With all the security issues from the past few weeks, it’s kind of taken my focus away from my primary area of concern, which is web development. Well, it’s time to fix that with what I learned on a webinar hosted by LeadPages last Wednesday, December 17. It covered topics about the fastest and most effective list-building techniques that started late in 2014 and are expected to be the hottest trend for 2015.
You will be seeing these techniques showing up here over the coming days and weeks.
So what’s in and what’s out?
Opt-in Forms:
Out
Sidebar opt-in forms. These just don’t convert like they used to, and most visitors to a website just ignore them nowadays. That means a very slow-growing list. Not good if you’re trying to earn a living from your blogging activities.
In
Using a button or banner image that loads up a popup form. This way the user first clicks on an attractive button or image, causes a form to open up and now the visitor must make a decision about whether to sign up or not. Once they click that button, they must choose. “But won’t that annoy my visitors?” you might ask. Well not really, they can choose not to click that button, and those who won’t make a decision would never have signed up with the sidebar optin form anyways. If someone clicks on the button or image or whatever, they’ve already shown at least some level of interest. Now all they have to do is give you their email address and click another button. Once they’ve come this far, they may as well go the distance and finish what they’ve started. What does this mean for me? For you this means you get a higher percentage of visitors actually making the decision to sign up for your mailing list and thus, your list grows faster. This has been tested by LeadPages extensively and proven to generate much higher sign-up rates then the sidebar opt-in form.
Home Page (aka Landing Page or Front Page)
Out
Your Home Page (aka Landing Page or Front Page) being just your blog posts. Systems like WordPress and Drupal made this a very common way to greet people to your site, but I’ve never been a fan of this type of Front Page as it goes against all the principles I went over in my Anatomy of a Good Website blog series from earlier. It just doesn’t give people a reason why they should bother reading those blogs. That’s what a Landing Page should do, give you a reason why reading this person’s (or company’s) website is important or even essential to the visitor. A chaos of blog posts just doesn’t do that. Even if you don’t follow the latest trend I’m about to go over, having the classic static home page, or at least some static contents at the top to give the visitor that reason why, is still better than the chaos of blog posts.
In
Having your visitors go through a landing page where they must make a decision of whether or not to sign up for your mailing list as they enter your site. To be effective, it must have a powerful reason why they should do that, a prominent way for them to sign up, and a visible way to enter your site without signing up. I can definitely see the benefits of building the entry point to your site like this, as visitors now can’t not decide. The drawback that this can potentially annoy repeat visitors if you don’t have some means of skipping this step for returning visitors, and a visible means of choosing not to sign up for those that don’t want to, or would like to actually see your contents first.
Thank You Pages
Out
A basic page that just thanks the visitor for signing up and tells them to check their email. This creates a dead end in your list building system as it takes people out of your website and dumps them on a page that offers no new value, and no way of returning to your site or other valuable contents.
In
An interesting Thank You page that also offers something of value and a means of going somewhere else that’s interesting, even if it’s just to return the visitor back to your web site. Doing a valuable Thank You page offers visitors something of real value for taking the time to sign up, give them something of interest, and a route back onto your website or sales system so you don’t punish those who were willing to join your list for doing so by sending them to a boring page that goes nowhere and offers no options.
If you’re looking for a new website, would like to upgrade yours to meet new trends like these or have any questions about web design or anything, feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.
