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In today’s Q&A, we are helping you discover more ways to collect emails from your website, other than the usual homepage and sidebar tactics.
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Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
- Elementary Librarian
- LeadBoxes from LeadPages
- AWeber – our email tool of choice
- Pinterest – check out our tutorial here
- Have a Question? Ask it here!
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to Q&A with S&J.
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
What’s up, guys? Welcome back to the Q&A with S&J Podcast where we answer your questions about online business. Our question today comes from Bobby Walker and full disclosure here, Bobby Walker is actually my best friend in real life. We talked him into starting his own online business a few months ago and it’s actually doing very well. It actually started making some sales.
He’s making money online and he had a great question the other day. We talk from time to time. He asks us questions and kind of picks our brain a little bit about online business. I thought this was an awesome question that he asked me the other day so we thought we would share it with all of you on the Q&A with S&J.
Bobby writes or asks, he didn’t really write it. He kind of just asked me but Bobby asked’
“Where else can I collect emails on my site besides the sidebar and on the homepage?”
That’s a great point because a lot of people say, you see a lot of the information out there. It kind of is very limited on how to get more emails. All the gurus say, “Put your collection box in your sidebar or prominently above the fold,” and that’s kind of all the information that they really give you about how to collect more emails, but Jocelyn and I over our last couple of years have developed a lot of strategies on where you can put your email opt-ins and how you can kind of convince people to give you that email address.
We’re going to go over two or three tips here where we think you should put your email opt-ins and how you can get people to get more likely to give you those emails.
JOCELYN: One thing that I always do especially on my Elementary Librarian site is I actually put email opt-in links inside my blog post content. If I’m talking about something that I give away for free, I might say something like, “I give this away for free to people on my email list. If you have not joined yet, click this link to be a part of the Elementary Librarian email list” and I get a lot of opt-ins that way.
SHANE: What happens is we use lead boxes to create links or to create buttons that people can click. Lead boxes are kind of a tool inside of LeadPages.net where you create sales pages and things like that. What happens is when they click that link, a little pop-up box opens up and once people click that link, they are very likely to go ahead and fill out the opt-in because they have like momentum. They’ve already taken action by clicking that link and when it pops up, they can fill it in and it’s in the content that they are consuming so you know they are very interested in that freebie or whatever you’re giving away in that link so you know they are probably going to do that.
I think our lead boxes in those content links when they pop up usually convert at about 80% or 90%. Once they’ve clicked the link, they are going to give you the email.
On that line, another thing that you can do to really work on getting more emails in your opt-ins is don’t just have the boxes there on your page. Don’t let it say, “Join our newsletter” or “Sign up for me free course” or whatever. What you want is a button. You want something that they can take action on. Don’t just let them see “name, email” because I think there is some ad blindness to that now, where a lot of people have done that in the past and when people see those boxes, they just kind of move on. I read an article one time that said that kind of makes you look like a taker.
It’s like, “Give me your address” instead of saying “Click here to learn more.” Now you’re giving it to them. When they click that button, they are wanting you to tell them something and it opens the pop-up and they have already got momentum so you’re more likely to get that email.
So don’t just put your email box out there and say “name and email.” Make it a button that says, “Click here, I’ll tell you a little bit more. If you’d like to know more, you take action and I will go ahead and give you this information.” That way, people are more likely to join your list.
JOCELYN: If you are only including an email opt-in box on your homepage, you’re really missing out on a lot of email addresses and I think there are a lot of people who do this. You have to remember that a lot of people never even see your homepage. People find you through Google searches, they get on to run on blog posts that you have, so make sure that you’re not just including that on the homepage. You can either put it in a widget on the sidebar, you can put it at the end of your post, which is another great place to put it.
SHANE: A great spot to put it.
JOCELYN: If people are interested in your content, you can always put something down at the bottom, “Would you like to learn more? Join my email list and I will give you ABC.” Make sure that you’re always providing value for people even upfront so that they know when they get on your email list, that is going to be a good experience.
SHANE: The end post is a great spot to put an opt-in collector because if someone came to your, say, they find you on Google search, they come to your website, and they read your entire blog post, they have already vested in you. They have already kind of hung with you for the entire post. They consume all of the information and they are ready to take action. They are ready to do something else even if subconsciously they are just wanting to thank you for that great information that you gave them in your post. They’ve read your entire post, you know that they believe in your stuff or they would have hit back way before and they wouldn’t have made it to the bottom. So put an opt-in collector down at the bottom of that list.
JOCELYN: In addition to just collecting emails, this is another tip that I got from somewhere. I can’t remember where I found this but whenever someone opts into your list, make sure that the thank you page that they land on has links to other places they can find you like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram. Whatever you’re on, make sure that the Thank you page has links to that because that’s another great way to capture those people and get them on other social media platforms that you use and that way, you have multiple ways of contacting them.
SHANE: Not everyone is going to open every email. The email is the most important thing. We want to stress that. Your email list is more important than how many likes you have on Facebook, how many Twitter followers you have, how many people are following you on Pinterest, whatever. That is the most important thing but not everyone opens every email.
If you can’t email someone, then maybe they will check their Twitter, maybe they will check their Facebook, maybe they will look at your stuff through other channels so it is important to not focus solely on collecting those emails. You’ve got to catch people in other avenues so your communications always get out.
Our final tip for email collection is it doesn’t always have to be an opt-in box. There’s a lot of different places on your website where people are going to interact with you and if they can get onto your email list without having to, I don’t know, they don’t want that free thing, they don’t want to download it, you can actually link your email list to a lot of places on your website like your contact form. Everybody has got myhomepage.com/contact, they can come in and send you a message or an email, you can actually include plug-ins that will connect to like AWeber. We use AWeber for most of our email collection and they can check a little box that says, “Put me on your email list” or sign me up for your newsletter or send me periodic updates.
They are already there, they are already ready to communicate with you, maybe they are sending you an email, make sure that you are putting them on your list at that point. You can do this in all kinds of places. Anytime you have any kind of form on your website, your order form if you’re selling a product. When someone buys something from you, they are not necessarily on your email list and you really want to put them on your newsletter so they can buy things in the future. By connecting all these different forms and things like that to your email list, so when they fill them out, you get that email, you’re growing your list.
We also do it in our comments section on our blog. When people come and they leave a comment, they may not actually open our opt-in form and give us their email, but we require an email whenever you leave a comment. If you come to FlippedLifestyle.com, you want to leave a comment and you want to join the discussion, we have a lot of comments on there, hundreds and hundreds of comments, but every time anyone has ever left us a comment, we have a little box that says, “Submit my comment and add me to your email list” so we get their email in that place. So when they join our discussion, they are going to go into our email list, get our autoresponder emails, and get our broadcast when we send them out in the future. Make sure you’re taking advantage of any place you can to link your email list to something on your blog where people are taking action.
JOCELYN: Hope that helps, Bobby, and anyone else who is interested in growing your email list or trying to figure out exactly where to put those opt-ins. It’s so, so important to get those email opt-ins. You need people on that email list. Those are people who could become clients of yours in the future.
SHANE: That was a great question, guys. If you have a question, make sure you send them it. We love collecting these questions. We’ve got a bunch that we’re recording right now. We’ve got a big list of questions but we’ve always got room for more. We’re doing this two times a week, that’s eight a month so we want to make sure we have plenty of questions so we can keep these coming out and we would love to answer yours on the air. Don’t be afraid to send us a question and we will get to it as soon as possible. Until next time, thank you guys as always for listening.
JOCELYN: Bye.
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