There’s nothing easy about acquiring thousands of email subscriber opt-ins for your website or brand but with the right tools and information it’s very doable. The following post covers the most common methods we use to generate thousands of new subscribers daily.
Advertising
Whether you have organic search traffic, social traffic or no traffic, you’ll still need to advertise to get clicks to your subscription offer. Erase the idea out of your mind that you can just put up a cleverly worded newsletter opt-in and get enough people to opt-in. Not gonna happen. You’ve got to create an offer with a very strong value exchange and advertise that exact offer to get the opt-in.
The Value Exchange
Getting a subscription is about the same degree of difficulty as selling a $20 item online. People view subscribing as a risk and an annoyance to get something of value, so you must be offering something with a perceived value of $20 or more to get a minimally viable conversion rate. The more perceived value the better. The easiest thing to offer is an ebook, but not just any ebook. But no matter how much value your ebook has, it isn’t likely to work on just any traffic. You’ll need to advertise the topic that your ebook addresses specifically.
Single or Multiple Opt-in Fields
If you try to collect more than a single field (email address), the value exchange needs to be that much better to compel someone to take the time and risk of giving you more data. For every extra field you display, your conversion rate can go down by as much as 50%. My advice would be to develop your campaign requiring just an email address initially. You can always get more fields later.
Content Access Gates
If you have killer content that people really want, you can let people read for a bit then launch a subscription gate for subscribers-only. This method works very well for extremely authentic and talented writers, but average bloggers will not convert many subscribers. Optimizing a campaign to get opt-ins is very challenging and it helps a lot to advertise a single idea until you get it right. If your content keeps changing you will be faced with variable conversion rates day-to-day.
Opinion Polls
Opinion polls about serious topics that people are passionate about can be good for generating opt-ins. People will not generally give you their email just because you ask for it. You’ll need to give them a believable reason you need it. When we create polls, we only poll on very serious topics and as a result, we let people know that we only count votes for registered subscribers. It’s the truth and it works.
Engaging Quizzes
Quizzes work well for getting engagement and they can also be a useful tool for collecting opt-ins. We’ve done successful quizzes with opt-in forms on the front and on the back. However, beware, if you use an opt-in at the back of your quiz as a requirement for getting the quiz results, it can annoy users. Annoyed users are more likely to leave nasty posts on your Facebook page, so use this method with caution.
As always, if you’d like to discuss this topic further, feel free to connect.
Thanks for reading…
John Valenty
CEO
Skype: john.valenty
john(at)earnware.com
http://www.johnvalenty.com
