Maximize Your Opt-In  Conversions 

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The Importance Of Conversions

So, you have worked hard building backlinks, optimizing your site, using social bookmarking, blog commenting, and forming Email joint ventures and you have attracted a visitor to your website. 

As you know already, the money is on the list so you need your web visitor to Opt-In (i.e. to give you their email address) and voluntarily join your mailing list. Now this sounds simple enough but many people see very low conversions (in some cases as low as single-digit conversions) on their sites. Few marketers focus enough of their attention on their conversion rates and this is a massive missed opportunity. 

Improving your conversion rate is one of the cheapest ways of increasing your profits. Logically, increasing your conversion rate will have a corresponding effect on your site's profitability as you have the chance to guide every new subscriber through your sales funnel and you can do this without increasing your traffic-generating activities or expenses.

The generally accepted rule of thumb is that a good marketer should make $1 per Opt In per month. So, an extra 300 Opt-Ins (just ten more a day for a month) should result in an extra $3600 per year.

Squeeze Page Conversions

Squeeze Pages by definition are designed to get the web visitor to Opt In and usually consist of a simple design with very few components:

Headline

The Offer

Opt-In Form

Video (Optional)

However, the effectiveness of Squeeze Pages can vary hugely. I have seen some squeeze pages convert as high as 60% while others can barely convince 2-3% of their web visitors to Opt-In.

As you can tell from these figures there is a big difference between an effective squeeze page and an ineffective one. So the big question is how to maximize your squeeze page's performance.

The Headline

Starting at the top of the page your headline is probably one of the most important factors (as it is on any page). A great headline should be a "Call to Action" including both what you want the web visitor to do (i.e. watch the video, opt-in get a free report, etc, etc) and the benefit that the web visitor will receive for doing so.

As with any good headline, yours should avoid the passive tense and it should engage the visitor in some capacity. Compare the following two examples:

"Do You Want More Traffic To Your Website?"

"Get The Traffic Tsunami Report Today And Learn How To Double Your Website Visitors By Spending Just 90 Minutes Per Week Doing These 5 Things…"

I hope it is obvious which headline is likely to be more effective. The first is a bit flat, the second not only has the call to action (Get The Report) but it also defines the scope of the effort involved (90 Mins Per Week) and engages the curiosity of the viewer (i.e. What are the 5 magic activities that will double traffic).

The Offer

Next on the list is your Squeeze Page's Offer. This is all about the exchange, remember you are going to be asking for the squeeze page visitor's email address in exchange for something.

Consider the following two offers and assess which you think has the greatest value:

Offer 1: Opt-In To Receive My Free Report On…

Offer 2: Opt-In To Receive This $27 Report On…For Free Today!

It's obvious that all other things being equal, Offer 2 seems more attractive. While everyone likes something free, it's even better to get something at a good discount (especially a 100% discount).

So, the better the offer the more likely the visitor will complete the Opt-In form and give you their name and email address. The higher the perceived value of the item you are exchanging for, the higher your conversions should be. While short reports are quick and easy to produce, a small video tutorial may take a similar amount of time but be considered a much higher value by your web audience.

The Opt-In Form

Considering the huge volume of spam bombarding most people's inboxes on a daily (if not hourly) basis it is vital to establish a level of trust when asking for your web visitors' email addresses.

In testing, a short sentence along the lines of: "Don't worry, we hate spam as much as you do. Your email address is safe with us, we will never disclose it, share it, rent it, or sell it to a third party" can have as much as a 30-40% increase in the conversion rates on an average squeeze page.

An additional way you can start to quickly build trust is to demonstrate a little bit of extra customer care and create a custom post-opt-in page rather than using the default page offered by your Auto-Responder provider.  On this post-Opt-In page, use the php "Get" command to re-use the web visitors name on the post-Opt-In page to create a headline that looks like this:

"Hey [name], thanks for subscribing, please check your inbox and look out for the confirmation email to get your copy of the …. report..."

If you are not a technical person you can easily find a freelancer coder on elance.com or similar site to complete this quick task for you.

Video Squeeze Pages

As frequently happens in Internet Marketing circles there is an ongoing debate about whether squeeze pages with video are more effective than those without. The argument for the video option is that you want more informed and more committed opt-ins, especially if you are then going to be selling a high-value item. The argument against the video squeeze page is that you do not want to slow down the process of someone opting in.

The intermediary option is to have a screenshot of the video and an alert box that pops up when someone clicks on the screenshot expecting a video to play. The alert box will reinforce the call to action to opt-in to see the video.

In a limited round of testing, I have found that this fake video format does make for a high converting opt-in rate but it also tends to have a high opt-out/unsubscribe rate too. With this in mind, I would only recommend this option if you have either a low-priced upsell or you are not interested in building a long-term list (i.e. You are specifically building a list for a prelaunch sequence)

Where you are selling outside the IM niche (i.e. in a market that may not have seen many squeeze pages) video squeeze pages can work well, especially if the video gives great value content rather than just making a sales pitch.

Web Site & Blog Conversions

Not everyone uses a squeeze page to gather leads and, if you have a regular website or blog you can reap the same rewards from a list of subscribers (i.e. An estimated income per subscriber) in addition you can guarantee a certain amount of visitor volume (very useful if you sell advertising space on your site) by emailing latest updates, news snippets and recent blog posts to your subscribers to encourage them to come back to your site.

The challenge with converting website or blog visitors into email subscribers is that, unlike a squeeze page, your site design is likely to be geared towards giving information rather than "squeezing" an email address from your visitors.

Taking this into consideration, there are still a few solid options available to you. The first is simply an Opt-In box with a great offer. This could be for a free ebook or report, it could be simply to receive a regular email newsletter (i.e. a content-rich resource), or, in the case of eCommerce sites (or other sites that have a sales-based monetization strategy) you could offer a discount code or coupon.

Take NameCheap.com for example, one of the more popular domain registrars on the internet. You can sign up to receive a weekly or monthly email notifying you of coupon codes so that you can get a discount (in some cases 100% discount) when you next shop for a domain. This ensures that Namecheap is regularly in the minds of its audience, even when that audience is not on the namecheap.com website.

If you are going to add an Opt-In form to your website or blog ensure that it is "above the fold" (i.e. that it can be seen on your website without the visitor needing to scroll down the page) and that it includes the "we hate spam too" message as previously discussed. 

As with the squeeze page, attention needs to be given to the offer or an ethical bribe to be given in exchange for the web visitor's email address. It should be obvious that the more attractive and useful the offer the higher the visitor to opt-in conversion rates will be.

The Death Of The Pop Up

In the last few years the massively unpopular "Pop Up" alert box has been in steady decline. While this is great news for the web visitor it has meant that online marketers have needed to innovate to ensure that they maximize the conversion rates of their websites and build that all-important email subscriber list.

Instead of an annoying popup, a footer ad slides up from the bottom of the page and this can carry either the usual opt-in text areas (name, email, etc) or sometimes a special offer or another incentive-driven call to action.

The key difference with a slide-up footer ad is the minimal amount of screen real estate (i.e. the content your web visitor came to see) that is obscured. The unobtrusive nature of this style of pop-up is far less likely to annoy your web visitors and thus increases the chances that they will opt-in.

Whichever device you use, collecting subscribers' email addresses and building a loyal following is an essential strategy. With so many websites competing for the limited attention span of your target audience, keeping in touch via email is an essential marketing process.

Post Opt-In Advice

Having successfully secured the email opt it is now imperative that you put the information to good use and begin to both cement the level of trust and, of course, to start to monetize the emails you have collected.

Re-affirming Trust

Your first goal is to confirm the investment in trust your subscriber has made. There are two key elements here. The first is to do what you say you would do. So, if the subscriber opted in to get a free report send them the free information immediately. Equally, if additional things were promised make sure you follow through and deliver the material expected by your subscribers.

The second element in reaffirming your subscriber's trust is to not spam them with affiliate offers. I am using the word SPAM here with a loose definition of any unwanted emails not just notifications of multi-million dollar inheritances from Nigeria or cheap blue pill offers! If your subscriber opted in to get a  free report on how to learn 10 Quick Guitar chords then sending them other related guitar offers could be acceptable but sending them generic make-money online offers would probably be considered SPAM.

Monetizing The List

For many, the sole reason to build an opt-in email list is because of the huge money-making opportunity. Promoting proper and related products and services for which you earn a referral commission is a proven way of making money. You must mix the offers with free content and good solid information and advice. Again, the goal here is to confirm your authority as an expert so that when you make a recommendation, that recommendation is both respected and acted upon.

The easiest way of achieving this is to ensure a positive bias towards free content vs offers and affiliate referrals. An optimal ratio is something in the region of 3-5 pieces of free content/products for every affiliate offer.

Adding a subscriber to an autoresponder that has 20+ emails preloaded (with the right ratio of free content to affiliate offers) is an excellent way of creating a future residual income stream. Every new subscriber that opts in will then receive your email sequence and be exposed to your recommended products.

A well-monetized option list with a coordinated and scheduled autoresponder sequence should typically earn $1 per subscriber per month. With this in mind, you can see why many marketers focus on building a healthy (>5,000) subscriber base as quickly as possible and you would be wise to do the same.