There are a lot of different ways to collect your customer email list. And either collecting a decent email subscribers’ database will take you forever or an effective toolkit will save you from Sisyphean work.
Omnisend – ecommerce marketing automation platform – analyzes their customers’ data and provides us with their reports every year. This year, it has been the data from over 7200 brands, mostly from the United States, United Kingdom, and other English speaking countries.
The comprehensive infographic contains the insights on promotional email campaigns, marketing automation, the Black Friday promotions as well as list building means.
This time let’s take a look at Omnisend findings on the signup forms’ performance in 2018. What forms have been the best?
The main findings:
- Several different signup forms work better than only of one type.
- Though the immediate and exit-intent popups were the most popular form, their success rate is only 3%. Yet popups perform almost three times better than a passive signup form that you can find at the bottom of the page.
- The landing pages (23%) and the interactive form “Wheel of Fortune” (10%) have the best signup rate.
- Asking for the extra information won’t ruin your signup success rate. But it can improve your signup conversion. The optimal number of signup form fields is three.
- The most popular combination is to ask for an email address and name (7%), followed by email address and birthdate (5.7%)
The highest-converting signup forms
Only because the popups’ performance isn’t the highest, it doesn’t mean you should stop using them. Plus, all the statistics should be taken with a grain of salt.
The nature of the landing page as a signup form is a little bit different. Businesses use them for the events, pro-active promotional campaigns, lotteries, etc. This is one of the reasons why they perform so well.
Meanwhile, the popups are the most popular signup forms on the websites. The successful businesses and not so successful use them on the daily bases. That’s why the success rate is significantly lower.
Digging deeper into the popups’ performance, we’ve seen that the exit-intent popup performs better than other popups, both in signups and user experience.
Nevertheless, taking into the account the versatility of use, the originality and success rate altogether, king of the signup forms in 2018 is the Wheel of Fortune.
It’s because of the following reasons:
- The form itself functions on the site without looking any further.
- It’s a fun interactive form that brings a great conversion rate. 10% of the site visitors sign up.
- The visitor gets the discount or other incentives immediately, so he/she is encouraged to spend it right away.
Summing up, don’t run away far from the popups but consider the wider variety of signup forms. And you should definitely try the Wheel of Fortune or its’ alternatives by other providers.
An extra fields in signup forms
Usually, the signup forms ask visitors only for an email address. By having one you can reach your customer via email, target them on social media or Google ads.
However, the more information you have about your website visitors, the better:
- If you know a birth date, you can send effective birthday emails.
- If you know the phone number, you can send them an SMS/ a text message with your super offer.
- If you know a city, you can segment your customers and communicate only to customers from Los Angeles, etc.
You’ve got the point.
So you need to gather all that information to be able to use it afterward.
Long forms with dozens of questions won’t work. No-one will fill long questionnaires to signup for a newsletter.
Still, according to the recent Omnisend findings, a few extra fields can definitely be in the signup form. The data shows that “email address + two additional fields” is optimal. This combination comes up with 10% signup rate.
If you haven’t a clear idea, what information you should collect first, try email address combination with a phone number. It’s a kind of surprise that asking “email + phone number” converts best – 10.15%. By having this data you will be able to reach your customers via the most personal channel – the mobile phone.
If this won’t work, go classic: ask a name, a birth date, and an email address.
Summary
So all in all, we can state the following:
- Adding landing pages or the interactive Wheel of Fortune to your list building toolkit can lead to higher signup rates.
- Adding an extra field or two can lead to higher signup rates and reveals the opportunity for more comprehensive marketing automation tactics.
- Combining email address with name or birthdate can have a positive impact on your signup rates.
Of course, never forget the business mantra ABT – always be testing. I hope, the directions are clear and the rest is up to you.
Test out the different combinations on your store to see which signup forms and what information leads to the better success rates in your case.
