We all want more email subscribers. One of the easiest ways to get them is to start at the very beginning – the opt-in form. If you can make even a few positive tweaks to the beginning of your opt-in form process, the results will follow through all the way to the end of the year and improve your email ROI – business website nagpur.
To help you get more opt-ins, we’ve combed the web to find all the case studies and best practices for opt-in forms we could. The roster of opt-in form best practices below is that roundup. All data based, split-tested, and ready to go.
Of course, every time we mention best practices, I have to mention that one company’s best practice is not necessarily your own best practice. You’ve got to test. But these should give you some very good testing ideas, and point you toward which test will make the biggest difference in your opt-in form.
Give them a reason.
The best way to boost opt-in rates? It’s to offer an incentive. For B2Bers, that’s usually a free report, or maybe access to a white paper or a video series. Online tools are good alternatives too. So are quizzes.
When Ascend2 did their 2015 survey of how marketers (mostly B2B marketers) are growing their email lists, two tactics rose above the rest:
- Website access
- Content downloads
Content downloads include the white papers, free reports and other assets I just mentioned. Website access is a different thing. Ascend2 defines it as “requiring registration to gain access to private or restricted areas within a website”. Because we’re focused on opt-in forms for this post, we’ll lean a bit more toward content downloads, but both of these tactics share a larger strategy: Get the address in exchange for extra-good content, a key practice used in matching your B2B content with your sales funnel.
Don’t ask for too much on your opt-in form.
You’ve probably heard about how adding more fields to an opt-in form suppresses opt-ins. Very well – did you hear how every field you add reduces opt-ins by 11%?
The below image shows you how many fields other marketers use on their forms – it’s from the 2015 Ascend2 Email List Growth Survey. This survey was offered to a mostly B2B audience – 71% of survey respondents identified themselves as B2B marketers.
After an email address, the most common piece of information to ask for is someone’s first name. Having a first name allows you to put it into subject lines, which has been shown to increase email open rates. It also means you can put their name into the body of the email as a salutation. This is a nice thing to be able to do and most email service providers – Pinpointe included – make it easy to add a person’s name to your emails.
Because we’re in B2B, many of us are going to want more information than just the name. This is when email opt-in practices and lead generation fuse together… for the most email opt-ins, we’d want to keep the opt-in form as short as possible.
How you choose to resolve this completely depends on what your business goals are. Maybe you just want to build your list super-fast, and so you’ll take just the email address and worry about getting more information later. Or maybe you’ll want to get even more information that the long form above asks for.
Don’t hide the opt-in form
Your poor site visitors. They just want to sign up for your email list. They like your company and want to keep tabs on it. Email is their preferred channel, not social media.
Use a feature box for your opt-in form.
This is one of the big kahunas for boosting email opt-ins. Yes, you are putting it on the most valuable real estate of your site: On the home page, above the scroll line, across the entire screen.
But do it, and do it right, and you’ll get half or more of your subscribers from that one opt-in box. I’ve seen these triple opt-in rates overnight.
Use a form, not a link.
When I switch clients from opt-in links (like the one above) to an opt-in form (like the example below it) I usually see a 20-50% increase in opt-in rate.
Why does this happen? People are resistant to clicking through. Having the form right there makes sign up look easier. And so they sign up more often.
Tell them what to expect.
Your opt-in copy, while short, has an important job to do. You have to tell people what to expect. How often will you send them emails? What kinds of content formats will be in those emails (Articles? Case studies? Coloring pages?) Who are your emails designed for (CEOs? Students? One person marketing departments?)
All this influences how many signs up you get, but more importantly, it influences who signs up for your list. The end goal here is not a massive, bloated list of people who aren’t your ideal clients. It’s to have a responsive, engaged audience of ideal subscribers.
RestoreHealth does a good job of this on their email opt-in page. Ideally I’d like this to be in the footer of their site as an opt-in form, but clearly they’d have to trim the copy.
Say something more enticing than “subscribe” on the opt-in form button.
“Subscribe” is pretty boring. Given how extremely valuable the real estate on that button is, let’s try to write something a little more enticing. Even something as mellow as “Sign me up” or “Send me the report” is better.
Of course, you’ll have to test.
You can also test button colors and sizes. Some people think these are kind of wimpy tests to run. I mostly agree with that. Test more powerful things, like the opt-in incentive, or the form’s placement, or the opt-in headline before you start testing button colors.
Offer a sample newsletter, or let them view past issues.
RestoreHealth (from #6) has a link at the bottom of their opt-in page for “View Past Articles”. This is not an essential element of an opt-in form, but sometimes it helps. It’s basically the principle of “try before you buy”. Some people like to see what they’re getting before they sign up.
Call your updates something more interesting than “newsletter”.
The word “newsletter” has associations with being out of date and tedious. It’s a word that’s about as appealing as broccoli (my apologies to broccoli).
So don’t use it. Call your email updates “updates”. Or maybe have a name for your email updates, like they were, you know, a publication. Maybe call your newsletter “The Buzz” if you sell coffee products. Or “The Tip” if you’re in the restaurant business.
Choosing a name for your updates might be the most fun you’ll have brainstorming in a meeting. Or you could outsource the name-picking job to your social media following and run a contest.
While it’s great to come up with a spicy name, it seems like the best word to use instead of “newsletter” is “updates”. That’s what Copyblogger, CrazyEgg and many other sites (that test A LOT) tend to favor.
You could also reframe how people think about your newsletter. Copywriter Joanna Wiebe has taken this to the next level. She refers to her newsletter as “free help” and has gone so far as offering like it was a paid ebook, but for $0.
Use social proof.
This works for a lot of sites. Whether you say how many subscribers you have, or how many followers you have, it’s all good. Don’t be afraid to include what feels like a small number, either. If you’re in a niche business, saying you’ve got 3,000 subscribers on the opt-in form might still be enough to trigger the social proof benefit.
Also notice how:
- the opt-in button is written (“me” versus “you”)
- the opt-in copy tells you how often you’ll be getting the updates
- the gray text in the opt-in field prompting you for your email address
Add a privacy statement.
Just be careful how you do it. Convent Verve has a terrific post about a series of a/b split tests they did on some privacy policy copy in an opt-in box.
Add a link to unsubscribe.
This often works better than a privacy statement. Including the unsubscribe link so close to the opt-in form proves you actually do make it easy to unsubscribe.
Put a default email address in the opt-in form.
Prompt people to put their own email address into the form. It makes them just a wee bit more likely to take action.
