The Top 10 Strategies to Fatten Your Opt-in List

Is building your opt-in email list hard? No, not really. As I’ve shown you over the course of the past two lessons, it simply breaks down to just spending a few hours to write compelling opt-in offers and knowing the strategies to increase your click-through rates on those promotions.
There’s no doubt about it, there are good ways to entice visitors to “sign-up” and there are worthless marketing strategies that simply do not work.
I’ve given you a list of very effective and compelling opt-in offers, but there are still many additional strategies to help boost your list. The opt-in offers I spoke of earlier (i.e. free newsletter, free reports, download, etc…) are simply proposals. Giving them what they want, works. But what are the best ways to go about promoting your newsletter and special offers? How can you make these offers more visible to your potential subscribers? Of course, you need to provide alluring offers, but there are other marketing tools that will make your promotion more visible and appealing to your potential subscribers – thus increasing the odds that they will opt-in on your offer.
There’s a large array of strategies that well-known
Internet marketers have proven to be successful. I have compiled together a “Top Ten” list of the best ways to fatten your opt-in list, and actually get your visitors to “sign-up”. These tactics have been researched by the most recognized marketers on the Internet and have been proven very successful at skyrocketing lists of loyal opt-in subscribers.
1. Use Pop-up Ads with opt-in forms to collect email addresses and promote your compelling offer.
There’s a reason that I listed this strategy as #1. If you ask any good Internet marketer, they will tell you that THE single biggest way to increase your opt-in subscriber list is to use pop-ups. Many times visitors find these ads annoying, but it has been proven that pop-up ads are 13 times MORE effective at generating clicks and opt-in subscribers than standard banners and forms found imbedded in a webpage. This is a very powerful way to present your newsletter or other free incentives. It ensures that your visitors will see your offer right upfront. Without a doubt, this is the most recommended means of creating a compelling and visible offer to your customers.
2. Increase the value of your offer.
People aren’t stupid, so don’t treat them like they are. You need to prove to them that you’re serious about helping and catering to their needs. You need to show them that you truly want to create a relationship with them that’s worth their while to give you their email address. Make sure you give away something valuable. This will stack the odds of you getting their address in your favor.
3. Everytime you sell a product, capture your customer”s email address.
Your customers will already be entering their details on your payment pages and as such you should be adding their email addresses to your list.
4. Have a “Members Only” area on your site.
You can fill this section of your site with whatever your target market might find most interesting and valuable. You can offer downloadable articles that can only be accessed by “members”. To increase your odds of getting opt-in subscribers, you should make it FREE to become a member.
5. Sprinkle more opt-in boxes in your sales letter.
If you have a sales page with a single salesletter, you should ideally have one opt-in box on top, one in the middle, one three-quarters of the way down, and one right at the bottom. This way, you have four chances of getting the opt-in. A good thing to do is to exchange the first, top opt-in box with a pop-up ad, and then keep the placement of the other three boxes as described above.
6. Include an E-mail Signature.
Every time you send an e-mail, you can use your electronic signature as a way to advertise your opt-in offer. Although many times your emails will be sent to people not in your target market, you’ll be surprised at how many people actually visit the links in your signature. You won’t generate hundreds of new opt-ins a day by doing this, but every little bit helps.
7. Use Co-Registrations.
Yes, if you’re really lazy, you can actually buy subscribers. Basically, it involves having your subscription offer listed alongside other publications’ offers, so that when someone signs up to the other offers, they are given the option of signing up for yours as well. We don’t usually recommend this option, but if you have extra money to spend, it’s not a bad tactic. But like I said before, there are better ‘free’ ways to increase your email list than this one.
8. Include “Send to a Friend” Options
Generate new subscribers with minimal effort if you include this in each and every newsletter, promotion, or special offer that you send out. I encourage you to make it easy for already-subscribed visitors to share your newsletter with others. They can simply forward the message, of course, but if you include an explicit send-to-a-friend link you are giving your customers and subscribers a gentle “nudge” to recommend your material to their friends and colleagues. This is a very powerful viral marketing technique that you need to take advantage of.
9. Promote Your Newsletter in Articles, Ezines, or Industry Directories
Any articles that you write and send into online article databases should include a reference and link to your newsletter or subscription offer. When you write an article for an online database, make sure you state that your article can be used on other webpages as long as everything written is held in it’s entirety (i.e. Be certain that if someone uses your article for their website, they keep your reference and active link in the article).
10. Run contests on your website (or include surveys and polls) to entice opt-ins
A contest at your web site works on the same principle as signing up for a contest to win a free dinner at a local restaurant. Both parties get something of value (you get their contact information and they win a prize). Make sure that the registration for this contest is SIMPLE. Your visitor should not have to spend more than a minute or two to complete the task – otherwise, they’ll frequently opt-out and leave your site before you’ve had a chance to get their email address. A great way to inform your visitors of the contest is by way of pop-up ads or a “Special Offers” page on your website.
Another thing you could do is to have people subscribe to your newsletter as a requirement of entry into the contest. If you’ve worked hard on your newsletter and included the tips from our last lesson, they will probably decide to continue to receive it even after the contest or poll is over.
Even if you’ve only been marketing on the Internet for a short time, I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, “the money is in the list”. A good email opt-in list – one that you build yourself – is worth its weight in gold. It is the difference between being wildly successful and falling into the midst of the no-name businesses on the web.

How you go about building this email list is completely up to you. But I guarantee if you put a little bit of time and effort into your marketing campaign, and use my recommendations, you’ll see firsthand how opt-in lists will skyrocket your sales
If you’ve never implemented an intense “opt-in campaign”, you will be shocked and no doubt excited when you find this undiscovered gold mine of possibilities! It works, and it works extremely well.
In the next lesson, we’ll discuss the most well-researched and proven marketing strategy to fatten your opt-in list…and the size of your billfold.