6 Ways to Increase Your Consulting Newsletter Signups

I’ve talked about the importance of consulting newsletters in the past and how valuable they can be to your business.

Why should someone give you their information? What is in it for them? Seriously.

If you’ve taken that advice, or already had a newsletter in place, there are several easy (and relatively quick) things you can do to increase your newsletter signups.

And hey, who wouldn’t want a bigger list with more prospective clients?

Here are 6 ways you can boost your signups today:

Clear Call-to-Action

Your call-to-action (CTA) “is the single most important element of any signup page” according to KISS Metrics. There’s no disputing this. Time and again studies have shown that the more your CTA stands out, the higher your conversions will be. In this case, I’m referring to someone visiting your website and entering in their name and/or email address and signing up to your newsletter – as a conversion.

Your CTA is the whole area that includes your offer, form fields and button. Though when many people talk about a CTA, they often simply mean the button that a user clicks on to submit their information.

In most cases, the larger your button is, and the more it stands out from the rest of your page, the higher response you’ll see. Derek Halpern does a great talk about the use of colors and conversion here.

The gist is that if your website’s core branding color is white and red, a blue or orange call to action button could deliver a strong increase in response for you.

Look at how Strategic Profits does it…

And here’s how Unbounce does it…

Make a Strong Offer

Why should someone give you their information? What is in it for them? Seriously. I know you want their information so that you can stay in touch with them and market to them…but that’s not what they want.

These are necessary and important questions to ask yourself…why would they want to signup?

Which do you think is stronger offer:

A) “Signup for our newsletter here”
B) “Get our Free Whitepaper on How to Double Your Productivity Today”

If you’re wondering…it’s not A. Clearly ‘A’ is a weak offer. In fact, it really isn’t much of an offer at all.

In contrast, ‘B’ is offering something of value to its audience.

The more valuable you make your offer the more likely people will be to signup.

What do you think about this offer?

And compare it to something like this from Michael Port:

Remove the Risk

We all get more emails, junk and spam than we’d like. And we here about scams and improper use of information, data leaks and all that other stuff on a regular basis. That’s why one of the biggest hesitations someone will have when considering signing up to your newsletter is “what will happen with my information?”

By assuring your audience that you won’t spam them and that you value their trust, time and privacy you will lower the perceived risk and hesitation they have regarding signing up.

Design Your Signup Form

Take a look at this signup form:

Now take a look at this one from Wider Funnel:

And now for this one from Digital Telepathy…

Which looks more inviting, more professional, more trustworthy? And which gives a higher perception of value?

Exactly…The second and third ones indeed.

For years now the value of good design and usability has been increasing. Many of the most successful companies, both products, service firms, and online businesses as well…have been focusing on improving their design.

And there is good reason for this. Their sales increase as a result.

The easier and more usable you make your signup form and the better you make it look, the higher conversion rate you can expect.

I do confess however, that this isn’t always the case. We’ve run tests in our business on signup forms and sales pages where a new variation was more ‘beautiful’ than the original…yet the original continued to perform better.

That brings me to my next tip for you…

Constantly Test

If you have an existing signup form DO NOT simply put up a new form in its place and hope that you’ll see some improvement. That process can be time consuming and inefficient to say the least.

Online marketers constantly run split-tests, also called A/B tests in situations like these.

You will create a new variation of your signup form to test against the current one you have running. That can include changes to any and all of your CTA, Offer, Privacy information and Design.

Next you’ll setup a simple test that will automatically alternate each variation of what your visitor sees…and will measure the conversion rate and # of views/visitors of each. Once you gather enough data you will see which variation performs better and by how much. And if you are putting these tips into practice…you will very likely see a strong improvement.

To run tests like these, you can use:

Visual Website Optimizer

Google Analytics Content Experiments

Optimizely

Give Pop-Ups a Go

No doubt you’ve seen them. You may or may not like them. However, there is little denying that pop-up signup forms are effective.

In a test that Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) ran on their own website, they found that adding a pop-up form to their site increased their signups by 50! Do that math on that – it adds up.

Here are 3 reasons that VWO says their pop-up worked so well:

1. It blocked out distractions from the rest of the page to have the visitor focused and only seeing the signup area.
2. They only required 2 form fields to be filled in (for you this could be name and email, or just email).
3. Their page didn’t reload, so from a user perspective it all felt like one experience.

You can implement each of these six improvements within a few hours. Time well spent if you ask me.

If you have any feedback or suggestions on what has worked well to increase your own signups, we’d love to hear from you in the comments below. And of course, we welcome your questions and ideas too.