“Relevancy,” “subscriber preferences” and “preference centers” are just a fancy way of saying you have options for email subscribers. Buzzwords aside, they’re a highly effective way to attract and retain subscribers. You can use web forms to find your subscribers’ preferences in AWeber, and you can download the free guide at the end that explains [...]

QR codes are powerful little marketing tools. These 2D barcodes bridge the gap between the real world and mobile Internet, allowing customers to interact with your content in new ways. We showed you how to build your email list offline with QR codes that link to your web form. Here are some best practices to [...]

Your web form needs to convince visitors to your website to sign up to your mailing list. Should you take the opportunity to get to know them more by asking them more questions, or will having a lot of fields to fill out just scare subscribers away? It’s a hard question, and the answer usually [...]

How do you know you have the best web form for your email marketing campaign? You might think you know what works best, but testing will let you know for sure and give you a better idea of what your subscribers want. One of our customers in the sports car business decided to set up [...]

One of the most important components of any email marketing campaign is of course, the web form. Without a way to sign up to your list, you’ll have a hard time finding anyone to send email to. That being the case, you want to make sure that your web forms are getting people to sign [...]

Building a list full of subscribers who are interested in your company means more interactions with your website and more sales. But how can you attract more subscribers? Last year, I worked with some AWeber customers on optimizing their email marketing campaigns. This experience allowed me to see which marketing tactics perform exceptionally well, and [...]

You’ve got your site up. You set up your email campaign. You open the web form generator to start your sign up form….now what?

There’s a lot of talk about best practices for email marketing, and they cover everything from list building to messages. It can be hard to sort through them all to find best practices for one component of your campaign, such as how you should design your web form.

So given the broad spectrum best practices cover, you’re probably wondering: what are those best practices for designing your web form? We’ve got four of the big ones to share with you.

1. Grab Your Site Visitors’ Attention

Your form will need to catch the eye of a visitor in order to be filled out. This means you’ll want to make sure you design a form that contrasts aesthetically with your web page. Here’s an example:

As opposed to this wine seller’s form:

Although there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with that form, it’s harder to see on that page.

Note that while making your form stand out is good, you want to be careful not to make the background of the form too busy. If there is too much going on, or if contrasts too much with your web page to the point you get a headache, you’re not likely to get many submissions.

You want to get the visitor’s attention, but you also want a form that’s user-friendly.

2. Make the Purpose Clear

Another contributing factor for a usable web form is a clear purpose. To establish this, the form needs to answer four questions:

• What is this?
• Why should I sign up?
• How do I sign up?
• When will I get the emails?

Here’s an example of what this can look like:

Answering these questions will help set expectations. If subscribers know what they’ll be getting and when they’ll be getting it, they’re going to be much more likely to stick around.

3. Only Ask For What You Need

Including too many fields can be overwhelming. While you may want all the information you can get, you don’t want the size of your form to scare away potential subscribers or have them abandon the form halfway through.

Let’s take a look at Bed, Bath & Beyond’s sign up form:

They’re using the sign up form to double as their direct mail form. This requires the visitor to fill out their postal address even if they just want the emails. If they don’t want to share that information, they won’t be on the email list.

Now look at Kohl’s sign up form

:

Much better.

If you plan to use other subscriber details for personalization, certainly make sure you ask the questions you need. You need to weigh the cost vs. benefit for each field and decide if there’s a better way you can get that information.

4. Test the Form

Your form isn’t complete unless it works properly, so you’ll need to test it out. Don’t leave this step out, because you don’t want your new subscribers getting an error message after they fill out the form you’ve worked so hard on.

Once you’re happy with how it looks and what it’s asking for, you’ll need to publish it on your website. From there, you can enter your own information to check out how it works.

How do you know it works? This is what happens:

• The thank you page acknowledges the email address has been submitted successfully.
• The subscriber knows they’re going to check their email in order to confirm.
• The subscriber receives the requested information after confirming.

It’s working? Congratulations! You have a web form that follows best practices.

What Do You Think?

We’ve covered the basics, but do you think anything else should be considered best practices for web forms? What about a privacy policy? Should images be worked in?

What other topics would you like to see best practices for?

We want to hear your thoughts!

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What would you do to increase your subscriber growth by 99%? What if it just required a quick addition to your website?

Michael McCarthy’s investor relations site QualityStocks has a large subscriber base with consistent growth, but Michael wanted to find ways to continue increasing those numbers. We talked with him about strategies aimed at increasing his subscriber growth, and after some testing and review, found just a small change can yield huge results.

This lesson can be applied to all email marketing campaigns. If you’re looking for an easy way to bring in more subscribers, read on to learn what Michael did and why.

How QualityStocks Built Its List

QualityStocks connects their email subscribers with companies that they evaluate and determine have huge potential to succeed in the short and long-term future. There is a form on the site where people can sign up to get daily updates:

They also have other pages on their site that talk about the mailing list and invite visitors to subscribe. The forms he’s using are called inline forms, as they are on the page itself. Michael does a great job explaining his mailing lists and what subscribers can expect, and this has created a great foundation for his campaign.

The Change That Increased Subscriber Growth

When you have a successful campaign with consistent growth, it makes it difficult to justify implementing any changes. However, some changes rarely disappoint, and can even lift a campaign to a higher level of success. Adding a pop-over or lightbox form is one of those changes, as other AWeber customers have discovered in the past.

Michael added a lightbox form on his site. His home page has a good section dedicated to information about the mailing list, so it was decided it would perform best on the “About Us” page, which gets a lot of visitors.

The “About Us” page contains important information about the company and what’s offered, but their invitation to join the mailing list is not as prominent as it is on some of their other pages. The lightbox now allows that invitation to stick out on the page, bringing in more subscribers:

Adding the form on that page was a good move; it caused a 158% increase in subscriber growth compared to the previous month without the lightobox:

This monthly new subscribers chart shows the six months before and after when the lightbox form was introduced. There is a temporary drop in new subscribers during the holiday months before rapid growth resumes.

In the six months since the lightbox form was added, Quality Stocks has seen a 99% increase in subscriber growth compared to the prior six months.

Other Changes to Increase Subscriber Growth

Already have a pop-over on your site? Make sure you’re utilizing these tips so you aren’t losing potential subscribers:

• Make sure your form is accessible- You can place your form “above the fold” which means that it will be in the upper half of your page. Your subscribers will be able to see it upon landing on your page, so they won’t need to scroll through your page to reach the sign up form.
• Put an inline form on every page- Visitors may click through to different pages on your website. You want to make sure that a form in on every page so that no matter where they are, they have the option to sign up to your mailing list.
• Utilize social media- Facebook has become a very popular social media platform and a great source for collecting subscribers. You can add a link to your web form on your Facebook page so visitors can become subscribers.

Add a Pop-over On Your Site

You can easily see what results you get by adding a pop-over form to your site, and you can always remove it if it’s not something you want to keep up on your site. Most find a pop-over is a great addition to their web site.

What have you done to increase subscriber growth? Do you think pop-up forms are effective on your site? Have you tried putting your pop-ups on different pages?

Tweet This

What would you do to increase your subscriber growth by 99%? What if it just required a quick addition to your website?

Michael McCarthy’s investor relations site QualityStocks has a large subscriber base with consistent growth, but Michael wanted to find ways to continue increasing those numbers. We talked with him about strategies aimed at increasing his subscriber growth, and after some testing and review, found just a small change can yield huge results.

This lesson can be applied to all email marketing campaigns. If you’re looking for an easy way to bring in more subscribers, read on to learn what Michael did and why.

How QualityStocks Built Its List

QualityStocks connects their email subscribers with companies that they evaluate and determine have huge potential to succeed in the short and long-term future. There is a form on the site where people can sign up to get daily updates:

They also have other pages on their site that talk about the mailing list and invite visitors to subscribe. The forms he’s using are called inline forms, as they are on the page itself. Michael does a great job explaining his mailing lists and what subscribers can expect, and this has created a great foundation for his campaign.

The Change That Increased Subscriber Growth

When you have a successful campaign with consistent growth, it makes it difficult to justify implementing any changes. However, some changes rarely disappoint, and can even lift a campaign to a higher level of success. Adding a pop-over or lightbox form is one of those changes, as other AWeber customers have discovered in the past.

Michael added a lightbox form on his site. His home page has a good section dedicated to information about the mailing list, so it was decided it would perform best on the “About Us” page, which gets a lot of visitors.

The “About Us” page contains important information about the company and what’s offered, but their invitation to join the mailing list is not as prominent as it is on some of their other pages. The lightbox now allows that invitation to stick out on the page, bringing in more subscribers:

Adding the form on that page was a good move; it caused a 158% increase in subscriber growth compared to the previous month without the lightobox:

This monthly new subscribers chart shows the six months before and after when the lightbox form was introduced. There is a temporary drop in new subscribers during the holiday months before rapid growth resumes.

In the six months since the lightbox form was added, Quality Stocks has seen a 99% increase in subscriber growth compared to the prior six months.

Other Changes to Increase Subscriber Growth

Already have a pop-over on your site? Make sure you’re utilizing these tips so you aren’t losing potential subscribers:

• Make sure your form is accessible- You can place your form “above the fold” which means that it will be in the upper half of your page. Your subscribers will be able to see it upon landing on your page, so they won’t need to scroll through your page to reach the sign up form.
• Put an inline form on every page- Visitors may click through to different pages on your website. You want to make sure that a form in on every page so that no matter where they are, they have the option to sign up to your mailing list.
• Utilize social media- Facebook has become a very popular social media platform and a great source for collecting subscribers. You can add a link to your web form on your Facebook page so visitors can become subscribers.

Add a Pop-over On Your Site

You can easily see what results you get by adding a pop-over form to your site, and you can always remove it if it’s not something you want to keep up on your site. Most find a pop-over is a great addition to their web site.

What have you done to increase subscriber growth? Do you think pop-up forms are effective on your site? Have you tried putting your pop-ups on different pages?

Tweet This

Question: Would you ask a visitor to do something right away, or after they’ve had some time to get to know you?

Pop-up type forms make this something you need to consider. These forms can greatly increase your subscribers for your email marketing campaign. You can set how much time elapses before the form comes up, but the question is: how much time should that be?

Split testing allows you to set up a controlled experiment within your account to test and see when you should have your form come up. We had a couple volunteers try out this experiment, and we’ll be discussing their results and why it may or may not work for you.

Time to set up some tests

Karen Baker runs the email campaign for this South Africa travel company. She has a pop-over form set up on the site to come up immediately:

She decided to set up a split test to see if this was optimal, so she also set up a form that would appear after a delay of 30 seconds.

After several weeks, we took a look at the results. The form that came up immediately had a 45% higher subscription rate than the other form, making it the winner. Satisfied with these results, this is the form that is on her site now.

Tony Kummer runs the email campaign for this site that has online resources for teaching kids about Christianity. He set up a pop-over form on Ministry-To-Children.com:

His pop-over comes up within 10 seconds of landing on the page. Like Karen, he decided to test how a form that comes up after a delay would perform in comparison, and he set up a form to come up after 40 seconds.

Again, we let the test run for several weeks before looking at the results. Tony ended up having similar results in that the form that comes up shortly after landing on the page was the winner with a 50% higher subscription rate.

What does this mean?

Having a shorter delay definitely brings in more subscribers for these examples. This may be because people don’t stay on a particular page that long, as they’ve found and clicked on a link they’re interested in before they’ve even seen the form. Another reason could be they are more likely to close out a form that comes up after they’re already looking at content, and don’t want to be taken away from that page.

It may also just be the visitors are prepared to fill out something that pops up shortly after they land on a page, especially if they’re already familiar with the company and know they want to be on the mailing list.

This is why it’s good to have an inline form as well. The inline form should be immediately visible upon landing on the page, and if possible, on all pages of your website.

When might this not work as well?

While having the form come up immediately works well for our examples, there are some situations it wouldn’t works as well.

1. The page doesn’t have a lot of information. If the web page doesn’t have a lot of content on it, people aren’t going to be staying on the page long. They’ll be finished reading through the site before the form is scheduled to pop up.
2. You’ve got some convincing to do. If you’re marketing a new idea or a new product, you may want to let visitors read over your information a bit asking them to commit to your mailing list.
3. Required reading is your goal. Some businesses only want subscribers that have stayed on the site for a certain amount of time and read all the good stuff that’s up there. After enough time has elapsed, then they get the mailing list offer.

Do a split test to find what works for you!

Does your pop-up come up immediately or do you have a delay? Have you tested delays for your pop-ups? Why do you think your pop-up timing is important?

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As you’re probably aware, we announced the release of our API several months ago, allowing developers to start creating AWeber applications via AWeber Labs.

We also released one of the first apps for our own API, a WordPress plugin which allowed you to easily add AWeber forms to your blog.

Today, we wanted to tip our hats to the folks at Unbounce, a landing page service, who have created yet another avenue for AWeber integration.

What’s Unbounce?

In case you aren’t familiar with them, Unbounce is a service which allows you to easily create landing pages for your website. You would typically use these for your promotion specific campaigns – whether it’s gathering new leads with their lead generation landing pages or sending your subscriber lists to a targeted landing page designed for conversion.

You can A/B split test different versions of the pages to find out which works best, leading to an optimized landing page and increased conversions.

You can learn more about their service on their website.

AWeber and Unbounce are a natural pairing for integration, since the core purpose of most landing pages is of course, a web form, with the goal of converting visitors into subscribers.

How Does The Integration Work?

The purpose of this integration is, of course, to have all the subscribers who sign up on your Unbounce page automatically added to your AWeber list.

Unbouce has kept things simple, so there are just a few steps that you need to do in order to sync up our two services.

First off, here’s the video walkthrough that Unbounce put together:

Just to briefly go over setting up the integration, you can look at the steps below or take a look at either the instructions on Unbounce’s website or our own knowledge base article.

1. In your Unbounce account, you can visit the page overview screen for any landing page you’re working on, and click “Send leads to AWeber” under the Leads & Form Integrations section.

   

2. At this point, we will prompt you to enter your AWeber account login and password in order to authorize the integration. This information is not given to Unbounce at any time.

   Note: If you have followed this setup process before, the “application is trying to connect” prompt may not appear.

   

3. 3. After authorizing the integration, you can choose which AWeber list you’d like the subscribers from this Unbounce page added to. Then hit the Complete button.

   

4. Next, you’ll need to log into your AWeber account. Once you’re logged in, make sure that you’re working in the list you chose to integrate with, and select Email Parser from the My Lists dropdown.

   

5. On this page, scroll down and check the box labeled “Unbounce Form Submission” in order to complete the integration.

   

Who’s Next?

Do you have a favorite service or app that you’d like to see integrated with AWeber? Leave a comment, or better yet, tell them about AWeber’s API!

If you’re a developer yourself, you can start creating your own apps and integrations today at AWeber Labs.