I know it’s a sensationalist headline, and I intended for it to be that way.  But the truth is that I actually increased my daily newsletter subscribers from about 5-10 new people per day to 50-60 by simply testing how the visitors to my site signed up.  There were no extra incentives, giveaways, or contests being held, and the subscribers didn’t drop off after a few months – the increase in newsletter subscribers stayed consistent from the first day the changes were made and continued to increase in proportion to the traffic.

How did I increase subscribers by 1400%?

It was a very deliberate and intentional action on my part to see what I could do to increase the number of subscribers to the newsletter.  My plan of attack was simple and straightforward – test where the subscriber box was located on the page and test the way visitors actually signed up.

Testing the way visitors signed up

The first step was to test exactly how visitors were signing up for the newsletter.  Although it may be something we don’t really give much thought to, whether your visitors sign up via a form, click on a link, or click on an image to sign up – they can have dramatic results on the number of people that subscribe to your newsletter.  There are several ways that you should test to see how effective the results are:

• By a text link – Your visitors can sign up by a text link on your page that takes them to a specific page (or pop-up window) where they can then fill in their information.
• With a button or image – Instead of a text link, your visitors sign up by clicking on an image that then takes them to the sign-up page or opens a window.
• On-page form – Your site visitors can type in their name and email directly on the page and click your “Subscribe” button.
• A window prompt – When your visitors visit your site or come across a certain page you display a pop-up window that they must close to view the site.
• Footer sign-up – A bar that stays across the bottom of the visitors screen as they are browsing asking them to join your newsletter.

While I did not use the window prompt or footer sign-up method (as I felt they were too intrusive for the site) I did test the other three ways.  The winner (by far) was the on-page form and it caused an immediate increase of about 25 subscribers per day, while the text link performed slightly better than the button image.  I should also note that the text and color of the form was also tested to find the combination that performed best.

Testing the text used to prompt them to join

As I said earlier, there were no incentives or promotional material that they gained other than staying up-to-date with what the site offered, so the only thing we could test was the text that persuaded them to join.  There are thousands of different things that you could say, but here are a few different variations as an example:

• “Join our newsletter”
• “Join our monthly newsletter”
• “Join our free newsletter”
• “Join our free monthly newsletter”

You can see that the list can go on and on, however, for this particular site it ended up being along the lines of “Join our monthly newsletter.” This particular variation caused an increase of about 10 more subscribers per day after testing the various text used.

Testing the location of the sign-up box

The last thing (and one of the most important) thing that was tested, was where the sign-up box was located.  There are several major places that you can test to find the most successful location:

• Sidebar
• Header
• Footer
• Navigation
• In the content

In my case, the most successful location was when the newsletter sign-up form was put directly below a page’s/post’s content and located above the copyright and privacy policy area in the footer.  This increased the number of subscribers an additional 10-20 per day.

Wrapping Up

As you can see from my little story above, it is imperative that you test your site constantly to get the most from the visitors to your site.  Email subscribers were extremely important to the site, so it was a big goal to get as many people as we could to sign up.  It’s amazing how even the smallest changes can have a huge impact on the performance of your site and the increase in newsletter subscribers was due to testing and no additional incentives or promotions to entice people to sign up.