will bring are huge.
Here are 5 ways we have used to improve our opt-in rates:
1. Your Headline is critical to gaining your visitor’s attention, interest and desire in handing over their email address to you. Keep these 3 things in mind…1) Make a promise or commitment 2) Make that promise highly aligned with your audience’s top emotional desire 3) Make sure your headline is in strong alignment with the content on the page
2. Multiple Exposures. Putting one, tiny opt-in box in the top right hand of your front page is not enough, you want your opt-in form in the following places 1) Blog on every page – test putting it after each post as a widget or a deloayed pop-up on exit (as a lightbox) – these can have dramatic improvements on your email opt-in rate 2) Each page of your website (EXCEPT your main sales page – that should be left to the single purpose of selling) 3) Links in articles or blog posts that are syndicated 4) A stand-alone squeeze page
3. Squeeze or Dedicated Opt-In Landing Page. There are many situations where you want to draw in new traffic via external (syndicated articles, guest blog posts, social networks, Youtube video descriptions) or your own content pages where you want to send your traffic next to your incented email opt-in. For that traffic, you want to have a highly effective “squeeze page” that is designed with a headline, benefit bullets, pictures and/or video with an opt-in form above the fold (without having to scroll).  These pages can convert at 25%-50% if they are compelling enough and can be a massively successful way to grow your email opt-in rate.
4. Actively Market Your Opt-In Offer. Sounds logical, but the reality is that 99.9% of online marketers market everything BUT their opt-in and “hope” that someone opts-in by chance when they arrive at their site. Change your approach and begin to send traffic directly to squeeze or landing pages where the primary focus is not first to sell something, but to get the opt-in.
5. On Page Optimizations. There are several techniques you should test that can make a big difference in conversion rates. For example, we recently helped a client triple their conversion rate by simply taking their existing opt-in forms and changing them to an orange background so they were more visible. In other cases, placing a picture or video within the opt-in form or on the squeeze page attracts more attention and looks more professional. Making these tweaks may seem like drudgery, just think of it as spending a few minutes to improve your chances of hitting the jackpot.
Having an effective email opt-in funnel in place on your website is the closest thing to the having your own automatic money machine…certainly deserving of your time and money.   Try putting the next few hours of effort you would have spent trying to get more traffic into improving the response from the traffic you are already getting.
