Optimise your sign-up forms with a light box Published July 19, 2012 The best email marketing lists are created by people making the effort to ask for your content and this is why every website should have an easy to use sign up form on every page. However, the reason people go to your site is not to sign up for emails, but to read or buy what they searched for or clicked through from wherever else they’ve been. So, optimising sign-up numbers often needs a little bit of work. Encouraging the sign up All sorts of tactics have been employed over the years to encourage subscribers, for example: incentivising by offering vouchers, forcing sign-ups to get free things like white papers, etc, these can help grow the list but do not always guarantee quality. If you consider that your Google Adwords campaigns get maybe a 70-90% bounce rate, you may also be intrigued to know that it’s likely that around 60% of those bouncers would sign-up for emails if they see relevance and if they get the opportunity. What is a light box and how does it work? A recent study from internationally recognised email marketing expert Mark Brownlow seems to suggest that sign-ups can be increased by up to 900% with “popover forms” and “light boxes”. A popover form, or light box, is when a sign-up form appears in the middle or to the side of the website after a certain amount of time on the page. Its appearance can be decided on many other factors like traffic source, pages visited and many more. In the past pop up adverts have been given negative feedback, however, a light box is not an advert. If the user sees relevance they are more likely to engage with the brand. You have to consider that if you don’t ask, you may not get. Subsequently just leaving a sign-form on your site, could be forgotten but by appearing it is a change in the content on the screen, thus getting the attention of the viewer. And, if the user sees relevance in the communication, they are likely to use this form. Here’s an example from our friends at theemailguide.com… . How PadiAct can help PadiAct is cracking online tool which allows you to make your own popover and lightbox sign-up forms and easily add them to your website. On top of that you can also give the forms different rules on appearance times, where they come from and you have reporting on each form. And the best thing about it, in my opinion, is that PadiAct can send your sign-ups straight into your Pure360 account. PadiAct offers a nice and easy to use free version to let you test it, play with the timings to optimise your forms’ appearance. As with all things email marketing, it’s all about the testing and testing PadiAct has been fun and very successful, you should try it too.