A recent post (We Are Testing Website Pop-Ups) talked about our efforts to increase the number of newsletter subscribers via a pop-up. Per the post:
For professional services firms, content is an important marketing tool. Articles, white papers, e-books, powerpoint decks, podcasts, etc. can convey expertise. At Mercer Capital, my firm, we have four e-mail newsletters that contain very useful content for their target markets. They are free, or complimentary, as we say. Two of those newsletters have fewer subscribers than we would like. Add to that the marketing engine which is our website - one of the most visited, if not the most visited, sites in our profession. The question was and is how to use our website to convert visitors into newsletter subscribers? While we have "subscribe to our newsletters" on every page of the site, that isn't getting the job done.
We are experimenting with a pop-up. The pop-up asks the visiter if they have subscribed to our newsletters. To keep the pop-up from being absolutely annoying, it does not pop on the home page (only on the interior pages) and only appears once as you navigate throughout the site. While nirvana would be different pop-ups for different sections of the website (a BankWatch newsletter pop-up that appears when visiting our financial services valuation section, a Financial Reporting Valuation Flash newsletter pop-up when visiting our financial reporting valuation section, etc.), that isn't feasible for our site and our budget. Therefore, the pop-up is general in nature and takes the visitor to a landing page which lists all our newsletters.
I am happy to report that during the first 30 days of the newsletter pop-up, we had 55 new subscribers as compared to the prior 30 day period without the pop-up in which we had 11 new subscribers. It appears to be working! In addition, we haven't gotten any complaints that the pop up is intrusive.
The next piece of the puzzle is analyzing who is signing up for which newsletter, as well as tracking retention rates. I'll keep you posted.
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