List Building Challenge – Action #3

Building your email list is always a marathon, not a race. It is a constant effort and something that you’re always doing.

And, if all you do it throw up an opt-in form with a single lead magnet and then waiting it out, you’re just not doing it right. We’ve already talked about how you can magnify your list building power by creating additional lead magnets and/or content upgrades.

But, what about the actual opt-in forms? How do you improve those and make them work better?

Split testing.

And, almost any decent opt-in form plug-in will make it pretty easy to conduct a split test on an opt-in form. Thrive Leads makes it easy.

Now, decent chance you already know about split-testing. Thing is…

Do you actually do it?

It is OK to admit to “no”. 🙂 Most don’t. Hell, I’m very much guilty of failing to do enough split testing.

But, I’m doing it more on some of the various opt-ins around my site. And, sometimes you get some radical improvements in the conversion rates. Sometimes, things you thought would improve the situation… don’t. Or even make it worse.

I had one slide-in opt-in form that I would have practically guaranteed would convert better. It was awesome, in my mind. The original was converting at 5.21%. But, as of now, my gorgeous new test form is converting at 3.16%. Crazy! The “boring” form is converting better. But, if I didn’t test this and just went with my gut, I would have lowered my conversion rate and just kept on movin’.

So, your specific action for today is…

Pick an opt-in form and set up a split test.

I’d recommend going for your lowest hanging fruit first. For instance, if you have any site-wide opt-in forms in your sidebar, an exit pop or a slide-in, you should run split-testing on that in an almost continual way.

Test things such as:

• Try a different lead magnet altogether that you think might be more compelling.
• Try a different form design that will stand out more strongly.
• Try different lead magnet titles
• Try different lead magnet images.

Just set it up and let it run for awhile. Depending on your traffic level, it may take some time for the test to complete with enough data to be meaningful. I’d suggest running it for a minimum of 100 opt-ins. You can always quit the test early and launch the winning test version early if it becomes crystal clear you have a winner on your hands.

Split-testing opt-in forms within your blog content can be pretty fruitful, too. For instance, on any content upgrades you might have.

For instance, you can test one of those 3-step opt-in forms we discussed earlier up against a more traditional form. See if it works for you or not.

I would also recommend setting up your test so that it will end automatically. I don’t know about you, but I sometimes just forget I have a test running and forget to look at the results. And, if I didn’t tell it to end automatically, I’ll have the failing version just sitting there continuing to take 50% of the traffic, thereby lowering my opt-in rate unnecessarily.

So, use the settings to end the test automatically once there’s a statistically significant winner. You can set the minimum number of conversions (100 is often default, but you can change it. Then, the winning version will automatically become the main form and the test stops. Set it and forget it.

And yes, Thrive Leads has all that built right in.

Oh, and yes, that is an affiliate link. You likely already knew that. But, trust me, I’ve tried most of the opt-in plugins out there. Thrive Leads is the best. I’m using this tool pretty much every day and I wouldn’t recommend it to you unless that were true.

So, pick an opt-in and start a split test.

Over time, you will improve your list building. No doubt. I’ve got one other form in an active test now and it looks like my new version is going to more than double the pre-existing opt-in rate. So, this is a fruitful activity to be doing… whichever way it goes.

– David