Three Reasons Why Your Opt-Ins Won't Work

These are three of the most common mistakes made by e-mail marketers.

* Your incentives are just not good enough. These days people will not give you the e-mail address without getting something reasonably valuable in return. It used to be that giving a free report was good enough, but not now. If you are giving an incentive for people to sign up for your list, there is a fine balance between offering something of real value but at the same time not giving too much away. For instance, let's say that you have something which gives value, such as software. What you could do is offer a "lite" version of your product. You have to be sure that what you are giving away actually does work in a basic sense, but impress upon the customer (after they've downloaded) that they can get the missing features (which are not necessary but highly desirable) if they pay a modest fee to upgrade.

* It is too difficult to sign up. This is enough to drive potential customers away in droves. If the signup process is too hard, people will get frustrated and quickly look for the red cross in the top right-hand corner. In order to overcome this, a marketer should have a squeeze page which is easy to read and is very clear to understand. The signup buttons should be as large as possible, so that the customer cannot miss seeing them. Another thing - don't ask for too much information on your signup form, because all you really need is their e-mail address. In fact, on my signup page that is all I ask them for - I don't even ask them for their name. Strangely enough, I get more signups when I just ask for e-mail address than I do when I asked them for their name as well.

* A confusing call to action. Now that we have assumed that you have got the customer sufficiently interested to actually sign up, your squeeze page must have a large and very distinctive call to action. The last thing you want is for your customer not to know what to do next. Even saying "click here" may not be enough, it is far better to have a large type button which says "click here to get your free report" or whatever incentive you are getting.

Of course there is a long hard road to go down to even get people to go to your squeeze page in the first place, and if they cannot find your squeeze page, then however good your opt in techniques are, potential customers will never see them. You have got to do whatever you can to get your squeeze page out there. This would include such tried and true methods as press releases, blogs, PPC marketing, social networking and forum marketing, just to name the obvious ones.

Remember, e-mail marketing is just like any other form of marketing - it is only effective when it is used properly. The above three points provide a good basic check list which you should match against your own opt in forms.

Peter Phillips is now a retired accountant living in Canberra, but hoping to go to the Gold Coast sunshine in the very near future.. He now devotes his time to building websites and helping small businesses in Canberra.
His main websites for doing this are:
Canberra mobile websites
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