How to Increase Your Email Subscription Rate by 875%
Friday October 24, 2008
Darren Rowse shares the story of how he increased the number of email subscriptions for the Digital Photography School newsletter from 40 per week to over 350! The secret was using the "Pop Over" feature from Aweber.
These Pop Over subscription forms are of course much more intrusive to readers than a sidebar form - this is the reason I resisted using them for so long. My fear was that they’d annoy readers, page views per visit would drop and that I’d end up with a lot of angry emails from readers.
But based on his test of a couple of weeks, it looks like the upside is well worth it. Check out this incredible screenshot of the daily subscriptions before and after using pop overs.
Read the full post: How to Drastically Increase Subscriber Numbers to Your Email Newsletter [Problogger]
Comments
Yeah, the popover feature really increase conversions when I use it. Even though I hate to deploy it because I know that as a web visitor these things annoy the heck out of me. They DO get a stronger, more reliable response from visitors though and people should test these on their sites to see if they benefit from them. Most of us using them are seeing better conversions with the pop over than without.
Dan
Conduit Method Case Studies
Dear Gregory Go:
First off - cool last name! I must say. Okay well I have been an avid reader of about.com for years and years. I’ve only recently come to your Online business section and I’ll be coming back for years to come.
I have read through quite a bit of your articles and I see a lot about hosting providers that you recommend such as Yahoo! and Godaddy and such but I don’t see anything on the new generation of hosting.
We’re just re-launching our company with this new type of hosting and I would love it if we could be just one of your examples. You see, previously somebody setting up their Online Business would have to deal with their own hosting by updating the software of their site themselves or hiring an expensive IT staff to do it. This is why, we offer a new solution called Haiku which is for the non-technical business owners. Haiku provides a subscription-based hosted solution with the benefits being that the updates are streamed across every users site while they sleep, the websites never go out of date and new features are implemented regularly. In fact, we don’t call them websites - we call them Online Businesses - just like your column here.
So what do you think about doing an article on the new breed of hosting? I would love to tell you more about it.
Kind regards,
Peter Venero
Thanks for your comment, Dan!
I think the key to using a popover is to deploy it selectively. Maybe after a few page views or after a long length of time. Having the popover appear within a few seconds of first visiting the site would be a huge turnoff.
This is an interesting tip. I will test it. What is your #1 traffic generation secret?
Thanks in advance,
Curt
Teachmomhow.com
Hi Curt,
Good question about traffic generation. IMHO, the #1 secret to building traffic depends on the type of website you’re marketing.
If it’s a content publication (eg., blog, online magazine), then I believe guest posting, commenting, and building a relationship with other publishers (ie., bloggers) is the best way to build traffic.
If your site is an ecommerce store (ie., selling goods, not publishing articles), then I think the #1 traffic building secret is good search engine optimization (SEO).
fastest growing and leading business to business directory of India and worlwide.
I know that the pop over is definitely going to get you more subscribers. I suppose what I’m interested in is if conversion rates stay roughly the same or do they go down?
I love the pop overs, but I’m just not convinced that email marketing is that valuable anymore.