What is a Good Opt-In Rate for Email Marketing
If you're involved in any type of email marketing (and you should be), then one of the most important things to focus on and try to improve is your email Opt-In rate, the number of people accessing your email marketing list.
The higher your email Opt-In rate, the more subscribers you'll get and ultimately the more money you'll make.
Email marketing Opt-In rate refers to the percentage of website visitors who subscribe to your email list. For example, if you had 100, visitors to your website or landing page and 20 people subscribed to your email list, then you would have a 20% Opt-In rate. Subscribing to an email list is voluntary, so site visitors must have a good reason or incentive to subscribe to your email list.
Typical free offers include but are not limited to free special reports, white papers, and special discount codes, as these are more powerful and give people a better reason to sign up for your email list rather than email, a newsletter, or a blog receive updates.
What is a Good Email Opt-In Rate?
Many factors determine what your Opt-In rate is. This can vary depending on what industry you're in, how you get traffic to your site, and what type of offer you're using to encourage people to sign up.
For example, if you run ads to cold traffic (people who have never heard of you) on Google or Facebook to get them to sign up for a webinar, your email Opt-In rate will be much lower than if you send you re-email your exciting subscribers who you already know, like and trust to register for the same webinar.
Getting someone to register for a webinar requires a much higher level of engagement on the part of the visitor than simply opting for an instant PDF download.
With this in mind, the average interaction rate on a website can generally range from less than 1% to 5% or more. Anything less than 1% can probably be improved by making some additional changes, discussed below. You can also significantly increase your email Opt-In rate by directing your traffic to a dedicated email capture Squeeze page, commonly known as a "zip page". Opt-In rates on a Squeeze page can be as high as 25% or more.
As mentioned above, serving ads to cold traffic will give you lower engagement rates than serving traffic from Lukewarm traffic (recommendation from a trusted source or your own internal email list).
Even if you do some sort of retargeting to people who may be more familiar with your brand, you can also expect higher email Opt-In rates.
As mentioned earlier, you will always see better email Opt-In rates on a dedicated squeeze page than on a standard website. We'll discuss this in more detail below.
How to Increase Your Email Opt-In Rates With Squeeze Pages
There are multiple ways to increase email Opt-In rates. One strategy is to send your traffic to a dedicated squeeze page (also called a landing page) instead of your usual homepage. A squeeze page is a landing page on your website designed solely to promote your free offer and collect visitor information.
There are no other links or things to distract the visitor, resulting in much higher Opt-In rates on average.
Opt-In rates for squeeze pages can range from 10% to 20% or more.
Some best practices for an effective squeeze page are:
- A headline explaining the great benefit of their free offer.
- An image representing your free offer (book image, video, screenshot, etc.).
- A copy explaining in more detail the benefits of the free offer.
- A call to action (ask them to enter their name to gain access).
- Fields from where they can enter their name and email address, and the call-to-action button.
Another thing to keep in mind that is you can call source traffic where it's coming from; Therefore, on the landing page, I reference to visitors to the "Free Report for The Balance".
Other helpful things that can increase conversions from your landing pages are credibility logos and an email privacy policy.
Note: The example above is an example of a "short form" squeeze page. It's also worth trying a mandatory "long form" page where you have a lot more text and information detailing the free offering.
Squeeze pages can be very short or be long in some cases, much longer copies may be included to sell the benefits of the free offering; in any case, a long or short form squeeze page will always include a benefit-focused headline, some bullet points pointing out the additional benefits of the free offer, an image of the free offer (if applicable), and a nice call to action to sign up.
How to Increase Email Opt-In Rates with Pop-ups
Another method of increasing your Opt-In rate is by using a popup tool. This tool put your offer right in front of your website visitors so they can't ignore it. They might close it, but not before they see your offer. If you provide compelling reasons for subscribing in this email popup, you will see your Opt-In rate increase significantly.
A popup tool unlike any other is Popup Domination. It works flawlessly and can increase Opt-In rates by up to 500%. Although you may hear many people complain that they don't like pop-ups and that they are annoying; when used properly, popups can be an extremely effective way to build your list without being an unwanted distraction on your site.
Many good email autoresponder services like AWeber have popups tools also available.
The key is that your popup will only appear once; otherwise, if the visitor wants to log in, it won't bother them and chase them away by showing the popup repeatedly.
Even if you want a popup, you still do include regular signup forms on your website so that the free offer is always visible and the visitor can respond to it.
The Best Tools to Handling Your Email Opt-In Subscribers
When it comes to E-mail marketing emails are all about, you should use an email service provider also known as an email autoresponder or email marketing automation tool to manage and send emails to take over your list.
Your email service provider acts as a CRM solution, storing names and email addresses (and information it collects) and delivering the actual email delivery; Make sure the emails you send are delivered to your leads and customers.
By anti-spam laws, they will also opt-out out and remove people from your email list who no longer wish to receive email from you.
Popular email service providers include AWeber, iContact, GetResponce, Constant Contact, and MailChimp to name a few.
