4 Things You Can Do Today To Double Your Email Signups

A sit down with Ronak Patel & SumoMe’s founder Noah Kagan

8 min readJul 28, 2016

Three days ago, I received this SumoMe newsletter.

Immediately, I clicked the “Join the workshop” button. Noah Kagan is the founder of SumoMe. He started 2 multi-million dollar businesses, grew a 700,000+ email list and is the internet marketing legend, besides Neil Patel and Hiten Shah.

I just finished attending the webinar which normally costs $1,500, and I am about to share the knowledge for my own future reference and others who might find it helpful. Welp, I am in Anton “Potato” Sepetov’s position few weeks ago — I am going to get “fired” for sharing this (I can’t since I don’t work there 😂).

Why Email Is the King of Marketing

Email surprisingly, still works for business despite the social media world we live in. Why? Because it drives the most traffic and has the highest converting ROI (Read articles here and here), but most important of all, your search traffic and PageRank score can drop due to a Google algorithm updates; your Facebook post impression can drop because of a change in the EdgeRank formula. Unlike other social media, since the mailing list is controlled by you, nobody can take away your traffic and you can send customers updates whenever you want (Well, not spammy of course), once you build up the email list. Email is the best performing channel, still. It is the platform you are able to scale fast rather than selling and pitching door-to-door.

“But most people going to your site aren’t going to buy anyway.”

S0 it’s even more important to have your potential customers email addresses, in order to follow up and re-engage with them. You buy from people you trust, thus just having their email is so crucial for the business.

What does this 2% represents?

It is your average conversion rate.

Which means out of a hundred people who comes to visit your site, in average 2 of them will be giving you their email address, or do an action you want them to take.

How do we freaking crush the 2%?

Step 1: Make a BIG welcome mat to get a boatload of email signups

Ronak is the founder of Code & Quills, an e-commerce store selling beautifully crafted tools that creatives will love to use by helping them to share their brilliant ideas. He shared his use cases of Welcome Mat on his website and here is the stats:

Left: 5% conversion before implementing Welcome Mat. Right: 15% conversion after implementing Welcome Mat.

The result? A 15% bump (tripled!) in conversion produces close to $1,000 in revenue — Ronak is crushing it!

Tips

Make it stupid easy for people to make decision (fullscreen!). Go to Facebook and Google homepage and you will realise their main page do not have as many stuff as you thought it would be. The less option you give people and the simpler it is, you can triple your conversion result like Ronak did just by spending 4 or 5 minutes.
Use Welcome Mat by SumoMe to create your highest converting page, with clear CTA (Call-to-Action button) such as “Go read this article” or “Go buy this product”.
Connect your email service provider such as Mailchimp immediately.
Bounce rate goes down when you put up Welcome Mat.
Customised and individualised welcome mat for pages work best with discounts and content relevant to the visitors.

Left: Installing Welcome Mat. Right: Setting up the campaign and view the tracking.

Step 2: Setup smart popups to build your email list faster

Visitors are leaving your site — there’ no way to follow up or re-engage with them. It’s a wasted opportunity. How do we solve this and get beyond the 2% rate?

List Builder allows you to convert visitors right before they leave and convert them from one-time visitors into lifelong readers and email subscribers.

In this example, Ronak shared that 8 out of 100 visitors give email before they leave the website…

and results in…

Tips

Set up a “smart” popup with List Builder. Make sure you have “Smart” selected for Mode so the pop up shows up when your visitors are just about to leave your site.
Analyse your visitors’ onsite time using Google Analytics so you can figure out the time to show the popup. For example, if the visitors are leaving the website around the 30-second mark, make sure to have the popup appears after 15 seconds.
Create relevant and customised popup to the page, and think about “Why would you want your visitors to give you their email”? You can play around with the image, copy and animation. Make it easy for the visitor to say yes to subscribe.
“Can I follow up?” Noah shared his story of personally emailing his visitors for the sign ups, and they are surprised when he responded to them directly. “Oh, you really respond?” is the type of reaction he got because his visitors did not expect this.
Don’t worry about annoying customers on this, because like any other SumoMe tools, scroll popups work hands in hands with other plug ins. So it’s pretty genius that the same people aren’t asked about subscribing to the email list on sites once they are already subscribe to!
Compound the effect and you will have a win-win situation!

No popup = No email subscribers :(

Step 3: Run a few stupid-easy tests to get crazy results

Run easy tests for good results. You can run 2 welcome mats at the same time by A/B Testing. Here’s Ronak’s result just by changing something stupidly simple…

Notice what’s the subtle difference? The Call-to-Action button copy!

Mat 1 “Check it out now” results in 17% conversion rate, about 2X as much as compared to Mat 2 “Get yours today”, settling at less than 9% conversion.

The result? Ronak doubles the amount of conversion and money, just by changing 3 words!

Tips

Make a couple mats and popups, BUT only change one thing at a time/per test. Let them all run for a little while so we can see which works, in order to figure out which one has a better conversion, and watch the emails rolling in!
86% of SumoMe tests failed. Noah shared that once he added the “pricing” (just one word!) to SumoMe homepage — that alone decreases the activation rate by 10 to 20%.
Implement A/B Tests with the page with the largest traffic source (think your website’s homepage!), and secondly, tweak the title on the hero section — that’s a big win to him immediately.

Step 4: Drive serious traffic to your site

Tips

Giveaways: Give something valuable and relevant to the target audience you want to attract. Give them something they can pass on or review, so they can channel their traffic to your side.
Use KingSumo to get even MORE free giveaways when they share on the social media. Noah gets 3,000 new subscribers by giving away $80 value in books.
Get engaged on Reddit: Create some posts, provide values to people, get them to your side, just reach out to the community in general and have them to promote.
Realised that you can utilise your own network of Facebook, LinkedIn and friends in real life! For example, just search “Friends of …” on the Facebook Search.
Paid ads is the lowest contributor to the total traffic, but could very powerful too and it doesn’t have to be super expensive. Don’t spend more than $10 when you’re just starting out and definitely don’t spend money on ads until you earn some.

Step 5: The Invisible Ones (Not shared on the slides)

Steal customers by working backwards: In the case of Code & Quil, Noah shared that Ronak can brainstorm the websites or platforms creative professionals would like to get onto. Are they creative blogs? Find out where they are, and if they are on creative blog, say for example, Ronak can email the creative blogger to “steal” their customers:

Creating content for them for the target audience OR
Doing partnership: By taking advantage of a large mailing list on our side, is there any chance we can do a large event, a joined webinar, and make it exciting and worthwhile at the same time for creative bloggers to promote your discounts? SumoMe Bundle is a very good example by doing partnerships with AWeber Email Marketing and Mailchimp.

Ready to seriously grow your business today?

Turn on Welcome Mat, List builder and Scroll Box, set-it-once-and-forget-it. If you’re willing to take that 5 minutes and invest in it, you can have compounding effect by taking an action today. If you’re not going to do it within the next 24 hours, you’re not going to do it anytime soon.