How to Increase Your Email Opt-in Conversion Rates
By now, we all have seen the true power of email marketing.
It does not matter whether you have a business blog, an e-commerce store, or an online marketing business. A well-targeted email list is definitely one of your biggest online assets.
According to a recent study, email marketing has the best return on investment (ROI). For every $1 spent, email marketing produces $40 in revenues — making it a significantly better investment than PPC, or social media marketing.
But are you satisfied with the number of email opt-ins you receive from your website?
Don’t worry if the answer is no. It is a very common issue with most websites and blogs. They don’t have a very good conversion rate when it comes to email subscribers.
In this post, we discuss a few tips and tricks that will help you increase email opt-in conversion rates.
1. Make It Your #1 Priority
Every website has a goal.
If you want to generate leads and increase email subscribers from your website, that should be the #1 goal of your website.
Is it, though?
If not, it might be time to make some tough decisions and revamp your website design and content marketing strategy.
For example, Paul Jarvis is a blogger who always had a very simple goal, i.e., to get as many targeted email subscribers as possible.
He designed his entire content marketing plan and website to help him fulfill his goal. Here is an image of his website.
As you can see, his website encourages visitors to do only one thing, which is to subscribe to his email list.
He even removed the comment section on his blog to increase his email subscribers, and it worked. As of this writing, he already has 16,000+ highly targeted email subscribers. And in the past year, he generated $200,000 from the same email list.
2. Content Upgrades
Giving away content upgrades for free has now become an effective technique to increase the email list. Many professional bloggers, such as Brian Dean, Neil Patel, Noah Kagan, etc. are consistently using this strategy.
Here is an example.
3. Leverage the Homepage
The homepage of a website is rarely optimised for lead-generation. However, with a few little tricks, you can easily optimise it and make it more compliant for email lead generation.
One of those little tricks to have a welcome mat on the homepage of your website. This welcome mat should have the sole purpose of encouraging visitors to subscribe to your email list.
Derek Halpern uses an excellently designed welcome mat on his website.
See the following image:
Videofruit got inspired by this idea and came up with a variation of it. Here is what they created:
This welcome mat got them 223 email subscribers in just one month with a conversion rate of 14.89%.
4. Exit-Intent Technology
Pop-ups are often annoying — especially if you don’t pay much attention to how they operate.
However, the exit-intent pop-up technology has made it significantly easier to show opt-in popups without being annoying. Even the most successful websites are using these exit-intent popups without much hesitation — because it works without annoying the website visitors.
There are many tools available that allow this exit-intent technology. Two of the most commonly used tools are:
However, both of them are paid tools and require a bit of money to invest on your part.
On the other hand, if you have a tight budget, consider using SumoMe. It is a set of various little tools that help you generate more email subscribers from your website.
SumoMe is based on a freemium model. You can use the apps for free — with limited features. But for most blogs and online businesses, the free model is more than enough.
Bryan Harris used SumoMe’s List Builder (which works on the exit-intent popup technology.
With this one, little free addition to its website’s armoury, Bryan managed to increase his email opt-in conversion rate by 5.52%.
Conclusion
If email lead generation is one of your primary goals, I’m sure these techniques will help you.
But one thing is for sure.
You will have to pay a lot of attention to it. Without focusing on lead generation as your website’s primary goal, it would be very hard to increase the conversion rate.
