A simple but effective way to grow your band’s mailing list

A question we routinely get asked is this: “how do I grow my band’s mailing list?” Whilst it’s tempting to reply with “ask if your mum has more than one email address,” there is actually a simple trick for improving sign-up rates on your website, and in this blog post we’re going to share it with you.

Basically, improving data capture conversion rates on a website involves putting all the fabulous content you might have on your website to one side for a moment, and focusing on getting your visitor to do one thing, and one thing only: submit their email address into a form.

So in essence, it means making a completely unmissable form the first thing your visitors encounter when they land on your site.

There’s essentially two ways you can do this:

1. By presenting visitors to your website with a full-page ‘welcome mat’ – a full-screen call to action that users see before any other content.

2. By using a 'popover form' which appears over your content when your visitors arrive on a page of your site.

To see how welcome mats work, check out this Appsumo blog post (it’s a bit salesy but it explains the concept in simple terms). Appsumo claim that welcome mats provide up to three times the number of signups compared to forms placed elsewhere on a website.

To see an example of popover forms in action, you can check out a site we built for Five Grand Stereo. Note that a popover form is different from the old, annoying ‘popup’ box of yore, which opened a new window without asking you (and was routinely blocked by browsers). Popovers are a bit more subtle; typically javascript is used to present a form in the window that you are currently browsing in. Sometimes, to emphasise the form, the script will darken the content behind it until you’ve either clicked to remove it or have submitted your details.

When we’ve taken either approach with band websites, we’ve definitely seen a significant increase in their mailing list signup rates. (Now all that remains really is to implement something similar on the Prescription site.)

Finally, even if you’re successfully using welcome mats or popovers, you should still make an effort to position regular data capture forms prominently throughout your site – a visitor to your site might initially ignore the ‘in-your-face’ form but subsequently decide, upon having a peruse of your website that they do want your content…in which case, make it easy for them by having a prominent form on every page.