The Premise
Until very recently, I’ve been using a single Sidebar Email Signup Form on my blog – front and center.
This has been performing relatively well – over the last couple of months, I was able to improve its conversion rate from 0.37% to 1.14% through a series of changes (all documented on this blog).
I recently started using an “End Of Article” second Signup Form on the blog – basically appearing after all of my articles. I was motivated by the well understood idea that the reader usually needs reminding in order to take action.
Before going into details about the experiment, here is the Optin Form I’m currently using:
Because the form is positioned at the very end of the page, by the time they get to it, the reader would have already presumably read the whole article. Also, given most of my articles are over 1000 words, the fact that they actually reached the end indicates that they found it useful enough to stick around – or else they would have stopped reading by that point.
So – the premise is that visitors that see this second Signup Form is much more qualified and interested in the content than the visitor who has just landed from Google and happens to see the main form simply because it’s above the fold.
Let’s now take a look at the actual conversation rate I’m getting on this form, and see if we can validate the premise for the experiment.
The Results
The data for this new Optin option is as follows:
Visits: 6044
Conversions: 141
Conversion Rate: 2.33%
How can these results be interpreted?
First – the conversion rate for this new Optin is much better then the Main Sidebar Form – more than 2x better. The premise of visitors being more qualified at the end of the page is validated and now has hard numbers behind it.
Then – given the fact that only half of my readers reach the end of the article, but the conversion is double – it basically rounds up very nicely to another 100% increase in signups.
It will be an interesting November!
Hey Eugen,
Thanks for sharing! Is that a plugin by any chance? 🙂
Hi Eric,
Yes, the plugin is called OptinSkin – I’m planning to write a review of it at some point – but in the meantime, here’s the link. Cheers.
But why is the email sign up form on the side on this page?
The sidebar optin form is the main one – all readers will see that one as opposed to the one at the end of the post, which, as my data shows, will only be seen by half of the readers. Also – it’s usually good to have multiple optins to remind the reader to take action.
I’ve just gotten back into actively marketing my blog and one of the first things I did was to revamp my opt-in forms. I didn’t have data like you did here, but my sidebar opt-in form didn’t seem to be cutting it.
It’s awesome to see the results you’re getting from the second opt-in. Once I get my first lead magnet set up I’ll
probably be opting to add it with a second opt-in below the articles.
Hey Mike,
Yeah, email capture is critical and so it getting the hang of a solid offer for an optin.
This article is a bit old and I’ve scaled up my optin efforts significantly since, but the end-of-article optin is still one of my best performing ones.
Glad the article helped.
Cheers,
Eugen.