Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to cultivate relationships with customers. Of course, you need to convince people to sign up for your subscriber list in order to leverage this marketing channel to its full potential.
That means understanding email popup best practices. When someone visits your site you want to make sure the email popup opt-in form is something they actually pay attention to. These tips will help you achieve that goal.
The Best Email Pop Ups Give an Incentive
Statistics indicate the average person receives dozens of emails each day. Some people receive hundreds. Thus, they may not be looking for reasons to clutter up their inboxes any further.
Your email popup needs to let them know your content will provide genuine value. However, you have a limited amount of space in an email popup to make your case. Thus, the best email sign up offers potential subscribers some type of incentive for joining your email list.
This email sign up form best practice is something even marketers on a budget can do. While a discount or coupon may be an effective incentive, you could simply offer guests free access to premium content (such as an ebook) for subscribing.
Minimize Fields in Your Email Popup
The best email sign up form isn’t one that overwhelms a user with too many fields. Reducing the number of fields has actually been shown to substantially boost conversion rates on similar forms.
It’s easy to understand why: A person isn’t going to want to spend time filling out a detailed form. On the other hand, if all the form asks for is their name and email address, signing up is much less of a chore.
That doesn’t mean those should be the only fields you include in an email popup. For instance, perhaps you segment your email list based on various topics to ensure subscribers receive content that’s relevant to their interests and needs. Email opt in best practices sometimes dictate you should include a field where users get to choose what type of content they want to receive. This can yield strong open rates in the future.
Avoid Harming Your Sender Reputation
It’s important to check all email addresses on your subscriber list regularly. That includes checking them when a new subscriber signs up.
If you send too many emails to invalid email addresses, your bounce rate will go up. This harms your sender reputation and could get you marked as a spammer. As a result, your content will be less likely to reach your followers.
Email Sign Up Form Best Practice: Stay on Brand
Someone visiting your site is likely already interested in your brand. Thus, they’ll respond more positively to an email popup that’s formatted and designed accordingly. You may not be able to make even the best popup blend in seamlessly with the other content on your site (its very nature prevents this), but you can design it so that it looks like a natural extension of the content a person might be looking for on your site. That’s why this email opt in best practice is worth paying attention to.
For example, maybe you’re marketing an apparel brand. Your site’s main page might consist of images displaying the latest products and discounts. An email popup form that has a similar design and showcases other products will align with what a guest is already looking for when they visit your site.
Test Your Best Popup Design
A/B testing is an essential component of all email marketing, and this applies as an email sign up form best practice, too. To create the best email popups, you need to test various options, and test them in various ways.
Test displaying your email popup after guests have spent different amounts of time at your site (10 seconds, 30 seconds, etc). Test popups that appear on different pages. Also test different email popup designs and calls to action. The more testing you do to determine the best email sign up, the better you’ll understand what does and does not work.
Remember these email opt in best practices when designing your forms. Again, email can be very useful for digital marketers; you simply need to build your audience to get the most out of it.