How to Create a Strong Email Opt-In Strategy

What Is An Email Opt-In?

Email opt-ins are the sign-up forms where a website visitor enters their email address to join your list, and your opt-in strategy is how you use these forms to generate a quality email list.

Your website’s opt-in forms are the first point of contact people have with your email marketing. They are often displayed as pop-up forms, embedded in navigation menus and footers, or in a focused landing page.

After a visitor signs up to your email list, your email strategy should follow up with a series of introduction emails, such as a welcome flow or exit intent flow.

By having an email list, you can retain your subscribers or customers by periodically sending them emails, which might include sales promotions, exciting news updates, exclusive offers, and so on.

Why Do I Need An Opt-In Strategy?

A solid email opt-in strategy is the foundation for effective email marketing, because it will help generate a quality email list for your brand.

What separates a good email list from a bad one is how engaged your subscribers are, and engagement is largely affected by the personalization of your marketing.

Personalization is key in modern-day marketing — in order to stand above the crowd, you need to be able to deliver messages that are relevant and valuable to your audience.

How to Use Your Opt-In Strategy to Enable Personalization

Collecting emails is the bare minimum of what your opt-in strategy can accomplish; in addition, your sign-up forms should also collect your visitors’ preferences and interests. This will help you segment your audience so that you can create relevant campaigns and promotions for them.

Here are some examples of opt-in preferences and interests you can collect in your sign-up forms:

• email frequency – nobody likes spam, so it can be helpful to let your subscriber set their email frequency on sign up; this is especially helpful if you’re experiencing high unsubscribe and spam rates
• email preferences – let your subscribers decide what type of emails they want to receive from you, whether they only want to see sales and promotions, your monthly newsletter, or new blog posts
• product collections – if you own an e-commerce store, you can use your subscribers’ defined product interests to send them promotions for the items that they want to purchase
• content categories – if you’re a content creator or blogger, letting your subscribers pick the content they’re interested in will help you deliver the content that’s right for them

By setting up your opt-in strategy to collect the information listed above, you will have a pre-segmented list — a list with known preferences and interests that you can use to deliver personalized emails.

Here’s an example:

If you’re managing a general food blog and your opt-in strategy collects the following category interests:
1) Baking recipes
2) American recipes
3) South Asian recipes
4) Fusion recipes
Then the next time you come up with a baking recipe, you can share it via email to your subscribers who are interested in baking recipes. This ensures that the right subscribers receive the right messages.

Segmenting your audience will immensely improve their subscriber experience and lifetime value, while also lowering your unsubscribe and spam rates.

Entry Offers

It is common practice to include an offer in your sign-up forms to solicit email subscriptions — especially for e-commerce stores.

This might include a discount coupon, a free consultation, giveaway contests or sweepstakes raffles.

Although this is a great method to grow your email list quickly, you should also segment these subscribers separately from your core audience.

This is because these are incentivized subscribers — subscribers who have joined your list mainly because they want to receive your entry offer. These subscribers may not be as interested in your brand as your core, organic audience.

Incentivized subscribers often have low content engagement, so messages such as new blog posts, brand updates, and newsletter emails may not perform well with them.

When marketing to this audience, you should primarily send promotional emails such as:

• sales
• seasonal events
• new product launches
• giveaways

Putting It All Together: How to Build Your Opt-In Strategy

Now that you know how to make great sign up forms for your website, consider the following elements when you’re thinking about your opt-in strategy:

1. Lists: What list(s) will new subscribers be added to?

• all opt-ins should add your new subscribers to your master list, this is good practice especially if you ever decide to migrate to another email marketing platform
• depending on your website, business or audience personas, you may want certain opt-in forms to only connect to certain lists
  for example: you’ll likely want to separate your incentivized audience (from entry offers) from your core, organic audience
• email automations/workflows can be triggered when a subscriber joins a particular list — keep this in mind if you want a certain opt-in form to trigger certain emails
  for example: if you’re using a landing page to collect emails from a giveaway contest, you should automatically send a followup email to your entrants, confirming their entry

2. Location: Where will these forms appear on your website?

• do you want your form to pop-up on your visitor’s screen? This works quite well, but it can be intrusive; pop-up forms often work best on a website’s home page, or product pages
• it’s common practice to embed forms in your main navigation menu and your footer
• embedded forms also work well at the end of a post or article, whereas pop-up forms would disrupt your visitor while they’re reading
• landing pages are commonly used for events such as giveaways or contests
• if you use digital advertising for your website (e.g. Facebook or Google display ads), you can link your ad to a landing page to collect email subscriptions

3. Entry Offer: What (if anything) will you promote to incentivize a sign-up?

• if you decide to use an entry offer to gain subscriptions, make sure they are collected in a separate list or segment
• your introduction emails should be built around your entry offer (if any)

4. User information: What preferences or interests will you collect?

• this information should be appropriate for your website/business
• think about your audience’s pain points, and how you will communicate your solutions through email

A strong opt-in strategy is the foundation of your entire email marketing that requires constant optimization.

That’s why marketing agencies resell our white-label email marketing services, so that we can grow their email list while they focus on client management.

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