Ensure Your Subscribe Button Is Continually Attracting New Visitors to Your Site
Email marketing databases naturally degrade about 22.5% every year. In the digital age, if you’re not cultivating your email list and replacing those foregone addresses, your business may be in trouble. Here’s the good news—with a few simple steps you can ensure your subscriber button is continually attracting new visitors to your site.
One quick note before we get started: all of the tactics we will talk about in this article are guidelines. What works for you will depend on your business and your subscribers, meaning you should always be testing to ensure continued growth and optimization. Remember, A/B testing is a great way to figure out what makes your subscribers and site visitors tick.
Subscribe Button Color – Make it Pop
There are competing theories on what button colors increase conversions; and while there have been studies saying green or purple buttons tend to be clicked on more, there are equally as many studies saying blue or red buttons are the ticket. Here’s what we can say confidently though: your button needs to stand out. Regardless of what color you choose, you should make sure that the button contrasts, or pops, against the rest of your site. The key here is to choose a contrasting, high-visibility button color that fits your brand personality. Two relatively easy ways to gather button colors:
- Choose complementary colors – opposite your dominant color on the color wheel
- Choose triadic colors – colors a third of the way around the color wheel from your dominant color
Use this color wheel by Adobe to quickly pull complementary and triadic color options based on your brand colors. Once you’ve decided on a few button colors, start testing to see which color reigns supreme.
Button CTA – Keep it Simple
When creating your CTA, you need to craft a message that is short and simple, yet actionable and benefit-oriented. What I mean by this is that your CTA needs to be more than one word, but not so verbose that it looks like a full sentence.
Here’s some examples of what not to do:
- Download
- Submit
- Continue
- Register
- Go
- Subscribe
All of these are too short. Sure, they are simple, but they don’t tell you anything about what action you’re about to take or what you will get out of the deal.
Here’s a few examples of phrases to try:
- Become a Marketing Guru
- Get Free Lifetime Access
- Become a [Company Name] Insider
- Get Access to Exclusive Deals
- Get X% Off with Your Subscription
- Get Your Free eBook
- Subscribe to our Free Newsletter
Depending on what you’re offering, you can use small phrases to not only drive action but show the benefit the person will receive.
Remove Barriers to Entry
Make Sign-Up Easy
Yes, in a perfect world you would be able to gather every detail about your subscriber. In reality, we know it doesn’t take much to scare someone off from filling out a form. To add someone to your subscriber list, really all you need is their email address, so try to limit the number of fields you make required (or even include) on that first form. Add additional fields to subsequent forms, using progressive profiling, or even allow a subscriber to include more details in the preference center. Bottom line: make it easy and unobtrusive to sign up for your newsletter.
Make Your Form Easy to Find
When a visitor is on your site, they should be able to access your sign-up links from multiple places. At no point should your visitors feel like they need to go hunting to subscribe. With that said, it’s important that while providing ample opportunity to sign up you’re not being obnoxious and impacting their site experience with large numbers of pop-ups and wiggling buttons/graphics. Generally speaking, it’s standard practice to have a pop-up or slide-in for new visitors on that first visit. If a visitor closes out of the pop-up, that’s ok, they should still be able to subscribe easily. It’s a good idea to have a subscribe button in your main navigation and site footer—allowing new visitors to quickly find the right place to input their information once they’ve chosen to move forward.
Give Them Something for Their Email Address
If you’re still finding that you’re just not seeing as many sign-ups as you would like, think about offering visitors something in exchange for their email address. It might be a percentage off their first purchase, a free gift, or even early access to a new eBook, case study, etc. Depending on your business, you can play around with different incentives to fully explore what piques your site visitors’ interests.
Bottom Line: Always Be Testing
As I stated earlier, every business is unique and, as such, different tactics are going to elicit different results depending on your business and the make-up of your site visitors. To fully optimize your subscriber buttons it’s key that you test everything from color, to placement, to CTAs, etc., but remember you should only test one thing at a time. In order to create the most irresistible subscribe buttons for your business, create a plan of attack—what pieces do you want to update and when—and then start executing. Over time you’ll be able to tick off all of the key requirements to create a fully optimized, killer subscriber button that’s sure to convert time and time again.
