One of my favorite quick fixes to kickstart a conversion rate campaign for my clients is to incentivize newsletter signups. By adding a great incentive that they’ll receive immediately upon signing up, you’ll encourage them to complete the sale and become a member of your newsletter simultaneously.
Let’s take a look at your current newsletter signup form. It’s probably sitting in a sidebar and looks a little something like this:
Walmart.com Newsletter Signup
Or this:
Target.com Newsletter Signup
I’d wager that the Walmart.com signup has a higher conversion rate than the Target.com signup, due to the inclusion of a prominent headline and emphasis on savings. It’s also interesting that Target.com chooses not to display their privacy policy anywhere close to the signup box, or perhaps its interesting that Walmart.com does. Also note the submit button text, “Sign Up” and “Go”. I think Walmart.com has again outdone Target.com, as “Sign Up” is much more descriptive and clear than “Go”, not to mention people most commonly associate “Go” with the color green, not red, but red is part of their branding — I get it. All that being said, I really think both of these retail giants could do better.
First we need to look at placement. Where is your signup box placed? Is it in a sidebar? The two examples above are not, they’re below the fold at the bottom of the page. Since different pages call for different elements and locations, it’s not always viable to have your newsletter signup prominently placed on every page… in its current form. When I say “current form” I mean, right now your newsletter signup is just that, a newsletter signup. It has no real other function for the subscriber, which brings us to the next step, “function”. If we really want to increase our signups we need to integrate our newsletter into our site as a useful tool with a variety of functions. Here are some specific ideas:
- When a product is out of stock, have a newsletter signup that says “alert me when this product is back in stock”.
- Allow a subscriber to receive an alert when a certain product is on sale.
- Allow a customer to be sent a ‘reminder’ at preset or user definable intervals. This is particularly useful for websites with long sales processes where decision making may take weeks or months.
A non-specific, sitewide idea may be to offer a 5% coupon for signing up. (Extra tip: On your submit button, use terminology such as: “Send my Coupon Now!”… not “Go”).
These ideas are great because they allow us to place the signup box at the product level and create a useful incentive for signing up. Industry specific signup incentives are the best kind and I’m sure with your business you can think of other sales functions that may warrant their own signup incentive.
In closing, the real takeaway that I intended for this post was to encourage you to enhance your signup form’s usefulness to the customer and in turn, give them a great incentive to signup for your site. Most often the incentives will (if they’re well thought out), help faciliate the sales process and thus you’ll be making more sales as a result.
