There’s no doubt that building your email list is important to work within the field of organic growth marketing. At the same time, it can be hard work. Optimizing your email capture process makes it a bit easier so that you can begin to gain more subscribers and grow your list to reach more people.
Here are ten tips to help you optimize email to capture the right way:
Tip 1: Make It Easy to Find
The first tip to optimizing your email capture involves making your capture form easy to find.
Website visitors shouldn’t have to hunt through your website looking for it — because they simply won’t do it. Instead, you need to take your capture form to them.
There are several different ways that you can do this:
- Use a pop-up window at the end of your content. Hopefully, by viewing your content, the user now knows enough about you to subscribe to your email list.
- Use a pop-up window when the user signals exit-intent. Don’t let people disappear without a goodbye. Instead, you can insert a pop-up window when the user is about to exit your page.
- Use a pop-up window when the user scrolls through your page. Similar to the first content approach, this method assumes that the user is interested enough and knows enough about your company to want to subscribe after scrolling through, let’s say, half the page.
- Use a sticky top bar. This feature allows you to capture without having to deal with pop-ups that are often seen as annoying. Instead, this bar stays on the screen the whole time without impeding views or information in the process.
- Use your homepage. Take advantage of the page with the most traffic to capture email subscriptions. Your home page should also be the best page on your website — so use it for capturing.
Tip 2: Make It Aesthetically Appealing
If you want to get more email captures, you need to put in the visual work. There’s nothing worse than a boring pop-up box that only has a few lines of text with nothing else.
Instead, you need to make your format aesthetically appealing with different fonts, images, and colors that fit in with your brand and overall website design. These designs will catch the user’s eye and drive them to subscribe.
Tip 3: Personalize the Messaging
If general messages aren’t doing the trick, then you need to get personal. You can easily do this online through targeting mechanisms and segmentation. For instance, you can customize your messaging based on the user’s country of origin.
You can also customize your messaging based on where the user is coming from. Personalization makes users feel more special and motivates them to subscribe.
Tip 4: Provide an Incentive
One of the best ways that you can better capture email addresses online is to provide an incentive. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that you have to offer huge discounts or expensive giveaways.
Instead, you could simply ask that the user subscribe to get more access to your great content. This is an effective incentive for things on your website like videos, blog posts, reports, infographics, etc.
In addition to access, you may want to consider offering things like coupons, giveaways, and freebies in order to boost your subscription rates.
Tip 5: Provide Value
While incentives are a great way to get people to subscribe initially, you also need to provide a consistent value to prevent people from simply signing up to get the incentive, using it, and then quickly unsubscribing. Tell people exactly what they’re getting by subscribing to your emails — and then give it to them.
For instance, are you giving them early access to new products or sales before they go live? Are you giving them access to professional research and reports about the industry? Are you giving them consistent discounts through a loyalty program? Whatever it is, be clear right off the bat to encourage and keep subscriptions.
Tip 6: Keep Your Forms Simple
Once people decide to subscribe, don’t scare them away with overly long and complicated forms. Instead, make it as quick and easy as possible by only requiring the most basic information. All they should have to provide is their email address and maybe their name.
If you want more information, be prepared to offer more in return. For instance, you can provide them full access to your site if they create an actual account. You can also provide bigger incentives like coupons for more information like phone numbers, addresses, interests, etc.
You can choose to either do this right off the bat during the initial capture or wait to send out additional emails later.
Tip 7: Incorporate Your Brand Voice
If you have a strong and unique brand voice, why not incorporate it into your email capture forms? This is a great way of showing users what they’re getting when they subscribe. For instance, if you have a fun and edgy brand voice, you can show that with bold “calls to action” within your capture forms.
On the other hand, if you have a more professional and mild brand voice, then you may want to stick with your basic capture calls to action like “subscribe” or “sign me up.”
Tip 8: Make It Mobile-Friendly
So many users are on mobile devices these days. As a result, your email capture forms need to be mobile-friendly to be effective.
First of all, make sure that your capture forms fit on smaller devices without any of the fields or formatting getting messed up along the way.
You should also make the process even easier for mobile devices that store user information that can be automatically inputted into the forms.
Make sure that this is an option on your website to boost your subscription rates in no time.
Tip 9: Conduct Testing Before Going Live
Even if you think you’ve come up with an incredible strategy for optimizing email capture, sometimes it helps to get things in front of new eyes. For this reason, you should always conduct testing on your capture forms and fields before going live with them.
One way that you can test is to utilize A/B or split testing. This allows you to make small changes to a single variable and compare the results with other versions.
Another way that you can test is to utilize heat map testing showing you where users’ eyes go on the page to take advantage of the best formatting.
Tip 10: Use Technology and Tools
In 2021, there’s no shortage of technology and tools available out there to help you optimize your email capture process.
For instance, there are widgets you can install that are specifically designed for this purpose. They can help you bypass things like pop-up blockers and incognito mode so that you can successfully secure access and information.
Final Thoughts on Email Capture Optimization
For more information on employing a successful email marketing strategy, check out some of my other resources. I’m always here to help businesses grow and succeed by using omnichannel growth strategies.
Sources:
Email Marketing: Still the Most Powerful Tool to Take Your Business to the Next Level | Forbes
Top Ways to Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices in 2020? | Medium
