Great article about increasing opt-ins over at Marketing Sherpa today!

Enjoy,

Steve

I love these folks. Have you been following their marketing experiments webinars? Not a lot there that some dedicated all-copy-no-design folks would like, but their latest with the "Clarity Trumps Persuasion" theme was great.





AND FREE

So how does one create a time-delay hover box? Anyone have a link for that?

Thanks,
Marcia Yudkin

You can make them with this program

Dynamic Popup Generator

I haven't used it myself, but Impact Popup, You Can't Block This, & Fly-In Ads Creator - Ultimate Popover Toolkit seems to be a nice solution.

Eric - I'll have to look for those webinars, they sound interesting!

Steve

Their stuff doesn't do it for me. These articles are great for bigger 'non marketing' type sites but their data is VERY difficult to apply into what we do.

Lets face it, hover ads have been in use for a while, nothing new there.

but how many of us have sites without asking for an optin right off the bat?

went to the ask leo site....

VERY VERY basic in terms of what he was doing to collect optins initially, so the data they show you is sort of misleading.

the hover ad is nothing special. Standard copy and look.

Think about it.... If you had a bland ol' form on your sales letter asking for an optin, and instead tested a hover ad, Its a pretty safe bet your optins would increase a lot as well.

I have to agree with Dave on this one...it's not much of a revelation and they probably would have got far better results with a rewrite of the optin page.

Having said that a lot of their information is engaging and they're using real tests to back up the recommendations they make which adds credibility to their statements.

As Dave says most of their tests are improving on really crappy copy to begin with.

But they are doing a great job of marketing their high priced products and services with pre-education.

That's something we can all learn from.

Kindest regards,
Andrew Cavanagh

To put it another way...

This site was getting 44,000+ visitors a day.

Their change helped the client go from 10-15 newsletter subscriptions a day to around 0.16% of visitors subscribing.

That's not 16% it's 0.16%. A tiny fraction of 1%.

I'd bet serious money that the majority of copywriters on this forum could do a whole let better than that.

I'd also bet the marketing sherpa team could do a whole lot better too but they would be constrained somewhat by the client's wishes.

That's one of the joys of dealing with corporate clients.

Kindest regards,
Andrew Cavanagh

You may be right on that one, I don't know for sure. Based on sites I've worked with I'd bet a lot of that traffic was unqualified. Cheers

Ouch...I still haven't read the report...I had figured I'll read it "as soon as I get a free moment".

But I bet Angie could get a better opt-in rate than that.