Is Your Opt-in Working? How do you Find out? Ep. 133

You have an opt-in for your email list, but how do you know if it's working? What are the metrics you should be checking to make sure you've created the right one and it's helping to grow your email list? Tune in today, and I'll walk you through how to troubleshoot your email opt-in because we need to make sure that the traffic we're driving to our websites from SEO is paying off. If we can't get the right people on our list, we need to adjust something - find out how to determine if your opt-in is OK or needs to be updated, changed, or completely redone. 

Transcript

Shure MV7-1: 0:32

Hi, and welcome to the simple SEO podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Lindteigen, and today we're gonna talk about your opt-in. You've probably got one, you're trying to grow your email list, you're trying to build your business, but is it working? So I get this question a lot and people really don't know. So we're gonna talk about that today. But first, can I just say, oh my gosh, how are we already at the end of May? It is Tuesday. My kid is out of school for the summer. On Thursday before lunch. I have a day and a half left, and so it's basically summer break. Holy cow. Did that go fast? So I will continue to be here every week. You know that I batch my content ahead of time. I am going to be working fewer hours over the course of the summer because he's going to camp about half the time. So if you're curious how it's going, be sure and listen in. I will let you know, or I'll let you know in an email, but I'll be working two weeks each month and he'll be home with me for two weeks. So as of Thursday. I am off for about two and a half weeks, and he starts camp on June 9th. So it's gonna be interesting though. It is nice. He's gotten old enough now that if I do need to work while he is home, it's a lot easier than it was when he was, you know, two or three or four. He's 10, he just turned 10. So he would happily lock himself in the room and play Roblox all day. But you know, we can't allow that. So Mama has to adjust her schedule a bit. So anyway, back to today's topic, other than like, oh my gosh, I can't believe. It's already summer break. My kid is out of school. So if you have your opt-in, your freebie, you're trying to grow your business, you wanna be able to have a schedule like I have where your kids are off for the summer and you wanna take the summer off, or you wanna work part-time, or you wanna work school hours, then we need to make sure that you have an opt-in that is working and that we are getting consistent traffic to it from you guessed it. SEO. So you've got that opt-in. I see this question all the time. How do I know if my opt-in is working? What do I look at? How do I know if people like it? So let's talk about this just to make sure that you understand if it's working, if you need to tweak it. Or if it's actually doing okay. And the problem is you just don't have enough traffic to it. So if you have a small email list, but you've got an opt-in, you've created a freebie and people are signing up for it, let's figure out how do we troubleshoot this? So. What we're gonna wanna look at, the ideal benchmark for an opt-in page, and I see people ask this a lot, is at least a 40% conversion. So that means out of 10 people who visit your page, you would expect at least four of them to opt in to get your freebie, to sign up for your webinar, to request your PDF to take your class. Whatever it is, we wanna see at least four out of 10 people signing up, ideally. 50 to 60%, even up to 70% is better. My opt-ins tend to be in that 60 to 70% range. What that tells us is that we've created something that our ideal customer sees value in, they believe can help them, and they want, and they're willing to exchange their email address. For that content or that information that help, and you have to remember, you wanna make sure that your opt-in is very helpful to them. It's going to provide value because people guard their email address, especially if you want the the real email address versus the junk email address.'cause a lot of people have the junk email address and they don't really wanna give you the real one. So what you are offering them has to be a value for them to even give you the junk one, but more than that to give you the real email address. The one they're actually gonna go looking for. So if you look at your analytics, if you're using a landing page software program, you may be able to have it just show you right there. You've had a hundred people join 10 people or had a hundred people visit the page. 10 people have looked at it that me or have signed up. That means you have a 10% conversion, you have a problem, there's a breakdown somewhere. They either don't like the copy on your page or they don't like the content idea for your opt-in at all. So anything under that 25% mark, you've got a big problem if you don't have software and you don't have to pay for separate software to do this. Okay? You can track this in Google, Google Analytics. What you're gonna wanna make sure is you have one URL for the page and a separate URL for the thank you page. Then what you're gonna wanna do is take a look and see of the people who landed on my page, how many of them got to the thank you page, that's your conversion rate. So how many people saw the page? If a hundred people saw the page and 12 people saw the thank you page, you have a problem. If a hundred people saw the page and 62 people got the thank you page, your opt-in is doing great. So that's what I want you to really understand. That number, that percent of people who signed up for it is critical to telling you whether or not it's working. Now, if you have an opt-in that you determine is not. Working. You have below 40% of the people registering for your opt-in getting to that thank you page. Then you need to do some troubleshooting. So the first thing to look at is the form. How much information are you asking for on that form? So we want to have as little friction as possible, meaning ask for as little information as possible. So in the event. Of, let's say we're talking about A-P-D-F-A guide, something like that. Really the only thing that you have to have. To get it to them is their email address. So if your form asks them for their full name and their address and their email address and their phone number or something else, that may be part of why you're not getting them. Switch that over. So the only thing you're asking for is the email address, and you may automatically see your conversions increase. On mine, I tend to ask for the email address and the first name, but I don't make the name required. It's there if they want to give it to me, because I do like to personalize emails, and I cannot do that unless they've given me their name. But I don't make it a requirement because having it be a requirement is going to potentially add friction to somebody who's signing up for your opt-in. So that's the first thing to troubleshoot. The next thing is to make sure that you are explaining the benefits of your opt-in on that registration page. So if you are telling them what the opt-in includes, but not how it's going to benefit them, that could be why you have a low conversion rate and you wanna try to edit that. Now you can use chat GPT to help you with this. You can go to it, give it your current. Landing page, like copy your content, put it in there, and ask it to help you. Ask it to think like a high conversion copywriter who's creating a registration page for an opt-in for, and then tell it what your opt-in is. Ask it to edit that, give you recommendations. You can also look at. Recommendations are opt-in pages for other brands, bigger companies, people who are within your niche, who are further along from you and ask for it to kind of help compare, take yours and take theirs. And ask what it could, what you could do to increase the conversions on your page and just say, this is a low converting page. I need it to convert higher. What do I need to change? And see if chat GPT can help you with that. It generally can help with stuff like that. Then if you don't have a visual of your freebie, consider adding that to the page. It seems kind of silly, but it can make a difference. It can make someone understand more, feel like, oh, okay, I see a benefit to that. I want a copy of that. So add that photo of your freebie at the top of the page. You also wanna look at. Your page on both desktop and mobile because you want to make sure that the spot where they opt in, the spot where they put their email address is on the screen on mobile, without them having to do. Any scrolling at all? This is really important. This is what we consider to be above the fold. Above the fold is an old term. It comes from newspapers, but the most important information needs to be above the fold, meaning it's what was displayed in the newspaper box. In today's world, it means it's what displays on the website or the phone or the tablet. Without scrolling, so you wanna make sure that above the fold on your landing page has really great information that is helpful to your potential new email subscriber, the person who's going to opt in and that there's an opt-in box. Then we wanna also look at including a short bio about yourself and how your background can help them. If it is relevant, it should be relevant. So those are some of the things to look at. The other thing we wanna see is that if you have a really low conversion, let's say you are 25% or below. It's very likely that your page is distracting. It's too long. You have irrelevant content, or you have a breakdown between what you're offering as an opt-in and what your ideal customer wants. If you're not sure what to create for an opt-in, do a little bit of. Consumer research, ask your ideal customers. Go to Google. Do a little bit of searching there. Use your keyword research tools. I have a blog post, um, about this, like how to use keyword research tools to find opt-in ideas because it's possible. Opt-in is not good, or it just doesn't have the right name. Even again, take it to chat GPT and ask it. Think like a conversion copywriter. Help me troubleshoot this. Is there a different name I should use? Or what would my ideal customer be looking for? You can use it to help you with some of these things. So what I want you to do then. Is make sure now we know are people signing up? The next thing is, are we getting the right people? So what we wanna look at here is of those people who are signing up. So we've passed the problems. We, you know, we have 50% of the people signing up. Now what we wanna look at is on your. Email, are they opening the emails? Are they reading your nurture emails? Are they ultimately buying from you? Because we wanna make sure that we're getting the right people into our list from what we're doing. So if we're doing SEO, we're doing ads, we're doing social media, whatever marketing channel you're using, or you should be using multiple marketing channels. Wherever you are sharing your opt-in. We wanna make sure that the right people are signing up. So what we wanna look there is your Optin, your open rate. Your open rate on your very first email in your nurture sequence. The one that delivers this opt-in should be by far the highest of the sequence. You should see 50, 60, 70%. Most people who request your opt-in should open that email. You also should see a high click rate if they're clicking to be able to download the information. If it's something that you can track, you should see a high click rate there for them to go and actually get that document. Then through the course of your email sequence, which you probably have, let's say, anywhere from. Five to eight emails in your nurture sequence, you want to make sure that you're providing value, you're giving them other resources, you're helping lead them to the point of conversion. In those initial nurture emails, we wanna see an open rate 30% or more. And again, we wanna see click-through rates. We also want to watch for unsubscribes. If you end up with an email where one of your. Like in your email sequence, you see that you have a bunch of unsubscribes in email number three, then you wanna go back and review email number three and see what's going on with it. Is there something that you need to change? You know, what do you need to adjust and focus on that? Because you know you're getting a lot of unsubscribes in email three, so something's not working there. This is how we troubleshoot. We just look at each step of it. Now, you may wonder like how many of these people are gonna become customers. Generally what we see is about one to three. 3% will become customers, which means if we get a hundred new people on our email list from our opt-in, we're gonna get one to three customers. So that is what we should be looking for. So if you've had 500 people come through your funnel, so that would mean maybe you've had a thousand people land on your page. 500 of them signed up for your opt-in and went through your funnel and nobody has bought what you're selling in your funnel, then you know you're either not getting the right people or your opt-in is not like matching what you sell. And so you wanna troubleshoot and take a look at that again. Now, what I want you to really understand here. And let's just do a quick recap,'cause I know this one's a little more involved, a little more numbers we're talking about, but I want you to look at this and be able to understand kind of what we're doing and what we're working on. So this is all about your sales funnel, and the way that we get traffic to our sales funnel is through SEO and through our podcast. And then it's about growing our email list. So the first thing you look at to determine if your opt-in is working. Number one thing is your opt-in page conversion rate. So if you're 50% or better, you're good to go. If you are below 40%, you need to start troubleshooting your page itself. If you are below 25%, you really wanna look at not only your page, your content, but also potentially your opt-in itself. Once you know that your opt-in page is converting at 50% or better, then you wanna look at your email funnel, those nurture emails, those five to eight emails that you send out. When somebody signs up those emails, we wanna make sure that they're being opened, the links are being clicked, people are paying attention. We're getting the right people in, and ultimately we're seeing some sales. If you've had a thousand people land on your page 500, approximately, sign up for your email list and you've not yet made a sale, and you are offering something for sale in your nurture sequence, or you are offering a consult call or something like that, and nobody has signed up to take that next step with you, then you have a breakdown. Something's not working. But if you've had 500 people go through and anywhere from five to 15 have signed up for your free consult, they've bought your product, they've booked your service, then you know you have a funnel that is working. Your opt-in is working. Okay. I know it's a little bit different topic for today, but I figure we need to start talking about this because. We're working so hard to get traffic to our site. Now, the next step is to make sure that the traffic we're getting is converting, because that's how you're gonna grow a profitable, profitable, I can't talk. That's how you're gonna grow a profitable business is by bringing the right person to your site. So we're using SEO to do that. We're driving traffic now. We need to make sure that we are converting them and we're getting them onto our list, and we're turning them into customers. If not. We need to go back and do some troubleshooting. Alright, that's it for today. I'll see you back here next week. Have a great one. Bye for now.