Is It Worth having an Email Optin Form at the End of the Page?

The Premise

Until very recently, I’ve been using a single Sidebar Email Signup Form on my blog – front and center.

This has been performing relatively well – over the last couple of months, I was able to improve its conversion rate from 0.37% to 1.14% through a series of changes (all documented on this blog).

I recently started using an “End Of Article” second Signup Form on the blog – basically appearing after all of my articles. I was motivated by the well understood idea that the reader usually needs reminding in order to take action.

Before going into details about the experiment, here is the Optin Form I’m currently using:

Because the form is positioned at the very end of the page, by the time they get to it, the reader would have already presumably read the whole article. Also, given most of my articles are over 1000 words, the fact that they actually reached the end indicates that they found it useful enough to stick around – or else they would have stopped reading by that point.

So – the premise is that visitors that see this second Signup Form is much more qualified and interested in the content than the visitor who has just landed from Google and happens to see the main form simply because it’s above the fold.

Let’s now take a look at the actual conversation rate I’m getting on this form, and see if we can validate the premise for the experiment.

The Results

The data for this new Optin option is as follows:

Visits: 6044

Conversions: 141

Conversion Rate: 2.33%

How can these results be interpreted?

First – the conversion rate for this new Optin is much better then the Main Sidebar Form – more than 2x better. The premise of visitors being more qualified at the end of the page is validated and now has hard numbers behind it.

Then – given the fact that only half of my readers reach the end of the article, but the conversion is double – it basically rounds up very nicely to another 100% increase in signups.

It will be an interesting November!