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After you have your autoresponder set up, your opt-in forms in the right locations, and some promotional strategies that work, you want to do everything you can to increase your conversions. Your goal is to get as many people as possible who visit your web site to sign up for your list. It’s not uncommon at all to see a good conversion rate such as 30 to 50% on an established marketer’s squeeze page.

It’s in your best interest to tweak things as much you can until you reach that point.

Offer Opt-In Incentives

You can definitely increase your conversions if you offer the right incentives for people to sign up. This might be in the form of discounts, ebooks, sneak previews, or an e-course. You want to make the incentive to sign up so good that they don’t mind handing over their email address at all. Many people are wary of giving people their email address, so they have to be really enticed to do so.

You also have to keep in mind that there are other marketers who are trying to get people to opt-in to their own list. Making the best offer you can will help increase your conversions and put you ahead of the others.

Stand Apart From the Crowd

As was mentioned in the last step, there are many other marketers vying for people’s attention. If you want to get as many opt-ins as possible, make sure that you are standing out from the crowd.

Doing something different and creating a different offer than everyone else has will increase people’s interest and increase your conversions. If your offer is boring and just like everyone else’s, you’ll have a more difficult time enticing people to sign up.

Focus on the Benefits

It can’t be said enough that if you want to increase your conversions you need to focus on the benefits of your offer. It’s not enough to tell people that your course will help them, you need to concentrate on their emotions and dig deep into what the benefits are. Too many marketers focus on the features, which are wonderful but don’t really have those emotional hot points.

The old copyrighting adage is that people don’t want to buy the drill, they want to buy the holes. You need to be selling the holes, instead of the drill. Or another way to look at it is that people don’t want to buy the rake – they just want the nice yard.

Tell People What to Do

Having a call to action will increase your conversion rate. You’ll want to test to find the right call to action. Simply saying “sign up for my list,” might work… but it’s probably not be the best way to phrase things to increase your sign up rate.

Instead, you should encourage people to sign up for your list because of the benefits they will receive.

Make People Feel Safe

People will not sign up for your list if they don’t feel safe. There are scam artists all over the net, and many of these people you are targeting have been burned before. Make sure you include some text that guarantees that you will not sell or rent their email list, and that the information is absolutely secure.

Adding a privacy policy is also standard operating procedure and highly recommended.

Use a Picture of Yourself

If you want to increase conversions make sure that people know who you are so they can trust you. A great way to do this is to include a picture of yourself. It doesn’t matter whether you’re camera shy or not, having a picture can increase the number of people who sign up. People want to know who they are giving their email address to.

Make sure you look professional in your photograph so that you come across as an expert that people can trust. This is also a huge part of branding yourself, which is a great thing for long-term profits.

A smile wouldn’t hurt, either.

Include audio

Have you considered adding an audio message to your squeeze page?

Adding an audio message to your squeeze page allows you to add another level of personality and trust. Not everyone who visits your page will listen to your audio, but those who enjoy audio will certainly be more inclined to sign up as a result.

You don’t have to make your audio intrusive. In fact, you can simply include a very small area where it’s obvious that audio is available if people want.

You may not want to have the audio play automatically, because some people may be startled. Others may open your website in a place where they are not able to listen to it at that point in time – like at work.

Obviously it wouldn’t help your conversion rate to have people clicking away from your site before the boss catches them!

Try Including Video

Sometimes you might be able to get your message across more clearly if you include video rather than audio. You can buy an inexpensive camcorder to record yourself, use your WebCam, or create a screencapture video with free software. This type of personalized message also shows people who they are dealing with, which can definitely increase conversions!

In fact, you can kind of “kill two birds with one stone” by uploading the video to YouTube as well. That way you will get views on YouTube, and it will help increase conversions on your own web site as well.

Show People What They Can Expect

Depending on your niche, people may not have signed up for many lists before. If they don’t know what they can expect, you may get spam complaints or people simply will not confirm their address. After they sign up with their name and email address you might want to direct them to a page that outlines what will happen next.

You can either do a video or screenshots of the confirmation email that will arrive in their inbox. Some people have reported that this has increased their confirmed opt-ins substantially!

Consider Including Testimonials

One thing you might want to test is including testimonials on your squeeze page. While many marketers use testimonials on their sales pages, very few use them on the opt-in pages themselves. Remember — social proof is a very important aspect of making sales. Social proof can also show people that it is very helpful to be a member of your e-mail list. They are likely to feel more comfortable seeing someone that is “like them.”

Do you want to improve your email marketing skills? If so then register for the free webinars below.

Free, Live Email Marketing Webinars ~ Become an Email Marketing Master

Recommendations:
aWeber Autoresponders - Quickly create and run your campaigns with powerful, easy-to-use email marketing tools.
Go Daddy – Where I purchase all my domain names.
Hostgator – Very reliable and low cost hosting service which I have been using for about ten years.

Now that you have the actual writing elements down, and all the technical aspects are set up, it’s important to know exactly where you should put your opt-in form. This is how people will sign up to your list, so it needs to be compelling and easy to find.

Make The Signup Form Clearly Visible

Many people who are new to list building put their opt-in form on just one tiny area on their web page and wonder why no one is signing up. If your opt-in form is not clearly visible and without priority placement, you’re going to get very few sign-ups.

It is a much better idea to make it very visible and “above the fold.” That means that as soon as someone lands on your webpage they should be able to see your opt-in form without having to scroll down at all.

You should also make sure that your form is large enough to read and and uses contrasting colors from the rest of your site so that people’s eyes are drawn to it. Experiment with different priority placements to determine whether the form should be on the left side, right side, or front and center.

Consider Using A Pop-Up or Pop-In

There are a lot of differing opinions on using pop-ups or pop-ins with opt-in forms. If you have a pop-up on your web page, a box will come onto the screen with your opt-in form when someone visits. Some of these even darken the rest of the web page that the only thing people can really see is the opt-in form.

Keep in mind that some potential customers will find this annoying and will simply leave your page. Still, many marketers have found that it greatly increased their opt-in rates. This is something you will have to test.

Put An Opt-In Box On Every Page Of Your Site

Many people also make the mistake of only including an opt-in box on one or two pages of their web site. If list building is a large part of your business plan (and after reading this, it had better be), you need to make sure your opt-in form is on every single page of your site.

If someone lands on a page of your web site that does not contain an opt-in form, you’ve lost a potential lifetime customer.

By placing an opt-in box on every page of your site you know that everyone that lands there will have a chance to sign up. Making this simple change can dramatically increase your signups!

Put An Opt-In Box on Your Thank You Pages

If you have an information product for sale, the chances are good that some people will buy your product even if they have not already signed up to your list.

Since you don’t want to lose contact with these customers, you should make sure there is an opt-in box on your thank you (or product download) pages.

Some people force their customers to opt-in before they get their product. This is not recommended most of the time as it can really irritate people who have bought your product and just want access to it. What you might do instead is include an extra bonus for signing up – make it an offer they cannot refuse.

Offer Free Products and Put an Opt-In Box on Those Pages

One method is to offer free products that people can download in exchange for opting in. Place your opt-in form on the download page itself, or even as a requirement before they get their free product.

People absolutely love to get free items that are high quality. This will start your list out right as people will be interested in what you have to say since you gave them such great value for free.

Participate in Giveaways

There are many niches where marketers hold giveaway events. This is pretty much a one-stop shop where people in your niche can grab free offers that they are interested in. People will sign up for your list in return for getting your free product.

Putting your opt-in box on one of these giveaway websites is another way to get increased exposure to those who might not have otherwise seen what you have to offer.

Do you want to improve your email marketing skills? If so then register for the free webinars below.

Free, Live Email Marketing Webinars ~ Become an Email Marketing Master

Recommendations:
aWeber Autoresponders - Quickly create and run your campaigns with powerful, easy-to-use email marketing tools.
Go Daddy – Where I purchase all my domain names.
Hostgator – Very reliable and low cost hosting service which I have been using for about ten years.