How to Use Opt-In Forms Successfully for Lead Generation
The average email opt-in rate is 1.95%, according to a recent Sumo study where more than 3.2 billion people participated. That means around 2 conversions for every 100 attempts. Not great, but not too bad either.
But, guess what – the top businesses and websites are getting nearly 250% more conversions from their opt-in campaigns!
According to the Sumo report, the top 10% of digital marketers have a 4.77% opt-in conversion rate. What’s more, a few elite marketers are converting up to 20% of site traffic with opt-in forms! Imagine that!
4 Tips to Boost Your Opt-In Success Rate
You too can convert more traffic with your email opt-in forms. But, you need to be smart. The following are four key tips to consider;
Create an offer the visitor can’t refuse
Starting today, think of email as a currency and the opt-in campaign as a transaction. The visitor is trading with their email address – something very dear to them. What do you bring to the table?
More importantly, does your currency (whatever you’re offering) match up to the value of the visitor’s email address? Would the visitor feel so? If the visitor is impressed, you’ll get the email – almost always.
Bliss, a beauty brand, for instance, offers a 20% discount off the subscriber’s first order, and the fans love it. Freund Container also offers a significant discount (10%) on the first order. What about you?
- Think carefully about placement
After you’ve found the perfect offer, the next step is to make the presentation stand out. Placement is perhaps the most important aspect of opt-in presentation.
There are several placement options to consider, including top navigation, footer, side bar, body placement, pop-up, and top bar. All these options work very well. However, the last two, pop-up and top bar placements tend to work the best.
Exit-intent pop-ups where the form pops up when it looks like the visitor is about to exit the page, in particular, are very effective. In one study, NutritionSecrets,com increased their opt-in rate by 400% thanks to exit-intent pop-ups.
- Timing is everything
One of the reasons pop-up forms are so effective is timing. If you can show/display the form at the right time, you’ll get lots of opt-ins. Get the timing wrong, however, and you might have ruined everything.
So, how do you get the timing right? By leveraging behavior marketing! Invest in a behavior monitoring tool so you can track what the visitor is doing on your website. This way, you can make the offer when they are most ready for it.
Alternatively, head over to Google Analytics and analyze your highest traffic pages to understand why people visit your site. Then, use the information to determine the best time to make the offer.
- Build trust
Social proof is a very important aspect of marketing. People will always go with the crowd. If you’re asking your site visitors to sign up to an email list with zero sign-ups thus far, rest assured of failing miserably.
These people will be asking just one question – if whatever you’re offering is so good, why has no one signed up yet?
The only way to eliminate that doubt is to show them that thousands of people have already signed up and are liking your offers. So, display the sign-up numbers and, where possible, share a few positive comments/feedback from those who’ve already signed up. It’s a bait many people can’t resist.
Time to Get Started
All these are actions you can implement right away. If you truly yearn for a better opt-in rate, this is the time to get started.