When you’ve pretty much got your new site written and designed, you need to start thinking about building a list of readers/potential clients/followers. Maybe you already have a sign-up box and you send out a newsletter to your email list now and then. Or maybe you’re resistant to the idea of collecting emails, because of all the spam sitting in your email folders – you don’t want to do that to anyone else! Or you’re on track, you’ve got a steady trickle of sign-ups, and you’re emailing your list all the time. If so, why aren’t you making the sales you were hoping for?
Let me break it down a little. The purpose of your email list is not for easy marketing, it’s for creating an opportunity for two-way communication with your site visitors. Don’t get me wrong – it’s still your most valuable marketing tool! But that’s because, by signing up or opting in, your reader or follower has indicated that they’re interested in what you’re doing and they want to learn more. They’re most likely to buy from you if they trust you, like you, and feel like they know you. And that’s where a lot of people go wrong.
But let’s back up a bit to the basics – how do you get your site visitors to give you their name and email? By trading them for something valuable that they want, via an opt-in or sign-up form!
An opt-in or sign-up webform is simply a free offer that you have on your site, that gives your visitors something of really great value for free, in return for them “signing up” or “opting in” by giving you their name and email address. Here are examples of two very different opt-ins from two of my sites:
As you can see, your opt-in can be very simple, or it can be more complex. In the beginning, it may be easiest to go with a simple offer for one item that will either solve a common problem your reader has, or, something that will really grab their interest. Here’s the big secret: give your BEST stuff away for free! Think about it, if your free stuff blows them away, they will think, “This is what she/he gives for free?! imagine what I’ll get when I pay for it!”
Your opt-in may be for a free podcast, or teleseminar, or video, or eBook, or free consult with you – something that your visitors REALLY want or need and is often in digital format, so you can email it to them (no cost to you!). In the case of a free consult, you can conduct that via phone or Skype, at no hard cost to you (just your time).
For this opt-in on the homepage of my ListenToYourGut.com site, my conversion rate (percentage of people who purchase from me after signing up for this offer) is 25 – 30 percent. That is unheard of. A “good” conversion rate is considered to be 1 – 2 percent and many Internet marketers are happy with 0.5 percent.
Why is my conversion rate so high? Because I have implemented all of the things I’m telling you to do in this Listen To Your Freedom program; I give super useful, top quality stuff for free, I tell my story, I speak directly to my site visitor’s pain and problems, they know I understand them intimately, and as a result I build trust.
I also provide a series of 7 emails for this opt-in offer, and during the series I give them 3 free eBooks and 2 free teleseminars (mp3 and transcript). So they really build a relationship with me over 7 weeks and I give them so much excellent stuff without any expectation of them ever buying from me.
Seriously. If someone can heal themselves from this free series, then I am thrilled with that. Because guess what, do you think they’re going to tell people about me? Post to their friends on Facebook and Twitter about me? You bet they are. And if they ever have a gut issue in the future, or their friend or family member does, are they going to come back to me? Yes they are.
I routinely have my husband Ian saying things like this to me (because he handles the daily operations): “We had a customer buy $300 worth today and the last time he bought was six years ago.” Are you in it for the long-term? Then make sure everything you put out there reflects that.
Most internet marketers (and the strategies they’re selling you) rely on the quick sale; get them in quick, flood them with “free bonuses” and make the sale. Ask yourself this: How many of these guys are going to be around in 20 years? And who cares that they sell a million dollars worth of product when their return rate is 70%? And no, they don’t advertise that part of their method! I sell over a million dollars of product each and every year, and my return rate is less than 1%. THAT is the kind of business I’m showing you how to build here at Listen To Your Freedom.
Competition?
Even when you’re selling exactly the same thing as someone else, your opt-in can be completely different in look, tone, feel, and grab a different audience – depending on who you are.
Check out these two opt-ins to see what I mean. Each of these women are working a completely different look and feel from each other. They may be selling essentially the same product, but they are not really in competition with each other since they each attract a very different audience. But, they each generate over $1 million/year from their business:
VS.
The first opt-in is from Marie Forleo. She is a glam Jersey-girl in New York and she loves slick production and high fashion – her videos are shot with a full crew and post-production editing.
The second opt-in is from Leonie Dawson. Leonie is from Queensland, Australia and she has shot many of her videos from her laptop camera, often while breastfeeding, or out in nature. She also does all the artwork for her book covers, meditation covers and opt-in offers herself.
Both these women do a superb job of communicating exactly who they are and what they’re about, and offering products that satisfy their market. You can see just from their opt-ins that they know intimately who their customer is (i.e. who they are targeting). I encourage you to go have a look at both their sites and swipe away (borrow and adapt the elements that appeal to you) – like you should from any good site.
Why Do I Need An Opt-In Form?
Having a free opt-in allows you to start collecting names and emails for your list. Do this ASAP if you haven’t already! Your list is one of your most important assets. And even if you just get one opt-in per week in the early days, the names will quickly add up.
Then when you want to promote a book or product using an affiliate link (set up to receive a commission on) or your own book or product, you will have a list of people sitting in your database you can contact right away. These people may also forward your emails on to other people they know.
Also, what happens if you do another really great report, or podcast, or video that you want to give away for free? If you don’t have your site visitors’ email addresses, you can’t communicate with your people, you can’t even send them freebies!
A sign-up box that allows you to build an email list, or database, of people who are interested in you, allows you to start building a relationship with those people. It allows you to have a two-way conversation.
If only they can contact you, and see what you’re doing, but you can’t contact them, or ask them questions, then you don’t have a relationship. A relationship is a two-way street. Building a list allows you to get that relationship going and then deepen it.
Here are two separate emails from Freedomite Jeromy Johnson at EMFanalysis.com that illustrate perfectly the importance of having an opt-in or sign-up box on your site:
Email #1: “Hi Jini – see the comment below from a couple that just signed up for my email list. 20 new signups the past 2 days!
Comment
“We are very impressed with your site; we are both electro-sensitive. One of the most relevant sites, fact-wise, that we’ve seen; you have all the essential info. in a succinct, well-laid-out way. I will be forwarding a lot of it to doubting friends and family.”
Email #2: “I want to thank you for everything this year. LTYF has helped me in so many ways. Thank you!! It seems some traction is taking place as well. My website had been cruising along at about 100 visits per day. Yesterday it jumped up to 850 visitors and today I have had 1,700 visitors! Tons of new email address for my contact list. Perhaps this topic is starting to hit the mainstream….”
So like I said, even if you start out really slow, with only 1 sign-up per week, as you keep blogging about helpful or interesting things, you will get more and more people finding out about your site. And then as you saw from Jeromy’s second email, you will hit points of “critical mass” where your traffic, visitor, signups, revenue etc. take big leaps forward.
Don’t Upset or Burn Out Your List
So yes, there are endless ways to do this right, and tons of possibilities. But there are also some “don’ts” to keep in mind! Just like any good friendship, you must not abuse this relationship with your email list. Don’t just email your people when you have something to sell. ALWAYS, always, always send them free, helpful, useful or amazing information, tell them stories, share tools, tips, etc.
And when you do want to sell something, give something great for free first at the beginning of your email and then give them your sales offer afterwards – in the same email. Never just send a sales email – think how you feel when you get these, they feel rude and grabby don’t they?
Believe me, I have tested everything I’m telling you here. I currently have 52,000 people on my list and some of them have been with me for over 10 years, without unsubscribing.
As you can see, it’s a little bit art, a little bit science. But rather than looking at emails purely as a sales tool, take a breath, have some fun, and focus on building relationship and trust between you and your tribe. Believe me, it’s worth it.
Setting Up Your Opt-In
Okay, now let’s get into the nitty-gritty of how to set up your opt-in webform and then how to place that sign-up box on your website. In case you haven’t noticed by now, ‘opt-in’ and ‘sign-up’ are just two different ways of saying exactly the same thing.
However, before I can present you with the different technical solutions that can do this for you, we have to do a bit of Internet Marketing 101; so you’ll know what I’m talking about when I tell you a system has a certain feature, or not.
If websites and opt-ins are old news to you, heads up anyway! If you’ve paid someone to set up your site infrastructure, or if you’ve cobbled your site together from bits of information here and there, or even if you’ve taken your cues from an online business guru, it is possible your systems are not running as efficiently or professionally as they could be. So stick with me on this and run your site through the checklist as I go over all the important details.
There are 3 things that you’ll need to understand in order to make a good decision about which platform to use for your opt-in offer:
- What is a customer relationship management (CRM) system?
- What is an email marketing platform?
- What do I get when I select a shopping cart for my site – what’s included?
The reason we need to talk about shopping carts at this stage, is because many shopping carts automatically come with email marketing platforms and opt-in web forms. So you need to know what you need, and what you can afford, in order to make the best choice for your site.
If this is sounding really technical and your eyes are starting to glaze over, snap out of it! Buckle on your self-discipline and stay with me, because you absolutely need to understand this section or you won’t make any money from your site! You can outsource the set-up of these components, if you wish, but you still need to understand what they are and how they work.
Let’s start with email marketing and CRM (customer relationship management), since these are both ways you will interact with and grow your relationship with your site visitors and customers…
What’s the difference between customer relationship marketing (CRM) and email marketing? The short answer is that email marketing is how you turn your site visitors into your customers and CRM is how you grow your existing customers into great customers. But let’s get into exactly what that means and how it’s done.
Let’s say I’m selling a book on mouse traps and I want to find out if the trap is working well for people. I can have an autoresponder email set up in my email marketing platform to be automatically sent out 20 days after the book purchase, which asks the customer for feedback.
You have an eBook on how to be a pro longboarder. This eBook is a combination of text and demonstration videos.
You have an online DVD course that shows people how to purchase an antique armoire from a flea market and refinish it to showpiece quality.
You have a series of audio-based healing sessions using hypnosis for different conditions: Stop smoking, lose weight, bedwetting, anxiety, insomnia, etc.
Your back-end email marketing system can be amazingly complex, depending on how big your business is and how many ways you want to be able to interact with your people. Or, it can be fairly simple and basic and you can build it slowly as you go. I’ll give you a 
If you don’t want to do either of the above, then at the very least, you can set up (or have your programmer set up) a “Subscribe To My Blog” form. This way you can begin collecting names and emails right away – but unless you’ve already got lots of fantastic content, you won’t get too many subscribers anyway, so it’s definitely better to go with #2 above and do a “Coming Soon” offer. Then you can add your offer for an eBook, or report, or audio download, etc. when you have one available.
The reason you may want to have your opt-in on every page is because you don’t know what page someone will land on when they first come to your site! Don’t assume people will come to your homepage.
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