In this post, I’ll show you how I nearly doubled the number of email subscribers for this blog and give you the exact code to do it.
BUT FIRST I want to shed light on the method to my madness….
The most valuable piece of currency content creators can accrue is someone’s email address (aside from loot).
Why? Because content broadcasted to social media is ephemeral. Email delivery on the other hand, exponentially increases the odds that someone will see something you created.
So if I’m going to create content, I want to maximize the fruits of my labor.
Before conducting this experiment, the only way people could subscribe to my mailing list was via the opulent widget on my sidebar.
On January 30th I added a email subscriber box to the bottom of each post and page on my site.
I enjoy coding about as much as reverse lunges. So I asked my friend where I should go for help with a small customization – he recommended Codeable.io.
I posted a job there for someone to emulate the exact subscriber box on a site I did a guest post for Technori. The ask price was $30. Within 5 minutes, someone got back to me and whipped up the code in less than an hour. Total time investment for me was about 10 minutes.
Instead of asking for someone’s name and email address like my sidebar subscriber box, I only required their email. This let me A/B test whether subscribers were signing up via the sidebar or on the bottom of the post.
Of the 111 people that signed up over one month of February, 56 came from the side bar while 55 come from the email box. Assuming that everyone who opted in on the new form would not have signed up originally, the new box accounted for a 98.2% increase in subscribers.
As I think about the number of amazing people I’ve met, opportunities received, and cool stuff that has happened to me through creating content, spending the equivalent of two movie tickets to increase the capacity for this happen was a great investment. It’s also a valuable lesson that maximizing your content’s value is just as much about design as the words on the page.
Want access to the code I used to implement on your own site? Sign up for my free mailing list here (not the box) – no spam, emails once per week, and occasional goodies I don’t post to the blog. Note I’m using a WooTheme (Canvas) and AWeber so the code is centric to those services.
