I just deactivated my pop up opt-in form with WP Subscriber (affiliate link) because I was actually getting annoyed with it. I’ve read a lot of content that shares their opinions on this matter but when I asked a couple of people in my community they said they honestly hated the form and most of the time they would leave my blog because of the number of times the box would open up when someone was trying to view content.
Well, that wasn’t good for me.
That would mean that my bounce rate would be increasing and my readership decreasing so I would be losing out on potential blog readers which is never a good thing.
I know I’ve gone to a lot of blogs that have the pop up opt-in forms and they say they receive thousands of email subscribers but when I finally reached out to a lot of them they say that they don’t. That most of their email subscribers come from opt-in forms that they have at the bottom of their blog post or in between their content on their “about me” page.
I know you’re probably asking yourself why is that?
You have to figure that people come to your blog to know about you and to learn about the content that you’re writing. So, those would be the main places where your email list would start to grow at. So, why have a pop up opt-in form when your biggest areas are your “about me” page and at the bottom of your blog post?
Your email list is one of the most important areas of online blogging that you can’t overlook. To build a responsive community you must have an email list. When you realize that, you need to focus on your email list you will start to test different areas of where your opt-in forms should be placed at.
When I did my spring cleaning of my blog I realized that my pop-up form was only bringing in 10% of my total email subscribers and my commenting system and email opt-in form at the end of my blog post with Wp Subscribers (affiliate link) was bringing in the 90% I decided to let it go.
Plus it was annoying my community. But, I’m going to share with you:
3 Ways to Test Your Email Opt-In Forms
You’re always going to want to test your email opt-in forms to see which are working best for you and which ones are just not bringing in any traction at all and it’s pretty simple on how you do this part of your blog.
Step 1: Create different opt-in html codes for each section of your blog to see which area is receiving the most opt-ins. This step is easy, all you need to do is go into your email hosting account and create different list names so that you can track to see where the bulk of your opt-ins are at. I know that a lot of people don’t do this because they’ve either never heard about doing it or their just lazy and don’t want to do the extra work. You still can insert the same autoresponder information, you just want to test to see where the bulk of your opt-ins are coming from. When you do this part you’re going to see where you can take away your opt-in forms to have a cleaner overall design.
Step 2: Ask the community where they opted into your list at? Location wise! The easiest test is to just ask the community where they opted in at. You can create a survey at Survey Monkey and put in the different locations where your email opt-in list is at and then just send that out to your email list. Once you get the results back look over and see what your community told you and then just clear out all of the opt-in forms that aren’t performing well. The cleaner your design is the better it’s going to be for you so you can have main focus areas of your blog for people to opt-in.
Step 3: This last step to test your email opt-ins is something I thought about doing in the spring and summer is clearing out all of my email opt-in forms and just having one opt-in form above the fold on my main page when people visit. I’ve seen this work out amazingly and people have seen great results with this too. I’ve looked over this strategy and seen that people do opt-in a lot more with this strategy and tend to be more in tune with your entire blog. If you’re a bit hesitant about taking this approach then that’s fine but this is always an option. The reason I say above the fold line is because people’s attention and eyes are lazy and you want to attract their attention as soon as they get on your blog. So, if your opt-in form is right above the fold line their better off optin into your list.
I’ve tested both step 1 and 2 and most likely going to be testing step 3 in the next month on my blog as well. These are three different ways you can test your opt-ins for your email list to see which areas are performing best. If you’re not testing your email list then I hope after you finish reading this blog post that you do because it’s very important.
If you want look at these examples of above the fold blogs that have great opt-ins:
