Simple & Efficient Ways to Make Your Opt-in Forms Irresistible
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Ben Pines is Elementor’s CMO. He has been in the digital marketing industry for over a decade. WordPress has been his platform of choice since the days when it was only used for blogging. |
A crucial element of your landing page is your opt-in form. If you can improve the conversion rate of your opt-in forms, you’ll have a bigger email list and the potential to make more sales.
As you know, however, customers can be stubborn. No matter how much you nudge them in the direction of your opt-in form, they just won’t enter their email address.
What gives?
They aren’t the problem—it’s what you’re offering. To make your opt-in form convert like crazy, you have to make it crazily irresistible.
Fortunately, it’s not rocket science. Let’s take a look at 5 simple and efficient ways to make your opt-in forms irresistible.
Build an Awesome Squeeze Page
A squeeze page is another name for the page where your opt-in form is. Typically, a squeeze page consists of a bold headline, a few bullet points that outline the benefits of opting in, and the opt-in form itself—and absolutely nothing else.
Why? Less distractions. The customer has just one decision to make—to opt-in or not.
It’s key that you use the right page builder here, and I highly recommend Elementor. It’s a WordPress page builder that’s free, intuitive and fast, and because WordPress itself is the most popular CMS on the planet, I always tell people to go with it.
For example, you might create an opt-in form that needs to offer a 25% discount to new customers only. Not all CMS’s allow you to do this.
Know What Your Customers Want
A lot of the time, the reason your opt-in form isn’t converting is because you haven’t met the prospect where they are at in their journey right now.
For example, let’s imagine that an eCommerce store is struggling with an abandoned cart problem. 80% of their potential customers are filling up their cart and then abandoning it.
In such a scenario, it makes no sense for the store to offer their prospects a free eBook via their opt-in form. Instead, it would make a lot more sense to offer a discount or even free shipping on their first order.
To meet your customers where they are at right now, you can use analytics to learn more about them. Find out their core demographics, their needs and wants. What do they want from you right now than anything right now? Do they want discounts or a free gift?
Once you know your buyer’s persona better, you can put the right offer on a plate for them via your opt-in form.
Offer an Incentive
It doesn’t matter what sector you’re in, your opt-in form needs to offer an incentive.
Remember, no one likes to give their email address to just anyone for any reason. A lot of the time, you have to incentivize people with a dangled carrot.
For eCommerce stores, these incentives typically involved a coupon code, a discount or a free gift.
Other incentives you might offer might include $10 off a customer’s first order.
Whatever it is, the incentive needs to be enticing, and it needs to be relevant to your niche and your customer.
More than that, however, it needs to be something that takes customers into your sales funnel. This is key because, while anyone can offer $50 off someone’s next order and grow their email list, it matters not if no one enters their sales funnel. Anything you offer must bring your prospects closer to doing business with you.
Make the Right Contextual Offer
Picture this: I’ve just clicked through an eCommerce store’s ad and landed on their opt-in form. Weirdly, the offer is now completely different to the one I was just promised on the ad. I was promised a coupon code, but now that I’m on the squeeze page, I’m being offered a newsletter.
When this sort of thing happens, it deeply confuses (and frustrates) people, and the eCommerce stores conversions will remain low.
Make sure the customer is getting the offer they expected. To this end, create multiple opt-in pages for multiple ads.
Don’t confuse people—meet their expectations.
Don’t Ask For Too Much
I understand that some eCommerce stores ask one or two extra questions on their opt-in forms in order to gather more information on their customers. Then, they can send out better emails.
However, requesting too much information can be deeply off-putting for the customer.
A lot of the time it really is best to just ask for their name and their email address. At a later date when you’ve started sending out emails and built a relationship, you can start to ask more questions.
But, look—people are busy. Make this easy for them by requesting just their name and email.
And then send them what you promised them ASAP.
Use a Professional Online Store Builder
When it comes to eCommerce and increasing your opt-in form conversions, it always helps if you make the most of the tools that are designed specifically for online stores—such as CS-Cart, an online store and marketplace builder.
With this tool, you can customize your opt-in form and also have the option to choose from multiple store layouts—so that you can achieve maximum impact with your target audience. The tools presented in CS-Cart also make it super easy to refine your offer so that you improve conversions and, ultimately, sales.
Conclusion
These are 6 simple and efficient ways to make your opt-in forms irresistible. A lot of it comes down to two things—presentation and making the right offer. For the former, use the tools mentioned in this article, while for the latter you can use analytics to help you understand your audience and their problems better.
More useful eCommerce articles and infographics are coming your way. Follow CS-Cart on Facebook and Twitter not to miss them!
Yan Anderson is the Head of Content Marketing at CS-Cart with over 10 years of experience in the eCommerce industry. He's passionate about explaining complicated things in simple terms. Yan has expertise in building, running and growing eCommerce marketplaces. He loves to educate people about best practices, new technologies, and trends in the global eCommerce industry.