Five Tips For Designing A Foolproof Sign Up Form

When you operate a business, you need your email marketing campaigns to be successful. Email marketing has been one of the most rewarding marketing avenues and contributes more to online sales than most other digital channels, only SEO can compete with email marketing.

However, for your email marketing campaigns to be successful, you need to ensure that you’re constantly growing your list. There are numerous reasons for this including:

• Subscribers will occasionally disappear (i.e. unsubscribe or close their email account).
• The more emails you get, the more revenue you can generate.
• You can send different campaigns to various demographics depending on where they are in the sales process.

To increase the number of subscribers you have with your mailing list, you need a sign up form. There is an art in developing a sign up form. Here are several tips to help you get started.

1. Keep Your Form Simple

When it comes down to it, you want to ensure that your sign up form is simple. Audiences should be able to look at it and know exactly what they have to do, what they’ll get and it can’t be cluttered. Therefore, keep the amount of information needed to subscribe small. Perhaps only ask for an email address.

The longer the form, the lower the conversion rate will be for you as well. This can be an important point. Visitors are often lazy, so you have to make it as easy as you can for them. Keeping a form simple, also allows you to place the form in different parts of your website, like on a sidebar.

2. Put A Visual Reminder Of What They’ll Get On The Form

If you’re giving something away to website visitors, to get them to subscribe to your mailing list, then visualise the giveaway. This makes your offer more tangible to audiences and allows you to increase conversions.

Good examples of how you can visualise the offer include:

• An image of a book for downloadable ebooks.
• A big version of the discount offer.
• An image of the free prize.

3. Use Specific Words In The Copy

When writing copy, certain words will be improve your conversion. By using words like ‘my’ instead of ‘you’, you can increase the conversion rate by about 90%. At the same time, you need to add specific language into the form that makes the offer urgent. A good example of this is by saying an offer is only open for a set period, or there is limited stock.

Finally, you should add social pressure to copy by including statements like, ‘join thousands of your peers’ or ‘sign up like 10,000 other customers’. Adding social pressure inside your copy can ensure that audiences subscribe because they want to feel part of a community.

4. Don’t Use Typical Verb Words

One mistake that many businesses make is that they stick to the same, traditional words like ‘download’, ‘sign up’ and ‘buy’. These are often seen by audiences as tired and aren’t as convincing as they once were. Instead, you need to use more persuasive words like ‘get’ and ‘learn’.

These words have a less transactional feel to them to customers and because they aren’t overused by businesses, they are more persuasive.

5. Present An Unfavourable Option

Fear is a powerful emotion you can use. One way is to use social pressure and the chance of missing out on something (see above). The other is by providing an alternative that is less attractive to the audience. For instance, you could provide the options of ‘I would prefer to pay full price’ or ‘I don’t want more traffic to my site thanks’ and audiences will be more inclined to convert on your signup form.

Conclusion

Get more subscribers to your mailing list. Use the tips above to improve conversions and increase revenues by growing your mailing list.

Do you have any tips for improving your sign up forms? Have you used any of the above?

Let us know in the comments below.

Tagged in: CRO improvement, sign up forms, subscription management