Transforming Businesses into Extraordinary Brands
Imagine this: You spend hours researching your ideal client and weeks creating the perfect irresistible free offer or ethical bribe. You finally put the opt-in offer up on your website and work like crazy to promote and market it, driving loads of traffic to your website. You’re thrilled because lots of people opt-in for the offer and join your list.
Sounds pretty good right? But the next step is where most business owners fail. What happens after someone opts-in?
I know many entrepreneurs and small business owners, especially when we’re first starting out, dream of building really big lists of prospects and clients — lists with the names and email addresses of people in our target market, who may someday spend their money with us.
At first, it seems to make perfect sense that you’d want a big list — that the more people you can communicate with in your email marketing campaigns, the more likely you will be to find a customer who will take the next step with you.
But what we often forget as we get “big eyes” imagining having a list with over 1000 names and email addresses on it, is that quantity in list building will never be as important, nor have as great an impact on our profits, as quality.
Now that you know the 8 components of a successful website opt-in box, you have all the information you need to create an awesome opt-in box. But, even though your opt-in box has all the right pieces and works the right way … it may not actually work to build your list?
What?!
If your free offer — the thing you’re giving away for free in exchange for their name and email address — isn’t what your visitors want or need, they won’t sign up and enter their name and email, even if your opt-in box is awesome!
Often when we start working with a new client, they are anxious to get their site up quickly and want to jump into the website design process and get started right away. But design isn’t the first step in the process of creating a successful small business website. Before we get started on the design of any client site, we first need to work with our clients to plan the site.
Planning a small business website can be a daunting task, but it will make a huge difference in your conversion rates, sales, and results you see from the site.
Here is a list of things you need to take into consideration and plan for before you get started on the design of your website:
Updated: October 28, 2013
An opt-in box and an irresistible free offer (IFO) is the cornerstone of an online information marketing business and a smart strategy to build any business’ marketing list. Unfortunately the opt-in process is often set up incorrectly with the same mistakes made over and over in the planning, execution, and follow up that takes place as part of a successful opt-in system.
For visual people like me, check out the step-by-step information graphic of the basic opt-in process below — and for those of you who want this written out step-by-step, you can find that below the graphic!
In this post I’ll outline 10 strategies you should base your next opt-in campaign on to increase and accelerate your list growth. But first, Here are 5 Key Factors In Planning Your Irresistible Free Offer Opt-In Campaign:
One of the primary goals of many websites, and ours too, is to build a quality list of prospective future clients and to continue to stay in the conversation with our current clients. A very common strategy to build a database of names and email addresses is to include an email marketing opt-in form or subscribe form on every page of a website, and experts will often tell you the upper right-hand corner of a web page is the most effective pace to place it. Now it doesn’t have to be in the exact top right-hand corner, but in that general area is preferred.
To entice website visitors more, many website owners will offer an Irresistible Free Offer such as a special report, free CD, e-book, video, or audio recording. But these offers aren’t really free because visitors are required to give their name and email address to receive the gift.
