17 Ways to Jumpstart your Email Opt-in Box

There are dozens of things you can do to get more email subscribers. Hosting a webinar, pay-per-click advertising, guest blog posting, and Facebook contests are just a few of them. But the easiest way to grow your list is to improve your opt-in box. If your email list is barely growing, or even slowly shrinking due to list churn, consider these 17 items.

Add an opt-in form to every page of your site. Don’t just add a link to sign up forms – add the form itself. Using an embedded form gives people one less step in signing up. It can increase opt-in rates by 20 percent or more.Add an opt-in form above the fold to every page on your site. Don’t make visitors hunt for your opt-in form. Design it with a color that contrasts from the rest of your site, and put it somewhere so your visitors don’t have to scroll to see it.Have more than one opt-in form on each page of your site. Have two or even three opt-in forms on every page of your site. One should be in the upper right hand corner. The other one should be in the footer — either the left or right hand side. Many retailers add a third opt-in form in the middle of one of their navigation columns, which means a visitor has an almost constant view of a form. Edmund Scientifics, an online retailer of educational products, has opt-in forms in the upper right and bottom left of its home page.

Test. If you could do only one thing, testing would be a good choice. Think of it this way. If you increased your opt-in rate by only 1 percent every week, at the end of a year, it would have increased by 66 percent. Test best practices, because they aren’t always the best choice for every site. Test small things, and large things. And keep testing. It’s common for a winning combination to decline in performance after even a few months.Give people a reason to sign up. Simply urging people to sign up for a weekly newsletter won’t cut it anymore. Give people an incentive to join your list, whether that’s a discount on their first order, a valuable free report, or anything else that’s valuable to them. Sometimes an entry into a contest will work. Other times, it’s a 20 percent discount on their first order.

Don’t call your newsletter a newsletter. “Weekly updates” usually get far more subscribers than newsletters. Most of us are already subscribed to too many newsletters.Test an e-course instead of a newsletter or a weekly update. Got a low opt-in rate? Try offering a free, emailed e-course and see if people aren’t more willing to sign up for that than for another newsletter. An e-course will also give you an opportunity to educate your prospective customers. If your product or service has a long sales cycle, this can be especially effective.Include social proof. Let prospective subscribers know how many other people they’ll be joining if they sign up. Telling them how many subscribers you have is one kind of social proof. Showing how many Facebook likes your page has is another way. The logic in your prospect’s head goes like this, “Well, if 5,000 people are reading this every week, maybe it is pretty good. I guess I’ll sign up.”Try a full-width home page opt-in. Yes, it will dominate your home page. It will be right in people’s faces. But if you really want to build your list, an above-the-fold, full-width opt-in box can’t be beat. It will often get two times the opt-in rate as a right hand navigation opt-in box.Make your About Us page a customized opt-in form. About Us pages are one of the most valuable and neglected pages on a website. It is often the second-most visited page on a site. Make the most of this traffic and include an opt-in form between the paragraphs of your about us page. It’s not uncommon to see opt-in rates over 5 percent on About Us pages.Use a pop-up. Follow pop-up best practices to make yours less annoying and more effective. Do things like showing the pop-up only after people have been on your site for at least 30 seconds, and showing it to each visitor only once a week. This pop-up from NAPA Auto Parts asks for a lot of details. But getting subscribers’ zip codes is worthwhile if you’re a brick-and-mortar retailer. Also note the link to the privacy policy, and the copy that mentions “special offers and promotions.” One of the main reasons people subscribe to email lists is to get discounts and access to special deals.

Ask people to sign up after they’ve commented on your blog. Free plugins like Comment Redirect make it easy. If someone is engaged enough to comment on your blog, the odds are high they would respond well if they were reminded about your email updates.Ask for as little information as possible in the opt-in box. There are many tests that have proven repeatedly how every extra field required on a form reduces opt-in rates. Think long and hard before you add anything to your opt-in fields beyond name and email. Are you really going to use that data? Is it worth getting 10 or even 20 percent fewer subscribers?Include a testimonial from a subscriber near your opt-in box. This is similar to showing social proof. Testimonials have worked for hundreds of years. They’ll still work a hundred years from now.Add a privacy statement near your opt-in box. No one wants to get spammed. And remember, too, that most consumers have a different definition of spam than marketers do. Consumers consider spam as anything irrelevant, unhelpful, or too frequent. They care very little about the legal fine print of CAN-SPAM.Add a link to a newsletter archive next to your opt-in box. This lets prospective subscribers see what they’re going to get. It reassures them the content will indeed be good, and establishes expectations well enough that usually they unsubscribe less, too.Use more compelling copy than “subscribe” on your opt-in button. “Get weekly updates” is a good alternative. “Sign me up” sometimes works better. Whatever the magic words are for your audience, test until you find them.

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