Easy Opt-In Form Tips
Articles & Tips - Justin Premick - September 18th, 2006 - PermalinkProviding consistently great content in your messages is key to turning your subscribers into raving fans of your newsletter.
Before you can foster that relationship, however, you have to get them to subscribe. You know that once they do, they’re going to kick themselves for not having done so before…
…but they don’t know that yet, and unless they opt in to your list, they never will.
By incenting your subscribers to subscribe, and removing barriers to subscribing, you can bridge the gap between a website visitor and another soon-to-be-devoted reader of your messages.
Tips for Effective Opt-In Forms
This entry was posted on Monday, September 18th, 2006 at 10:25 am and is filed under Articles & Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment response, trackback from your own site, or permalink.Put the Form in a Prominent Location. If visitors don’t see the form, they won’t sign up, right? So put it in an easy-to-find spot. For most sites, this means near the top of the page.
Tip: Not all visitors have the same screen resolution, and so what might look like a good form location to you or me at 1280 x 1024 may be a poor location for people on 800 x 600. If you use Firefox as your web browser, there’s a nice extension that lets you quickly see what a page looks like on different resolutions.
I talk to a lot of people who want a “newsletter button” that visitors click on to display the form in a popup window. This is an alternative, but with this approach you risk popup blockers keeping the form from appearing. A simple inline form located near the beginning of the page avoids that completely.
Also, if you have a multi-page site and your visitors tend to browse the entire site, put the form on every page.
Keep it Short and Sweet. Long forms may be tolerated for mortgage applications, but not opt-in subscriptions. When I go to a website, if the opt-in form looks like it’ll take me more than 10 seconds to complete, I’m put off. Remember, your competitors are only a click away.
Ask yourself: What do I need to get started with my subscribers? If you absolutely need your subscriber’s phone number or some other detail right now, OK, but if not, get it later as you further qualify him/her.
Give Visitors a Reason to Subscribe. No matter how much value you’re delivering to your subscribers, your emails still take up real estate in their inboxes. Your visitors, who haven’t yet experienced the value you’re delivering in your messages, already get dozens to hundreds of emails a day.
Why should they make room for you?
Clearly and concisely detail the benefits of subscribing. Use bullet points, bold text and other techniques to tell them why they’re going to be better off getting your emails. This not only helps to get visitors to become subscribers, it also helps to build expectations which you can then meet to build trust and relationships with them.
September 20th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
Great tips! I’ll put a small opt-in form on every page as part of the side bar, for non-subscribers to see.
September 20th, 2006 at 10:20 pm
Better yet, put in a ful squeeze page and capture every e-mail or they don’t visit. Your results will be better.
September 22nd, 2006 at 9:17 am
I found that the popover option works best. These are not blocked by browsers. I have it set so it will only pop up once a day for each viewer. It tripled my subscribers.
October 2nd, 2006 at 2:08 pm
Yep, from my experience the pop hover form is the best choice. They will never miss your opt-in form
October 4th, 2006 at 2:58 pm
Great Stuff!
Since I have adjusted to "short and sweet" like you
mentioned, I am getting a ton more subscribers
every month.
October 13th, 2006 at 8:15 am
I’m a life coach living in Paris France.
and I need more clients, more subscribers.
I write newsletters every month; I’m in the process of changing a few things on my website to have visitors read these newsletters more easily(- make them accessible) but I would need your advice, your suggestions.What are my options? And of course, financial considerations will matter!
Also, you in the states and I over here, if I were to choose you for setting this up for me, would it make it difficult? Thank you, J
October 19th, 2006 at 10:31 pm
We have noted that in most cases, adding the words
"We Respect Your Email Privacy" below the final opt
in field will increase opt-ins. Please test this,
but it always outperforms versus no privacy statement.
October 25th, 2006 at 12:13 pm
[…] Use our Web Form Generator tool to easily create the forms you’ll publish to your pages. Follow the video tutorial we offer on using this tool (for some useful suggestions, review Justin Premick’s Easy Opt-in Form Tips) […]
October 29th, 2006 at 5:53 pm
make it easy to use.
November 24th, 2006 at 9:11 am
Use free videos or ebooks to subscribe in order to get the free gifts worth $xxxx…
December 8th, 2006 at 1:21 pm
[…] I’m a big fan of making opting in easy, but I’ve always looked at it as an isolated interaction between subscriber and site. Meaning that you make your opt-in form quick-and-easy to fill out so people don’t abandon it. […]
January 1st, 2007 at 2:38 pm
I know how to creat optin forms and a little about installing them. My question is to install them do you have to 1. have a autoresponder? and/or 2.do you have to have a seperate server, 3. do you have to have hosting?
January 2nd, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Ken,
1. An opt-in form is something that you can create outside of an autoresponder; however, an opt-in form in and of itself isn’t going to follow up with the people who fill it out.
At AWeber, we help you to create the opt-in form with our Web Form Generator, and to automatically follow up with subscribers.
2. You can put an opt-in form on any of your web pages…as long as you can make changes to the web page content/HTML, you can put an opt-in form on it. This is true for a free web page you would set up on a site like Geocities as well as your own domains. I’m not quite sure what you mean by "separate server" but hopefully this addresses your question.
3. In order for your web page to be accessible online, it does need to be hosted. The opt-in form is simply part of the content of that web page (just like any text you would have on the page).
January 10th, 2007 at 10:21 am
It is absolutely imperative to note that the first element of any relationship is contact.
However contacts have many and diferent levels, approaches and fluidity.
I do agree that e-mail opt ins can be taken as part of the process of relating to the outer world.
Have we then considerd the above?
Answering this will lead us to some findings.
TO OUR SUCCESS.
January 15th, 2007 at 9:33 am
Flippin’ brilliant post/blog.
Very helpful comments too.
January 18th, 2007 at 6:59 am
Popups work well. We have tested them on a large list.
But how can I customise the popup forms? I want to wrap the form in a wrapper with some CSS but have to do it through your interface because of the javascript link. There’s no ability to do this.
So its a great tool… but a little ugly. Especially when you look at post-it notes like Adimpact.
While I’m on the subject.. the standard Aweber unsubscribe screen could do with a makeover too.
April 28th, 2007 at 12:21 am
I just signed up to Aweber I been very impressed with some newsletter I signed up for Richdreams, I like my name on the emails.
I like this pop up http://www.adhspain.com
and would like to make something catchy like it I know it works very well for the company
October 26th, 2007 at 8:58 am
[…] We’ve talked a lot in this space about making it as easy as possible for your subscribers to get on your list. […]
April 4th, 2008 at 10:56 am
[…] the things we like to stress around here when it comes to building a subscriber list is that “simple signup forms are good, and that you shouldn’t make signing up hard because then people… don’t sign […]
April 9th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Very good info. I am checking out the other blog posts for more info and ways to use the opt-in forms. I have placed your form on my website and the names are coming in…