At interact we’ve worked with our customers to develop quizzes that have generated over 8 million email subscribers with an average conversion rate of 50%.
I’ve put a screenshot of a perfect opt-in form below and I’ll talk through each part of it in detail below.
1. A contextual reason to opt-in
The most important part of any opt-in form is to make it relevant for the people who are seeing it. What I mean is that the reason for opting in should be related to why the person is on your site in the first place. With a quiz this is straightforward, where you are opting in to see your quiz results.
For any sort of website or blog, the opt-in form should promise to provide helpful information based on the topic of the site. For a marketing blog “Enter your email for up-to-date marketing tips.” The way to think about this bit of copy is to consider why the person would be on your page in the first place, and then promise to send helpful information about the reason they came in the first place.
2. Tell me how opting in helps me
In reality everyone is just worried about themselves. Your opt-in form should make it abundantly clear how getting emails from you is going to help the person opting in get better at whatever it is they are trying to get better at. Here’s an example from a blogging quiz.
Headline: Enter Your Email to See What Type of Blogger You are
Sub-Heading: And get personalized tips on how to improve as a blogger based on your unique style
So now the reason for opting in is so that I can become a better blogger – if I’m taking a quiz about blogging I’m very likely to want to improve my blogging skills since that’s a subject of interest for me, so this sub-heading tells me exactly how that will be achieved if I put in my email address.
3. Clear details of how often you are going to contact
You should make it explicitly clear how often you are going to send emails when someone opts in. No one wants to get on a list only to find out you send out a daily email that they really don’t care about. I always put a note on the opt-in form that says exactly how often I send emails. For example
“We send out a weekly email with blogging tips to help you become a better writer”
Which not only gives me an idea of exactly how often you are going to contact me, but also reinforces why I should opt-in in the first place because it again mentions the benefit of getting on the list.
4. Asking for the right information
Unless you have a very explicit reason to ask for more than just name and email, don’t. Now it does make a HUGE difference if you address people by their first name in emails, so you should ask for first name, and in all of your emails use merge fields to address everyone by their name, but other than that there is no reason to ask for more than first name and email.
5. Letting people choose not to opt-in
Always give an out. This not only makes sure that you only get people on your list who are actually interested, but it also gives some peace of mind and helps the new subscriber know that you have their best interests in mind. A company that is taking any new email address and forcing people to opt-in probably isn’t one that is really useful anyways, so let people choose right from the start.
Note: Currently we only offer open text format opt-in form fields, we don’t support drop down options or radio button options or anything like that for the time being. We are aware of the demand for new types of form fields and have them in our product development queue, at this time we don’t have a firm date for when they’ll be released.