Check Out This One Easy Tweak That Doubled Blog Subscriber Conversions

If you're like most online entrepreneurs, your website uses exit overlays to gather leads.

But how many people are actually filling out the form and subscribing to your newsletter?

One company set out to answer that question.

As part of a recent set of experiments with different kinds of exit overlays, custom landing page software company Unbounce took a different approach, and as a result, they saw a jump in their conversion rates.

By offering gated content in exchanged for signups, they saw their conversion rates increase from 1.27% to 2.65%.

Check it out:

Experiment #1: Content Offer vs. Generic Signup

Our first exit overlay had a simple goal: Get more blog subscribers. It looked like this.

[image source: Unbounce]

It was viewed by 558,488 unique visitors over 170 days, 1.27% of which converted to new blog subscribers. Decent start, but not good enough.

To improve the conversion rate, we posed the following.

HYPOTHESIS
Because online marketing offers typically convert better when a specific, tangible offer is made (versus a generic signup), we expect that by offering a free ebook to abandoning visitors, we will improve our conversion rate beyond the current 1.27% baseline.

Whereas the original overlay asked visitors to subscribe to the blog for “tips”, the challenger overlay offered visitors The 23 Principles of Attention-Driven Design.

[image source: Unbounce]

After 96 days and over 260,000 visitors, we had enough conversions to call this experiment a success. The overlay converted at 2.65%, and captured 7,126 new blog subscribers.

[image source: Unbounce]

Since we didn’t A/B test these overlays, our results were merely observations. Seasonality is one of many factors that can sway the numbers.

We couldn’t take it as gospel, but we were seeing double the subscribers we had previously.

Observations

Offering tangible resources (versus non-specific promises, like a blog signup) can positively affect conversion rates.

Gated content can be a powerful driver of conversions, especially if you have a compelling title that catches people's eye. One way to do this is to offer a case study, whitepaper, or ebook, depending on your industry and your audience.