February 28, 2025
The middle of the funnel is the only place where you can break through the barriers of engagement with your audience and get them to take the first step to commitment. Social, search, and paid will focus primarily on brand recognition and engagement but is limited with sign-up tactics, meaning you have to keep targeting and re-targeting to keep engagement up. Email can only exist with the capture process, making it reliant on the ability to properly capture your audience.
Email capture is the moment when a prospect decides to walk into your store. They are sending you a signal that they are interested in your services and / or products and are ready for the next steps. Putting out signs in front of your digital shop will help to bring prospects in and create a thriving business.
The first question every business asks is - how much can I offer and still be profitable? The second question is - do we need to make an offer at all?
Examining the profitability of your email capture will help to create urgency as well as the desire for someone to engage with the brand. To find out what your offer will bring, take the total amount of revenue - cost / revenue x 100.
If you have a $99 pair of jeans, take the percentage off first, making it something like a $79 pair of jeans. Then determine the amount it will cost after the discount is taken off. This will give you the complete picture related to profitability for your offer.
The most common discount is between 10 - 20% for D2C brands. This is enough to justify initial spending while building trust with the particular client. Cash back is another version of this that is known to provide effective results.
If you have items that are a higher price, going as low as 5% is effective with the sales you want to make.
If you want to create urgency through limitation, consider sweepstakes, contests, and giveaways that highlight limitations and exclusivity for your brand.
In many B2B brands, offers aren’t related to a % off, especially if it’s a service. A free first consultation, audit, or portion of a service helps to get someone in the door. Many will turn this into a deeper conversation with quizzes, calculators, and free downloads that bring someone into the initial conversation.
Also consider options such as special clubs or exclusive information. For example, if someone is working toward a goal through your business, give them extra support, VIP perks, and even free information that no one else has.
The offer you have for your business is unlimited. Tie it into what you want with your brand to pull in prospects and start the conversation to build brand trust.
Third party apps that specialize in pop ups and more advanced pop-ups in ESPs will direct you to several approaches to display offers. Make what you offer more enticing by adding layers and elements with your display.
The most common display is an image to text that highlights the % off that someone is going to receive. For best practices, make sure the offer is on the right hand side. This is where the eye goes first and will trigger a reaction for the sign up.
Gamification is another methodology that allows you to get results. Spin the wheel, pick a lucky card, etc, are all popular methods that are known to change the number of sign ups that you get with your email capture.
Diversity with your email capture is another way to keep users going through the sign up form. Using tentpole moments (BFCM, spring sales, etc) and changing the capture to hit against what your business is doing and increases results. Anything you can add in to create urgency and exclusivity doubles down on options to build out results.
If you want everyone to recognize a special that is more exclusive and not on the front page, use a landing page or embed on a separate URL. This allows you to have more content on that page, set up sales initiatives, and give the visitor a taste of your brand before they complete their sign up. This method serves as an affinity based targeting method to draw more attention to your brand.
The first level of email capture is to ask for an email when someone first visits the site. This should give you anywhere from 4-6% of sign up rates from prospects who are visiting and interested in your brand.
Optimization is based on how and where you decide to place things on the site. Consider these tactics when building out your capture.
There is a difference between someone who signs up for an initial percentage off to those who sign up after reviewing the site 10x, to those who return after a purchase and sign up again.
To follow best practices, target the customer journey to make sure you are sending your offer at the right time. Follow these foundational definitions to identify what the most effective methodologies are to get prospects in the front door:
New Prospect: Best offer that immediately shows after a specific amount of time
Returning Prospect: If they have already signed up, hide the email capture from them for x amount of times
Abandonment Prospects: If your audience is further down the funnel, then consider sending them a different capture option that is more specific to where they are on the site. Deeper pages, cart abandonment, etc all deserve special attention with the proper sign up.
Filtering out specific groups from receiving an email capture and highlighting where someone is in their user journey will support better opt-ins. This guides the user based on where they are in the journey and creates a sense of trust to urgency as they are browsing through your site.
The industry average of email capture is 3.5 - 4.0% of those who visit the site as a session. The metric is defined by new and returning visitors that have not signed up for email when they visit the site.
After the initial set up of your email capture, optimize it with different versions, offers, and approaches. Always split test concepts, methodologies, and approaches to find the best offers, tactics, and definitions around your email capture. The result will be a substantial increase in revenue and an audience that begins to know and love your brand.
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