On June 30th, I made the announcement that with the new site design, I’d be testing to see how mailing list subscriptions went with the subscription form built into the page rather than in an annoying popup. As you can probably guess by the title of this post, it didn’t go well. How not well? Take a look at my mailing list statistics using 7, 14, 28, and 90 day moving averages:
Subscriptions didn’t just go down. They fell off a cliff, creating a perfect inversion of negative momentum. As a marketing professional, this is your worst case scenario, where your metrics indicate that something has gone horribly wrong.
So without further ado… the popup is indeed back. This time, it’s in a slightly different form. I’m testing a new plugin that only shows it once you hit the bottom of a post or after 60 seconds, so there should be plenty of room for people to read and get the content they came for without immediately having something in their faces. In another month or so, I’ll let you know how the analytics go with the new system. For longtime readers, once you see it today (everyone will, since it’s a new plugin), you won’t see it again for 90 days, assuming the software behaves.
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Thanks for sharing this data, Chris. I’ve been anxiously awaiting your results and now I’m going to perform the same test on a couple of my websites.
It would be cool if these sorts of popups had a way to identify people who are already subscribed and not show up for them.
It indeed would be, but that sort of tight integration is still not practical for the average small site. You -can- get it in some of the gigantic, exceptionally expensive marketing automation systems.
What is the name of the plugin?
it’s called Pippity: http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=316767&u=301842&m=33043&urllink=&afftrack=
Hmm… I tried entering my email into your new form (it popped up after about 20 seconds, though- too soon for me to beocome engrossed in your blog post!), but the Click Here button wasn’t working. Chrome and Windows 8, if that’s any help.