How To Capture Visitors’ Email Addresses Before They Leave

New Updates

Grow Your Mailing List: Build, Buy Or Rent?

It goes without saying that building your list is of vital importance. It’s been hammered home time and time again on this very blog. What hasn’t been discussed, and may surprise you to learn, is the rising popularity of email lists that can be bought outright or just rented on a “per use” b.... More »

How To Make Space In Your eBook To Make Money

The purpose of your eBook is important in determining which form of acceptable advertising should be considered. This could be advertising that you can take advantage of to create additional streams of income or to promote your own products. Affiliate links, affected items, items related to the eB.... More »

Launch A Full-Scale Attack To Get Subscribers

Without a sizable email list, you are missing out on a flood of opportunities to make more money and maintain communication with your readers proactively, rather than just through blog post email updates. This guide will help you quickly build your list of email subscribers with an concentrated assa.... More »

Cost Of Email List Rentals Falling

Have you rented 3rd party email lists for acquisition and lead generation? If so, you are aware that costs are dropping. Foliomag.com reported that the downturn in the economy has resulted in a slump in CPM rates for both B2B and B2C lists:“Permission-based e-mail b-to-b, which is the highest pr.... More »

Top 5 Free Linking Building Tips

Building links is an essential part of building a growing blog into complete success. Links will provide your blog with more popularity on various social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Technorati along with a higher page rank with Google. With both the Google page ranking and the higher author.... More »

Those of us in the affiliate marketing world work hard to get visitors to our pages, so it’s disappointing when they turn on their heels and walk out without even clicking a HopLink. The disappointment is intensified if you actually paid for the traffic using PPC advertising.

What can you do about this? Is it possible to still get value from visitors who are leaving your site? Do you just let them walk away, or can you still convert them into potential customers without requiring them to buy right then?

A lot of smart Internet marketers realize that every visitor to their site has value, and they maximize that value by realizing that even though not every visitor will hand over money, they can part with something that may prove just as valuable – their email address. Having a list of qualified, opted-in visitors can be very valuable to your marketing efforts, allowing you to re-market to these visitors later, and can be a powerful bargaining chip when negotiating joint ventures with other Internet marketers.

Studies indicate that the majority of site visitors leave within 8 seconds of visiting a site. Another significant percentage leaves after reviewing the landing page and deciding the content is either not relevant, or not compelling enough for them. A mere 3% will actually make a purchase, on average. Interestingly enough, though, approximately 30% of visitors will sign up for a newsletter.

If you’re not getting many email addresses from visitors right now, and you’re feeling frustrated by all the traffic just walking away, then I strongly encourage you to try the following methods to improve your signup conversion rate.

Popover – A popover is a small overlay containing newsletter signup information that can be set to appear on every visitor’s screen shortly after they arrive at your site. Unlike popups, browser blockers do not affect popovers. They can’t be missed either. They appear in an overlay that sits over the top of the page and can be as detailed as you like, listing the reasons why they should sign up and fields for their name and email address. You can style them any way you like and include as much or as little text as you want. To maximize your chances of a signup, make it clear what’s in it for them and make sure the whole process is easy and works smoothly!Testing indicates that delaying the popover for about 20 seconds gives visitors a chance to get familiar with your site so they’ll be more inclined to sign up.

Exit popover – Similar to a standard popover, an exit popover is activated when the visitor attempts to close the browser or visit a different site.While this might seem a little desperate, it is surprisingly effective. If you’re unsure about whether this technique is right for your audience, why not split test it with a standard popover and see which works best.

Sidebar signup – If you run a WordPress site, then adding a sidebar widget is something you can probably do in your sleep. Signup form code can be pasted into a standard text/HTML widget. With your signup form appearing on every page of your site, it increases the chances of it being seen and capturing an email lead before they exit, regardless of the entrance page.

Give them a reason to give you their email

Asking for an email address outright doesn’t generally work. The novelty of getting emails wore off about 10 years ago, so there needs to be a good reason for someone to part with their email address these days!

The secret to getting a visitor’s email address is to think about what they want. It sounds obvious but it’s often ignored. You get them what they want and they’ll give you what you want. Simple.

Think about what you have of value that you can offer in exchange for an email address.

A free eBook
A free 7-part mini-course
A free trial membership
A free SEO report on the visitor’s website

Obviously free is a good start, but make it relevant and you’ll be on to a sure thing. For example, if you have a site about dog training, then offer a 7-part course on house training a puppy. Or, if your site is focused on Internet marketing, tempt them with a “Beginners Guide to PPC” eBook.

Give visitors two options: Buy or leave their email address

If you’re only focusing on making sales you’re ignoring around 97% of your visitors. That’s not good business practice. If you put as much effort into capturing email addresses as you do trying to make a sale then you can look forward to a far more successful online business in the future, with an email list that can potentially earn you a lot of extra dollars in the months to come.

Do you try to capture email addresses? What works for you?

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama