Size Does Matter…When It Comes to Email Lists

I’m in San Francisco this week and as I crossed Market Street in one of the busiest areas of town, I ran into these two sign spinners. They’re spinning and juggling and tossing these signs around like circus acrobats promoting a vendor that’s part of a tech show in town. They were quite a sight and you couldn’t help but notice the message on their signs especially when compared to the bus stop and outdoor signs all around them.

Your approach to building your list of people interested in buying what you sell has to work like these spinners.  How do you grab people’s attention?  You can’t just park a “Sign up for my newsletter” web form on your site and expect people to sign up. That isn’t going to work. You need the equivalent of sign spinning online creatively grabbing a visitor’s attention and enticing them to fill out your form.

I’ve researched some available pop up options and a few of these worked nicely for me.  The one’s I’ll show you are simple and all they do is get a promotional pop ups to show up several seconds after a visitor arrives at the website.

Before I get too far, I want to address a concern that always comes up. People tell me,

“I hate those pop ups. They’re so annoying.”

Well, let me tell you something. Annoying or not, they work. They hands down increase the number of people that notice and willingly part with their name and email address in order to get whatever it is you’re offering.

Let me tell you how it worked for one of my clients. The Nelson Center for Emotional Healing introduced an online program for over eaters. In order to promote it, we built them an addictive personality quiz visitors could take online.  The quiz would email them their results and make a recommendation on how best to proceed based upon their score.

Using a WordPress plugin called WP SimplePop, we promoted the quiz using an image that pops up five seconds after a visitor arrives at the site.  A visitor can either click on the image to take the test or close the window and continue with whatever they had been doing on the site. (See www.TheNelsonCenter.com to see how it works.)

In the first two weeks after launching the pop up, that approach gathered the name and email address of 35 new contacts. This was a huge increase over her previous approach which gathered two or three a month.  This happened with just the normal organic traffic that visited the website daily.

You can see another example that’s similar to this one at my www.ConfusionNoMore.com site.  On this site I’m using a WordPress plugin called Optincrusher. It’s similar to WP SimplePop in that a promotional pop up shows up several seconds after people arrive at the site, but this one emerges from the lower border of your browser.  It also provides the user with button they can select and get more information on the offer being provided.

Both of these are simple to implement and require minimal technical know how to get them working.  And as I said before, they rely only on the organic traffic your site is getting today.

This is a great way to move forward with your Internet marketing and start identifying leads you never would have known existed using the methods you’ve been using until now.

Hope this helps.