1. Overview

There’s no shortage of ways you can opt into my email list over on Baeldung.

And make no mistake about it – nudging a random reader to raise their hand and opt in is the best way to connect that reader to your brand. Not social media and not anything else – email.

Here’s a quick rundown of the various optins that you might see on the site at any point in time.

2. Sidebar Optins

The sidebar optin is probably the most visible one.

It’s reasonably effective as well, and that’s because I’m using 3 of them – contextually. Depending on where you are on the site, you might the optin offer one of the following lead magnets:

• REST Services with Spring eBook
• Get the Most out of HttpClient eBook
• Persistence with Spring eBook

Overall I would say that, if you can – contextual is the way to go – if you can create multiple lead magnets for different areas of your site, your conversion rates will definitely improve.

3. Bottom of Every Post Optin

The “Bottom of Every Post” optin is exactly what the name says – it appears under all articles on the site.

This one usually has a better conversion rate than the sidebar optin – simply because by the time a reader sees it, they already received value out of an article. The flip side of that is – as you would expect – this optin has a lot less impressions than the sitebar optin, because not everybody reads through the whole article.

4. Exit Intent Optin

The “Exit Intent” optin is an interesting variation to the standard popup optin – it only appears when the reader signals their intent to leave the site. Usually that means that the mouse cursor goes out of the page and towards the Back button. It’s at that point that this popup appears and asks the user if they’d like to opt in.

Now – popups are a tricky one to get right. First – you need to be able to easily close a popup – none of that “the close button is almost invisible and not where you’d expect”.

Next – popups need to only pop up once. If the reader opts in – great. If they don’t – don’t bother them again.

5. What Would Seth Godin Do? Optin

This is a fun one. WWSGD is a WordPress plugin that I’ve been using for a few years now. It’s dead simple but has good results.

What it does is – it shows new visitors a message. After you visit the site for a few times (configurable) – you don’t see the message any longer.

With that in mind, the message could be something like: Welcome to my site – start here…

But it can also be something along the lines of: If you’re new here, you may want to get the {insert lead magnet here}

6. Content Upgrade Optins

The Content Upgrade is a super-powerful way to boost the conversion rates on a page. The simple idea is to use a lead magnet that is custom, valuable and highly relevant for that particular page.

Easier said than done though.

On Baeldung – I picked a few of the most visited pages on the site – and went for it with Leadpages. The lead magnet I’m using is the code sample itself – which checks all the boxes – it’s valuable and highly relevant for the page. And for the most part – it works great.

The one big downside is Leadpages doesn’t check if the user actually confirms their subscription and sends out the lead magnet immediately. What that means is that there’s a decent chance that they’ll simply forget to confirm their subscription into the email list (or choose not to).

7. Custom Optin Pages

Finally, I also have a few individual, custom optin pages on the site. These server very specific purposes and overall represent a very small percentage of my total new subscribers.

8. Conclusion

As you can see, implementing a mature, diverse optin strategy does take some work. These optins need to be checked monthly (by a VA), A/B tested and generally maintained.

But – it’s also very much worth it, as email is really the only good way I found to keep in contact with my readers and continue providing value.