List Building

How I Doubled My Email Sign Ups By Ditching Conventional Wisdom

How My Business Began

My wife told me she was going to quit her job when she became pregnant. Sure enough, that’s exactly what she did! In order for us to meet all our goals and expenses we still needed two incomes so we looked to make money online.  
We started an ecommerce store and I started writing about it on my blog. And that’s how Mywifequitherjob.com was born! I chose that name because I knew it would stand out once our brand grew in the marketplace.

It was a bit of a risk in the beginning but I stuck with it and now I have over 100K email subscribers.


 
Now I absolutely didn’t start out with a list that size, over time I figured out some techniques that have increased my daily list growth by hundreds. One of the strategies that worked best for me was using forms embedded into my web content.
 

Hot Spots For Webforms

I realized that the hot spots on every post are at the top, bottom, and middle of the content. I inserted a link at the top of every post into the byline that has been very effective for me.
A lot of people will have sign ups at the end of their posts but they separate the form out from the post by putting it in it’s own box to make it stand out.

I’ve found that this actually has a negative effect on your overall email sign ups.

What happens is that when people see that box they view it as an endpoint to the content and they just move on to something else. If you blend the form into the post they’ll actually read the offer and will be more likely to opt-in to your list.

When I blended my sign up form into my content my opt-ins on that page doubled.

In the middle of your content the best practice I’d recommend is suiting your offer to the content so as someone is reading your content it’s acting as a value add and an invitation to go deeper with you.

Going Single Opt-in

Ok, I know this is going to be seen as controversial but I have to share my experience.

The conventional wisdom says that using a double opt-in will give you a higher quality lead. I’m not disagreeing with that necessarily, but I found that a lot of my double opt-in confirmation emails were not making it to the intended person.

This means there is 0% chance for that person to join my list. When I switched to single opt-in I immediately saw my sign ups double.

Now you’d expect that my engagement would then decrease by half, but it didn’t! Net for net, I was still doing better by about 30%.

I know both of these strategies seem counterintuitive but they’ve helped me grow my list to its current size. Sometimes it really does pay off to buck the trends and stand out from the pack.

 

Action Steps

  1. Add opt-in forms in the bylines at the top of your posts.
  2. Add opt-ins in the middle of your content with a related offer.
  3. Add an opt-in form at the end of your post, but keep it blended with the content itself.
  4. Switch to a single opt-in confirmation, and monitor your sign ups and engagement metrics.

 

Result You Will Achieve

More email sign ups by breaking the patterns most websites have when it comes to their opt-in strategies.

Mentor: Steve Chou

CEO at My Wife Quit Her Job – hardware engineer by day & entrepreneur by night. With 200,000 monthly visitors & a list of 100,000 subscribers, Steve made $700,000 last year from his blog of which 90% was directly attributed to email marketing.

 
This article is based on an EHQ interview with the mentor.
 
 

Liam Austin

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