When was the last time you clicked onto a new website and were desperate to give someone your email address? It’s not something that happens very often and when someone has the ability to cause that kind of reaction in people they will be very rich indeed. Those are the people who end up having huge email lists that turn into buyers. Everyone else can still make some nice money from a website, but nothing compared to what these people are making. If you can’t beat them you will have to join them.   That means causing the same reaction in people that land on your site. You need to turn your opt-in box into a conversion machine. How do you start? The easiest way to find the secret is by studying what the successful people do right. They definitely don’t just throw something together and hope it works. Let’s have a look now and we will go through a few things they all do. Start incorporating these into the design of your opt-in box and watch your conversions skyrocket.

Let’s start with the freebie

When you want someone’s email address it’s a good idea to offer them something in return. This is usually in the form of a free gift which can be anything you like. The most important thing is that you present it in an alluring way. That means you dangle a nice picture of it inside your opt-in box so they know exactly what they’re getting. The fact that it should be something they are interested in speaks for itself

Nail the headline

Even though the picture is going to be the first thing that catches their eye you still need to have an amazing headline telling people exactly what they’re getting. It should scream out at them and make them want to read the rest of the box. Remember that everyone in the world will always want something. You have the website they are on, so you should know what they want. The headline is just a teaser to let someone know they are getting it.

Explain what it’s about

Your opt-in box should always be short and sweet just like anything else you want the majority of people to pay attention to. You have a few sentences to tell someone what they are going to be getting when they join up. You have to use benefits instead of features because people don’t really care what your product is, they only care about how it will improve their life. Tell them how it can do that and your conversion rate will increase.

What do you ask them for?

When you see most opt-in boxes there will be a space for someone to enter their name and email. This will obviously depend on what you’re niche is, but sometimes it’s better if you don’t ask them for their name. It’s because the conversion rate will decrease and you don’t need to know their name anyway. If you ask for their email address there’s a good chance you will make more money. You obviously need to test this for yourself, but that’s what most people are seeing.

Prove you are safe

Right at the bottom you also want to tell them they won’t be spammed. They still don’t know anything about you and have no idea if you’re a spammer. When people sign up to certain lists they get abused so much with different offers every day. Tell them they won’t be spammed and you can even go as far as telling them how often they should receive an email from you. They’ll know what to expect and won’t be overwhelmed by it.

George Kent is a full time seo blogger. He is of the opinion that in order to find a certified ct in seo one can browse through the local directories also.

Anyone who is serious about making real money from their website knows they need to include an opt-in form. An opt-in form on a blog is like an engine in a car. You can’t get to where you want to go without either one. If you try to drive a car without an engine you know you’re going to be wasting your time. Why would you possibly think you could make money without getting your visitors signed up to your autoresponder sales funnel? You’ll maybe make money, but not much.

The same goes for the design of your opt-in form. It’s great having one on your site, but if no-one is signing up then it defeats the purpose. You’re still leaving lots of money on the table. You probably know it needs to go in your right-hand sidebar and I hope you have it at the top. Please have it at the top. But once it’s there you need to make sure the design is prefect, so that people actually enter their email address and don’t just glance over it. Let’s look at the basics and you can then go and test them out.

An alluring heading

When someone looks at your opt-in box the first thing they’re going to see is the heading. It needs to stand out and that means saying something that resonates with whoever is reading it. I like to use the word FREE. It automatically tells someone they won’t have to get their wallet out and they feel more secure. You also need to tell them what they’re going to get in as few words as possible.

The main copy

After your heading you get a few extra sentences to hook people in. The best thing to do here in the little space you have is to tell them what benefits they’ll get by signing up. Don’t tell them what’s inside because most people won’t care. They only want to know how it’s going to benefit their life. Why should they bother to read the emails you send them? If they think they’re getting something useful they will want to know more.

Use an image

We all like images. It’s just the way we are. You can have plain copy, but if you test it out with an image you will find you get more conversions every time. Remember that it won’t work this way if you throw up any image you find. It needs to be something that once again gets them excited. Maybe a nice copy of the free eBook you’re going to give them. If the front cover looks nice they’ll be more eager to sign up. If you have ever bought a book on Amazon you’ll know this is the case.

Don’t ask for their name

When you ask for their email address, don’t make them give you their name. The less hurdles they have to jump, the higher your conversion rate will be. It’s really that simple. You don’t even need their name and some people get sick and tired of personal emails. They are not stupid and obviously know they aren’t the only one getting the message. They might think you are trying to trick them. But it doesn’t matter. You get higher conversions with only the email box so do that.

Tell them they won’t be spammed

Nobody likes to have their inbox spammed by a shady marketer and when someone doesn’t know you they will be suspicious. You need to tell them at the bottom of the opt-in form that they won’t be spammed. I’m sure you’ve seen the message ‘we hate spam’ before. Just because you tell them this doesn’t mean they’ll trust you 100%, but it will increase your conversions and that’s all that matters.

Alexander Shekaroff is an active blogger and experienced web designer. He recommends Toronto website design - a company known to create sophisticated, contemporary, and professional websites for their clients.

Any business involved in online operations knows that increasing sales volume is the route to more profits. This is no different from other businesses such as restaurants, retailers and electronics outfits. The difference appears in the medium used to bring buyers and sellers together: the Internet. This form of communication has enabled businesses to move their operations online by creating a website. When visitors come to this website, it is just like visiting a regular store. The goal of the website is to persuade those visitors to become customers. Website owners can measure how successful they are by using a metric called the conversion rate.

To get the conversion rate, you divide the number of visitors by the number of customers. This percentage rate tells a business owner how well his site is doing.  If the conversion rate is high, it means that the website owner is making money even with a low traffic volume. But if the conversion rate is low, some improvements should be made to the website to increase conversions. Below are four of our top conversion tips to help business owners reach higher conversion rates.

Website Appearance

A professional, clean-looking website is always an asset. Think of the site as a virtual salesman. No salesman would be able to do his job if he showed up for work looking like a bum. The same principle applies to a website. If the website has some Flash animation, clean lines, and well-done graphics, it should do just fine.  

Security

The Web standard for Internet security is Secure Socket Layer (SSL). This protocol encrypts sensitive information as it is transmitted between browsers and servers. Adding SSL to web pages that deal with payment information or personal details makes would-be customers trust the website more. The more security, the better; customers will respond to a website that has all the right features.

Personal Touches

Use real customer testimonials when advertising a product or service. Including testimonials from customers who found a product or service unsatisfactory can be positive if the testimonial praises the site’s customer service. Write a factual history of the business and put it on a page that is near, navigationally speaking, the testimonial page. Customers like personal details; they humanize a website and make it more plausible.

Purchase Page

The purchase page is where a lot of websites have problems. An incorrectly designed purchase page puts a big dent in any website’s conversion rate. This page needs to have a large, colored purchase button that gets the visitor’s attention. Additionally, it is best to have the purchasing process as streamlined as possible. Visitors do not like having to navigate through several different pages to buy a product or service. Eric Wyatt writes on internet marketing and social media, particularly focusing on conversion optimization and landing page optimization.

Running an online marketing campaign can be an expensive proposition, especially if your sales pages are not converting as well as they could. An SEO agency could help you to save money by ensuring that your sales pages perform as well as possible. Investing in conversion rate optimisation may seem like just another up-front expense, but in the long run the extra money you get from sales will quickly add up.

An SEO agency can ensure that you choose the right key-words for your advertisements, ensuring that you attract clicks from the right people, rather than wasting money by paying for visits from people that will never choose to pay for your product.

What is conversion rate optimisation?

When you employ an SEO agency for conversion rate optimisation, the agency will do a lot of research into the market for you. They will figure out which key-words are the most searched on, and which ones are the most competitive. They will also help you to identify the key-words that are most relevant to your product

Once the SEO agency has figured out the keywords that your customers are likely to be interested in, the real work on conversion rate optimisation can begin. The SEO agency will examine your sales copy and help you to tweak it so that it is much more likely to convert.

One of the biggest mistakes that people make in their sales copy is to focus too much on promoting the product, and not enough on persuading your customers to buy it. A call to action is an essential part of a successful sales page. If you do not tell your customers what they should be doing, then they may just read the page, be impressed, and move on. The call to action does not need to be an instruction to buy, either. You could tell your customer to bookmark the page, sign up for your mailing list, or send the page to their friends.

A good SEO company will be able to help you identify holes in your conversion process. Are you attracting the wrong kind of buyer? Are you losing customers on your payment page, or somewhere else in the process? How much of your sales page do your customers read before they leave the page? You will be able to answer those questions, and more, after allowing an SEO company to look over your pages and your advertisements.

Another part of conversion rate optimisation services is iterative development. The SEO company will help you to tweak your advertisements, and your sales pages, and will track your conversion rate to see if it improves or gets worse when changes are made. These tweaks can be made over time, allowing you to watch the results and make informed decisions about the route you want your marketing to take. You could, if you prefer, run two campaigns at once, watching the results of each one before deciding which is best.

This post was written by James Harper on behalf of Boom Online Marketing. James writes on subjects relating to online marketing, including conversion rate optimisation.