Looking for a dead simple way to increase subscriptions to your email list?
Well, keep reading because it doesn’t get any easier than this…
Recently, the Times of Israel ran a simple experiment to direct more traffic to their email signup page to try to grow subscriptions to their daily newsletter.
(Disclaimer: Times of Israel is a client of mine.)
Their test consisted of placing a red Hello Bar at the top of their header linking people to an opt-in landing page.
And the results were incredible!
If you’re not familiar with it, Hello Bar is a free website tool that allows you to drive more attention to your most important website content by placing a simple colored strip across the top of your website.
One of the great things about Hello Bar is that it provides simple A/B testing capabilities so that you can easily craft the Call To Action that converts best for you.
Oh, and another awesome thing about the Hello Bar is that it’s Free.
The Results
After installing the Hello Bar on their site, Times of Israel immediately experienced an incredible 260% increase in their monthly email opt-ins.
That’s a pretty impressive conversion increase from one simple update that only takes 5 minutes to implement.
If you’re curious about the subscription landing page they sent traffic to, I can tell you that it was as simple as can be. In fact, all they used was the simple MailChimp form page. They didn’t even host a form on their own site.
Imagine how much better they can do with a proper landing page.
Here’s a screenshot of monthly subscriber growth from the Times of Israel’s MailChimp account so you can see for yourself the impact that adding the Hello Bar had to the growth of their email list.
As you can probably guess from the chart below, the Hello Bar was added to the site in mid November.
And if any of you are wondering about the value of email subscribers for a news site like Times of Israel, then let me show you the results.
The following graph was taken from the Times of Israel’s Google Analytics account. This graph shows their growth in website traffic from email since the site was launched back in February 2012.
That’s some pretty nice traffic growth from a very reliable traffic source.
Here’s what to do next…
Do you have a friend who is trying to grow their email list? Share this post with them so they can see how easy it can be to grow their subscriber list just like Times of Israel did.
What’s your best trick for growing your email list? Leave a comment below and tell me what’s working for you.
And if you want to receive more tips and case studies like this about how to grow your email list, then be sure to sign up for my email list so you don’t miss any of my upcoming posts.
Hey Aaron.
Lately, I’ve been seeing HelloBar everywhere and I am deliberating putting it onto my website. I’m concerned that it may be a bit too obtrusive for some of my users. But recently, I saw a website that had something that looked like a HelloBar but on the bottom of the page. Is that also called a HelloBar? I wonder how well it converts if it is on the bottom of the page. Would you know?
Thanks for the great post!
On a site of mine, I had rather poor results with such a bar (I had used Viperbar). The results were better with a box that only appeared after the visitors scrolled down, which had a much higher click-through-rate and is (in my opinion) less intrusive. But as always: you have to test it.