How to Maximize Your Email Signups From Organic Traffic
So here’s a dilemma for ya:
Is it better to spend time optimizing your existing sales funnel—split-testing optin forms, experimenting with new lead magnets, fine-tuning the copy on your website…
Or should you just bust your butt and hustle to get more traffic to your site?
My take on this is, there’s a time for both.
Sometimes it’s tricky to know where to best put your focus.
Take subscriber Zubin for example.
He recently launched a course in a sub-niche of engineering, and here’s what happened:
1020 subscribers
Sent 4 sales emails — average open rate was 22% and click rate 4%
Results :- 10 sales, about 1% conversion rate
In all, about 80 people SAW my sales page.
Not sure if these are good numbers or not.
I was thinking to increase my email sign up rate which is currently at about 5-7% — If I can double it to 10-12%, that would help me? (So going from 100 subs a month to around 200 subs)
And that’s a difficulty I am facing — not sure how can I do that — since my landing pages/sidebar optins are performing quite well.
What do you suggest? Where do I start with this process?
Zubin’s in a pretty typical situation:
He has a funnel that’s working to an extent.
Website visitors in at the top, dollars out at the bottom.
(Fewer dollars than he would like, but dollars still.)
The temptation in this situation is to tinker endlessly with everything.
To try to squeeze every last drop of juice out of that organic traffic he’s getting.
The reality is, there’s only so much tinkering you can do at this stage before it becomes counter-productive.
For a site like Zubin’s, which gets a few thousand visits a month, getting 5% of all visitors to sign up for your email list is already pretty respectable.
And while I applaud the goal of improving his optin rate over time, jumping from 5% to 10% will require a LOT of testing.
With his current traffic of a few thousand visits per month, running even one good test could take several months.
What I’d suggest is to grab the “low hanging fruit” of improving your optin rate:
– Convert your home page to an “upside down home page” (Google it—mine converts at around 12%)
– Create content upgrades for your top 10 blog posts
– Test a few different offers for your sitewide popup
You can do all that in a few hours, and it’ll probably get you to the +7% range.
Then spend several months focusing your energy on traffic, traffic, traffic.
Find 1-2 good ways to generate traffic in your niche, and master them to get more people to your site.
You have a sales funnel that’s working.
Now you need more “juice” flowing through the system so you can start finding the leaks and plugging them.
By the way, the “upside down home page” technique is one I picked up from razor-sharp marketer Bryan Harris.
And if you’re interested in more ways to grow your list, his Get 10,000 Subscribers program is top notch.
It’s closed now, but you can get on the waiting list here: