When people want to increase their email opt-in rates, they usually start by trying to drive more traffic.
Of course, you need traffic to grow your list, but it’s better to start with the low-hanging fruit.
Focusing on conversions will boost your opt-in rate and grow your email list faster.
Adding traffic to a site that doesn’t convert is like trying to fill a leaky bucket.
This article will teach you how you can triple your email conversions in only 7 days.
Growing your email list
If you’ve been in the marketing space for any amount of time, you’ve heard that building an email list is essential to growing a business online.
The first thing people want to do is drive traffic to their websites. Your site needs traffic but focusing on conversions can get you to your email list goals faster.
Consider this scenario: You’re paying $.10 per click for PPC traffic to your site. Would you rather have 2,000 visitors with a 1% conversion rate or 1,000 visitors with a 2% conversion rate?
If you focus on conversions over paying for more traffic, you’ll get the same amount of visitors at half the cost.
Acquiring customers is one of the most expensive things in business. This post will show you several ways in which you can improve your conversions and make the most of your existing traffic.
Five strategies for tripling your conversions
1. Heatmaps
Have you ever wanted to see why your visitors leave your site without converting, fill their shopping cart and bail, or get stuck on a certain page?
Heat maps can show you how and why your website visitors behave the way that they do. A heat map is a visual graph that represents data using colors.
Heatmaps can show click tracking, eye tracking, scroll tracking, and mouse movement.
If your visitors spend more time in a certain location, the map will change color — most often from blue (cold) to red (hot).
A heat map will tell you what you need to remove, add, or move to increase the conversion rate of your page.
Knowing where people spend time on your page is extremely important.
People stay above the fold.
In 2010, researcher Jakob Nielsen conducted an eye-tracking study in which he tracked the eye movements of website visitors across a large variety of websites.
Nielsen looked at 57,453 eye fixations (looking at something on the page for less than half a second).
The graph below shows user fixation distribution along stripes that were over 100 pixels high.
The bars represent the total amount of time that someone was fixated in milliseconds (rather than the number of fixations).
Nielsen found that users spent 80.3% of their time above the fold and 19.7% of their time below the fold.
Above-the-fold content refers to everything you can see on a page before you have to scroll.
It makes sense that putting a call to action above the fold would have a higher conversion rate than one below it.
People don’t look at banners.
Niesen also conducted a study on the efficacy of display advertisements on websites. He found that users rarely fixated on or engaged with ads.
This phenomenon is known as banner blindness. Banner blindness occurs when website visitors ignore the parts of your page that look like ads.
As people have been hammered with ads for years on the web, we’ve learned to ignore them.
The image below shows where users looked most on one site. The green boxes highlight the advertisements on the page.
As you can see, users rarely looked at or interacted with any of the ads.
How to use heatmaps
Penny auction software provider Softmedia used CrazyEgg, a heat mapping software, to boost their conversions by 51%.
In a short 12 days of using CrazyEgg, Softmedia generated a heatmap report of data from over 10,000 page views.
They noticed that a “do not click here” button and a video demo button were distracting users from requesting a quote. The image below shows the heatmap results.
Softmedia then created an overlay report to identify which fields were not being completed.
Here’s a quick snapshot of the report:
Since all the fields weren’t mandatory, they removed the fields that users weren’t completing to improve conversions.
Results
After Softmedia’s development team implemented Crazy Egg’s recommendations in 10 minutes, they immediately saw a conversion rate increase of over 51%!
2. Create an irresistible offer.
One of the most common marketing techniques online is to offer a freebie in exchange for someone’s email address.
Also known as a lead magnet, this content can be in the form of an e-book, report, video series, MP3, plugin, or just about anything that can be delivered over the web.
However, your visitors have more choices of where they can go online than ever before. That means more competition for you.
To stand out from the crowd and make visitors convert, your lead magnet needs to include an irresistible offer.
Most lead magnets are too broad and don’t offer any tangible benefits for the reader. To create an irresistible offer, your lead magnet must be valuable to your reader.
A valuable offer is one that solves a specific problem for your reader. Most opt-in offers are too vague.
For example, if you owned a bakery and wanted your business to bring in more money, which lead magnet would you rather have?:
- 7 Tips for a Better Small Business
- How to add $1,000 of Profit to Your Bakery in Less Than 30 Days
You would hands-down select option B because it’s targeted and solves a specific pain point.
Look at this webinar freebie for Michael Hyatt’s “Get Published” course.
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