The majority of visitors to your e-commerce store will not make a purchase, no matter how appealing your products are or how well you have priced them. Not on their first visit, at any rate. Before they are ready to make a purchase, people need time to conduct research and make a decision. This is especially true for online retailers because shoppers cannot physically see or engage with the product before purchasing.
In fact, 92 percent of shoppers are not ready to make a purchase when they visit an online merchant for the first time. Instead, consumers only become customers on subsequent visits.
Because many first-time visitors will never return to your site, you must find a means to remarket to them in order to maximize the possibility that they will return and make a purchase.
Collecting email addresses is one of the most effective ways to accomplish this.
Email marketing is one of the most effective channels, particularly for e-commerce stores. The average return on investment for email marketing is a whopping $44. Using your website visitors to build your email list is so critical to your e-commerce business.
However, this is not always easy to achieve. People are sometimes cautious to provide their email address, especially when it is on a website they have never visited before. So, in addition to providing an incentive for individuals to sign up for your email marketing, you will need efficient methods to collect email addresses.
However, how can you obtain email addresses from website visitors?
As a digital marketer, you must constantly come up with new techniques to boost your conversion rate when it comes to obtaining email addresses from website users.
Read Also: How Email Marketing Can Turn Leads Into Sales
Here are some of the most frequent and inventive methods of acquiring email addresses of online visitors to assist you with email signups and list growth.
1. Sidebar Forms
Many websites use sidebars as a navigational function. While their primary function is to offer readers with connections to other pages, there is generally enough area in them to add other content as well.
Because of their breadth and the fact that they run along the length of your page, they are great for a rectangle graphic displaying your opt-in incentive. Including a subscription box here will increase its exposure while not disturbing your visitors.
If your site already has a sidebar with plenty of empty space, this alternative is a no-brainer. See if there’s anything you can remove from more packed sidebars to make way for your email opt-in form. If you don’t already have a sidebar, adding one will most certainly necessitate a relatively extensive site restructuring. However, if you are having trouble getting email signups, it might be worth the effort.
2. Popups
Popups are perhaps the most common way to collect email addresses on the internet right now. You have probably seen them appear in the middle of your screen as you wait for the website to load. Their pervasiveness on the internet is attributable to two factors: the ease with which they may be put up and their efficacy.
Adding a popup with an email form to your website is a highly effective approach to improve the number of signups you receive. Their ease of use and inexpensive cost. This makes them something you should absolutely attempt on your site as well.
The sole disadvantage of popups is that they can be irritating to some individuals. Particularly when someone is unable to discover a way out of the hundredth popup that is obstructing the content they are looking for for the day.
If you are worried about this happening to your visitors, there are some popup modifications you may use to make them less annoying.
3. Exit Intent Popups
Exit intent popups only appear when a user is about to exit your page. These are newer and rely on tracking people’s mouse movements to detect when they are ready to leave your page.
For two reasons, these popups are brilliant. For starters, they do not obstruct visitors and the content they came to your site to see. Second, having the popup appear on the screen just as someone is about to exit causes people to immediately stop what they are doing and pay attention to the popup.
When used in conjunction with other email collecting methods, these popups effectively give you a second chance to capture someone’s email address.
4. Delayed Popups
Another excellent technique to reduce annoyance from popups is to have them appear only when your visitor has met a specified requirement. Common examples of this criteria include spending a particular period of time on your site, seeing two or more pages, or scrolling down your blog entries so far.
The disadvantage of delaying your popup is that it will be seen by fewer people. Fewer individuals seeing your popup will almost certainly result in fewer signups. However, it does imply that individuals who stay on your site long enough to see the popup are more likely to be qualified leads and thus more valuable to be on your email list, resulting in higher open rates when you send an email.
Running a test will most likely be required to determine whether delaying your popups is a good fit for your site. If you discover that they do not result in a large decrease in conversions, the annoyance you save your visitors may be worth it. Otherwise, you can always remove the delay.
Read Also: How To Build & Nurture Email Marketing List Of Quality Customers
5. Sticky Top Bar
Displaying a short thin bar at the top of your website that remains at the top of your visitors’ screens as they scroll down will capture their attention without being annoying.
Normally, these bars are meant to notify visitors of an update or announcement, but there’s no reason you can’t add an email address box and a subscribe button to it as well. Because it is in such a prominent location on your website, you ensure that everyone has the option to join your email list if they so desire.
Including an incentive offer beside this, explaining why visitors should sign up, and making the bar a bright color to stand out can result in even more conversions. DIYthemes got an additional 1,180 email subscribers in just 30 days after adding a top bar to their site.
Hello Bar is a fantastic service that allows you to effortlessly add a top bar to your website.
6. Footer Subscription Form
A subscription box on a website is most likely to be found at the footer. This implies that anyone who wants to join your email list will frequently scroll to the bottom of the page, expecting to discover an opt-in form.
Aside from being in a place where visitors expect to see them, the fact that they are in the footer means that they will appear on all of your site’s pages. As a result, instead of manually creating them across all of your pages, you just need to set it up once.
While this isn’t the most imaginative way of collecting email addresses from website visitors, it’s such an important aspect of web design that it’s almost obligatory to have.
7. Welcome Gate
If a popup isn’t large or eye-catching enough for you, then welcome gates are a better solution.
Welcome gates are full-screen popups that take up the entire page. They will appear a second or two after the page begins to load, allowing visitors to see the real page they are visiting. This keeps consumers from thinking they have visited the wrong website or clicked on the wrong link. This gives them the appearance of landing pages.
As these welcome gates are very similar to being their own webpage, you should be careful with them showing to the same person multiple times. If someone who has already entered their details on the welcome gate sees it again, they’ll want to exit from the form. This is where there’s a risk of them bouncing if they decide to just exit the page. To help avoid this from happening, ensure that the welcome gate isn’t shown to people who have already seen it and provide a clear and easy option for exiting the signup form.
Because they are newer and less widespread than popups, they are less bothersome. This is especially true if your welcome gate isn’t overly forceful in its attempt to obtain someone’s email address. Including your opt-in incentive and respectfully asking for your visitor’s address, on the other hand, will certainly offer higher results.
Justuno is a popular lead generation app that also works well.
8. Run a Competition
If you’re having difficulty finding signups with your opt-in incentive, it’s probably time to revise it. Running a competition that people can enter by signing up for your email list is an excellent approach to increase your conversion rate.
The reward for e-commerce companies can be as basic as a discount voucher, but the higher the prize, the more likely people are to join up. Running competitions to increase your number of email subscribers may be both a blessing and a curse.
Ultimately, you want to fill your list with qualified leads who have a good chance of becoming paying clients. If consumers sign up just for the chance to win the reward, you risk building a disengaged email list that will be detrimental to your business. The idea here is to balance these competing criteria so that you receive a good sign-up rate while not damaging your list.
You may run the competition on your website using applications like Gleam, which make the process extremely straightforward. Gleam also allows you to create tournaments in which you may select from a broad list of tasks that potential subscribers must complete in order to enter, such as retweet a tweet or check-in at a specific place on Facebook.
Other solutions include gamified popups, such as Wheelio’s virtual spin wheel, which allows users to win a prize.
Read Also: Six Reasons Why You Should Separate Your Email From Your Website Hosting
What Should You Do With Your Email List?
Now that you are aware of all the major methods for capturing your website visitors’ email addresses, it’s time to start integrating them on your site.
Collecting email addresses to add to your email list will not help your business unless you send an email to your subscribers. Email marketing initiatives are an excellent approach to boost sales.
Conclusion
Check out our capabilities if you are searching for a simple solution to automate your email marketing. We make it simple for eCommerce shops to automate their email campaigns and create email newsletters rapidly. Abandoned cart emails, clever segmentation, and triggered email campaigns are among our features, and we integrate with all of the major e-commerce platforms.