If you want to increase your sales, especially your lifetime sales, then you want to grow your email list.

And the best way to do this is to increase your opt-in rate.

Your Email Intro Offer

For starters, you need an intro offer. This can be:

• a lead magnet guide with free information like a cooking guide 
• a checklist
• a special promotional offer
• free shipping
• a discount 

No one wants to “subscribe to our newsletter” because no one wants more email.

What they do want is something that solves their problems or educates them to help them select what they’re looking for. 

So give them that instead.

Okay, once you have an opt-in offer, make sure to put it in front of people. 

Everyone hates pop-ups. So why is the internet still littered with them? Because they work. So strongly consider a delayed pop-up (because showing it immediately can harm your SEO on Google), or else use a slightly less disruptive slide-in in the lower corner of the browser. 

Once you have an opt-in offer and you’re putting it in front of people, you can A/B test the pop-up.

Please note, A/B testing is most effective when you have a decent amount of traffic. If you don’t yet, work on that first, whether with SEO, Google Ads, Facebook ads, etc.

But assuming you have at the very least a few thousand users coming to your site every month (according to Google Analytics), you can run A/B tests to determine which pop-up (or slide-in) gets you more subscribers. 

Why A/B Test Email Opt-In Offers?

Because testing your intro offer will increase your opt-in rate, which will increase the size of your list, which will allow you more chances to sell your products to your prospects. 

What Email Pop-Up Changes Should I Test?

The offer itself is the first thing to test. 

If you’re giving people a discount on their first order, test different percentages or dollar amounts. This is assuming your margins can support that. We don’t advise our clients lose money on their first sale to a new customer (a loss leader) but in some cases it can make sense to merely break even on the first sale if your business relies on and regularly earns repeat sales from a list of customers. 

Once you’ve nailed down what the opt-in offer is, try changing the headline. Make it more punchy, informal, direct, sound like a bigger win. Emphasize the fact that they’re getting something valuable for FREE. 

This goes back to copywriting basics. Make it about them and make it a no-brainer. 

In the tests discussed in this episode, Chris from our team tweaked our client’s basic Name and Email opt-in form to add checkboxes to ask what types or ailments or supplements the prospect would like to learn more about. Although the usual rule of thumb in digital marketing is to remove fields if you want to increase opt-in rates, in this case, adding fields increased the opt-in rate. Klaviyo was even able to show that the results were statistically significant. 

Why would people opt in at a higher rate when they are asked to fill out additional information?

It could be that they perceived that they would be better segmented on the email list (which was the reason Chris built these checkboxes asking for more detailed information) and thus only receive emails on topics they cared about. 

In another test, we changed the headline of the slide-in box from “Never miss out on news and promotions” to “Get 20% off your next purchase!” This one was my idea and I’m glad we tried it because being more direct about the benefit to them increased the opt-in rate again. 

How High Can Your Opt-In Rate Go?

In this case, we helped the client increase their opt-in rate from 3.37% all the way up to 7.5%. When you double your opt-in rate, that means twice as many of your website visitors join your email list, which allows you to communicate with and sell to them without having to pay for additional ads. 

In an episode we released later, we interviewed Exit Intelligence, an agency that specializes in optimizing pop-ups, about how they helped the same client get their opt-ins in the 10-15% range. That’s massive!

What are you going to test first to entice more email subscribers?