Many companies generate a significant percentage of their sales with email marketing. Does yours? Leverage an email sign up form as a low-cost, easily-automated sales funnel to drive business growth.
Does your WordPress site have an email subscription form?
How does your email sign up form perform? The average email opt-in rate is 1.95% (Source). Anything above that and you're doing better than half the planet. Well done! But we want your form to be more than just average!
Only the top 10% of email marketers hit 4.77% conversion. It may sound small, but if your website only gets a modest 5000 visitors a month, you'd still be adding 2862 new email addresses to your list every year. Compared to the 1170 an "average" email subscription form would generate, and you see how a well designed form can more than double the potential sales and business growth that your email list can generate!
Most of our tutorials focus on using the features of Formidable Forms, but this one is a bit different. Your form can be perfectly functional and contain all the clever actions and conditional logic you need. But if it doesn't convert, all your hard work has gone to waste. Follow the Formidable top tips to build email sign up forms that convert.
How can you maximize the effectiveness of your email sign up form?
#1 - Offer incentives to subscribe
Why should I give you my email address? Everyone already gets more junk email than they want, so there is a massive pre-existing bias against handing over email addresses online. This is the first hurdle for any email subscription form.
Many websites avoid this all together by not mentioning an email subscription. Instead offers like "Get our best selling eBook FREE" or "Join our club FREE today and get 15% off your first order" are used to entice users to enter an email address.
Offering real rewards for simply entering an email address is proven to work. If your reward is in the form of a discount code, you can increase your chances of making an immediate sale by introducing a time limit. If that coupon expires in 24 hours then visitors will search your products straight away and see where they can best use it!
#2 - Keep your email subscription form simple
For an email newsletter you need two things: an email address and a name. Nothing else! In fact, you don't even need a name. Many of your users will be too busy to fill out a long form, or may have concerns about information security and privacy. Especially if this is their first experience with your business. It's a hard and fast rule that simpler forms convert better on first contact.
While it may be tempting to ask for more information, this can seriously harm initial conversion rates. Marketing experts advise keeping the initial form as simple as possible, but allow the option for users to add to their profiles and complete their account information later. Once they're on your mailing list, regular updates will entice them back again and again. It won't be long before you have all that extra info.
#3 - Position your email sign up form prominently
Is your email subscription form hidden at the bottom of the page footer? No smart comments about the sign up form on this website now - our newsletters aren't sales focused! In addition to our footer form, we also include one in our blog sidebar and we use OptinMonster to show a form in a popup after a time delay.
Does your business rely on email marketing for sales and newsletter sign ups keep the cash flowing? Then make your sign up form not just visible, but prominent too. Use the top of page banner or include a sign up form in the slider to make it one of the first things a visitor sees.
Positions at the top of the sidebar, and directly below the main post content are also proven to be great for high-conversion email subscription forms.
A vibrant color scheme and eye catching design will further increase conversion rates, and a clever use of graphics elsewhere on the page can also draw the eye to the sign up area.
#4 - Minimize distractions
If your website design is vibrant and eye catching, it can be hard for your email subscription form to stand out, even if positioned prominently. Perhaps you simply have too much content that you want to display above the fold, and including your email sign up form makes everything look squashed? Modals to the rescue!
Display your form in a modal with the rest of the page grayed out to put 100% of the focus where you need it at that moment.
Modals can be triggered by a button (Click here to get 15% off!), or some plugins allow automatic modal triggering after a specified delay, or when a specific scroll point in the page is reached. Strategically time your popups with OptinMonster and Formidable Forms.
Not every modal plugin is created equal, and some do not support Formidable functions. Our Bootstrap Modal add-on is specifically designed for displaying forms.
#5 - Motivating call to action
Does your call to action motivate the user? The default "Sign up Now" or "Subscribe" on the submit button may be among the worst options when building an email sign up form. Both can be subconsciously connected with concepts of commitment, long-term involvement, and ongoing interaction which can be off-putting.
Instead phrases like "Get Started", "Get Instant Access", "Count Me In" or "Let's Do It" can promote a positive vibe and a bit of extra motivation. It's a tiny change, but one that could have a big impact on your conversion rate!
#6 - Integrate MailChimp with your email sign up form
Building a list is only the first step. Take advantage of that list. Services like MailChimp take the hard work out of this. Our MailChimp add-on lets you create a MailChimp subscribe form to automatically add new sign ups to your mailing lists instantly and MailChimp handles it from there.
We also have add-ons for Aweber, ActiveCampaign, Hubspot and MailPoet. Plus there are 3rd party add-ons to integrate your forms with Campaign Monitor, SendInBlue, iContact, Get Response, and Sendy - with more integrations possible via Zapier too!
Read more: How to make a MailChimp contact form for WordPress
Read more: 3 steps to marketing automation with WordPress contact forms
Adjust your email sign up form today
Your email sign up form has the potential to generate sales and grow your business. With a few simple tweaks, this tiny form could become the driving force behind your business expansion. So take some time out of your day RIGHT NOW and see what your form needs to help it produce Formidable results!
Great information. Thanks for sharing.