For just over a week now I have been testing the Aweber “lightbox” popup email subscription form. I wrote about the experiment here, and now I wanted to share some results.
As you can see when I placed the form up I actually got a small dip in subscriptions before it corrected to become an increase to eventually settling down to a 5.9% conversion rate, up from 2.4%. A client is trying it also and is getting a 5.5% conversion.
Why the dip? There is a weekend lull, but I looked at my analytics and I believe it is because of traffic source. Referral links and search traffic seems to convert much better than social media and my regular visitors.
What I need to keep my eye on is the unverified and the unsubscribes. It’s hard to tell at the moment but I think some of the people signing up were just looking for the freebies and nothing more.
Thing that surprises me is if you take a wider view, the results are not terribly dramatic:
So what is the conclusion?
It’s worth a try for newer blogs to get that early momentum, and certainly others are gaining subscribers at a better rate, but for me I am not entirely convinced the results justify the damage to credibility and longevity.
I want my content to sell my subscription, and I want people to stay subscribed because they see value. Like I often say on this blog, it is not worth burning up your long term value for the sake of some short term gains.
To test this I am going to look at segmenting people who join via popup and see if there is a difference in engagement before trialling my alternative.
Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss those results or what my alternative subscription idea is!