For the longest time we've been quite resistant to installing pop-up opt-ins on our sites. It wasn't so much that they annoy us (like most, we're desensitized to them) but it was more for the fact that we never knew how to do it right on our own and couldn't afford the services that do it for you.
As with many topics on blogging, if you're not going to go at it with the best you've got, it is probably not worth pursuing at all. So we didn't.
It wasn't until we finally dealt with the cost and decided to purchase a pro license for Opt-In Monster ($199/year) that we truly realized what we were missing.
This is something we should've done a long, long time ago.
Why Newsletters Are Important, and Opt-Ins Help
When it comes to reaching your readers, we've been putting a lot of time into making our social media work for us. If you've been reading our Blog Your Trip series, you have likely noticed that we're pretty heavy on social topics as they are currently one of our largest sources of traffic.
But when it comes to reaching your audience on those networks, you have to jump through a lot of hoops to make it happen.
Newsletters, on the other hand, are direct access to your reader's inboxes whenever you like, and with open rates often exceeding 50% (at least for us), that can certainly be a lot of eyeballs on your content whenever you want it.
For us, going at it the manual way of collecting newsletters was slow and sad. Without any assistance what-so-ever, it took us over three years to collect about 500 subscribers. That is a roughly 0.1% conversion rate at the page views we were receiving at the time.
Pretty sad, right?After installing Opt-In Monster, our conversion rates changed considerably.
Pop-Up Subscriptions Increased Our Conversion Rate 10x!
Although Opt-In Monster offers numerous features for increasing your subscriber rate, so far we've been focused on the pop-up feature which includes multiple settings such as scroll triggering (pop-up displays only to people who read X% of a page), exit intent (pop-up displays only to people exiting your site), and trigger delays (pop-up displays only to people who visit X number of pages in a session).
We're not experts on these services just yet, and after making a few custom graphics and a quick install on exit intent, the value of the service appeared right away: Our conversions increased to nearly 1% just by turning on pop-ups.
Okay, that still isn't great, but I'll take 100 new newsletter subscribers in just over a month over the 10 we were getting before.
What has been most impressive to me is not the performance of Opt-In Monster here on Living the Dream (that we need some work on), but what it is doing on our niche site Discover the Burgh.
Using the exact same configurations we have at Living the Dream, but with different display images and no freebie, our niche site is experiencing a subscription rate of over 3% starting out. That means that not only are people liking our pop-ups, our newsletter could get larger than Living the Dream's in just a few short months!
We will be stepping up our opt-in game at Living the Dream in the future, but this certainly does show exactly what a pop-up service can do- especially if you're someone who is just learning about it all in the first place like we were.
Our results are not like what you'd normally see published (sorry, we didn't get 75,000 newsletter subscribers like most reviews say- mostly because we're also not receiving millions of monthly views), but we did increase our conversion quite a bit. For independent bloggers like us, that is still a pretty huge deal and is far worth the subscription fee by any means!
If you are interested in checking out Opt-In Monster, click here to purchase a yearly license. Our links contain affiliate information and we will receive a small commission from your purchase at no added cost to you. Disclosure: We purchased our own license for this service, and were not requested or paid to write this review.
