How A Minor Change Could Double Your Email Subscribers

As an Internet marketer you may be familiar with the general principles of building a list of opt-in email subscribers i.e. people who voluntarily subscribe or sign-up to your email list. But could some minor 'tweaks' double the number of people who subscribe to your list?

The first task in any list building exercise is, of course, to attract visitors to your website or other opt-in offer. This may involve using such traffic generation methods as search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, social media engagement, article marketing, and the list goes on.

Once you can generate the right traffic - qualified prospects - the next step is to entice them to opt-in to your email list. And, as it turns out, this is where arranging your offer - including how you present each element of text, graphics and other items on your webpage - is integral to maximizing the number of subscribers you acquire each day.

To this end, most (if not all) Internet marketers find that continuously testing and improving their web page formats increases their opt-in rate - the number of people signing up to your list divided by the number of visitors to your opt-in page. Making such changes to the opt-in landing page as modifying the signup form, adding or removing audio, video and pictures, changing the headline, using a different call to action button, and all kinds of other tweaks, can impact the number of people who sign up.

As a case in point, consider an Internet marketing company that originally laid out its opt-in page with the following elements, in this order:

1. Marketing Text
2. Signup Form
3. Graphic offering free ebooks
4. Testimonial

The company subsequently tested a slight change on the page: they moved the graphic offering the free ebooks so that it was now located above the signup form. The webpage elements were now arranged in the following order:

1. Marketing Text
2. Graphic offering free ebooks
3. Signup Form
4. Testimonial

Well, it turned out that this minor change doubled the number of people who signed up to the company's email list!

Whilst we don't know for certain, it may be that after the graphic of the free ebooks was placed above the signup form, visitors felt they were being offered free ebooks and, as a practical step, needed to just provide their email address to receive the gift. The original setup may, on the other hand, have implied that visitors were being asked for their email address first and foremost, and only then would they have the privilege of getting some free ebooks. That's just a theory, but can you see the distinction, right?

As another example, consider an Internet marketing company which ran a split test on their opt-in page. One version of this page listed the benefits of opting in above the form. The second version listed the benefits below the form. The first page out-performed the second one by a massive 88.4 percent.

Now, before you rush off to ensure your graphics and list of benefits are above the sign-up form on your opt-in page(s)... don't assume that what worked for these companies will work for you. We've found that certain arrangements of webpage elements have worked differently in different niches for different offers. So you need to test!

And that's really the lesson here: whatever your current number of opt-in subscribers, it's not necessarily the number of subscribers you could be getting. Only by constantly updating and testing your webpages, will you be able to optimize your opt-in rate.