Any marketer worth their salt will tell you that “the money’s in the list”. What they mean is that, over a period, you can convert many more visitors to buyers by having a mailing list. Sometimes this means broadcasting to all subscribers when you have news or information to relate but usually these lists also use an autoresponder that sends out emails in a set sequence.
I recently set up a membership site which offers free membership with paid upgrades. At the end of the process, the member was automatically added to my Mailchimp mailing list – they would then, of course, have to confirm that they wanted to be on the list because “double opt-in” is a requirement of all respectable lists. The problem is that even with a freebie thrown in as an incentive to complete the process, only 1 in 4 of the people who became free members signed up to the list.
Now, you might ask why I did it this way around and the truth is that it was simply because this was the way Wishlist Member (the WordPress membership plugin I use) did it.
Why was it important to get people on the list? Because I know that I will get a much higher conversion rate for the paid memberships if I remind and prompt people to upgrade over the following days. It’s also worth building up a list because a targeted mailing list has a value.
So, on Monday, I reversed the process. I set things up so that when the user visited the site they were invited (using the Popup Domination plugin) to sign up for a free membership via the mailing list. They then get the double optin confirmation at which point they are directed to the page containing the registration box for getting their free membership of the site. This way, I guarantee that they’ve signed up to the list before they get access to the site. Sure, they could easily unsubscribe but then those sorts of people would be unlikely to buy in any case.
The results so far has been impressive. A slight drop in the number of free members but the percentage of daily mailing list signups has quadrupled. Next week, I should see this improvement in mailing list conversion translate into paid upgrades.
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