Email marketing is a very unique way to drive traffic. I have been testing a number of theories lately, and one of them is the way to capture subscribers. If you do not have a high-traffic website to use, the quickest way to drive traffic to a potential email list would be paid traffic such as Facebook, PPC, or PPV.

For this study, the traffic came 100% from PPV sources, and with one small change, I increased my subscribe rate by over 92%.

How You Can Exponentially Grow Your Email Lists

This was actually the first campaign I’ve tested on PPV to build an email list, and I am pretty excited with the results so far. I’m going to do an analysis of the campaign and the factors that I think influenced the different subscriber rates from different pages.

About My Email Campaign

To start, I was running the following: page2, page3, and page4. About 1500 displays in, page2 was dominating both page3 and page4, so I decided to build two more (page5 and page6) that were similar to page2. In the end, page2 performed the best, but not by much.

Breaking it Down

In my original testing phase, I decided to try a couple different variations. I’m going to go in depth with the best and the worst pages during this study.

Page 2 – The Best (5.0%)

This page fit very nicely in any PPV pop-up, and had bright colors on a black background.

It was setup like this:

• The title was red text and had a negative tone.
• The picture was very well related to what the visitor was looking for
• The benefits were yellow font (on black background) and it was 2 short sentences
• The opt-in box said “Get Exclusive WHAT-YOU-WANT”

Honestly, I thought the picture on page5 or page6 would perform better, but that just goes to show that you never really know what will happen. Test everything!

Page 3 – The Worst (2.6%)

When I originally launched this campaign, I was not very confident with this page. I built this was what I thought was the ugliest, but to start the campaign, this was actually out-performing everything else. This goes to show, however, that you should not judge a campaign too quickly!

Page 3 looked like this:

• The title was red text, geo-targeted, and had an ‘exclusive’ tone
• There was no picture
• The benefits were in bullet form, green text on a purple background (very ugly)
• The opt-in box said “It Only Takes 10 Seconds…”

After getting some data, I made a few conclusions why this did not perform well:

1. No picture – Visitors like to see something. Why is there almost always an eBook graphic even though you don’t get anything but a download?
2. Contrast on benefits – The green text with a purple background looked horrible. Also, on a laptop at certain angles, it was VERY difficult to read clearly.
3. Order of benefits – After thinking about it, re-ordering the benefits might have changed the results a little, but I did not put the ‘most important’ first.
4. Very unprofessional – While some landing pages perform better with an amateur look, in this case I think the more ‘official’ the visitor things it is, the better it will perform. Always test this theory with your campaigns.

The Final Numbers

Until this point, here are the costs and subscriber numbers:

Total Cost: $106.98

Total Subscribers: 336

Total Confirmed: 137

Cost/Confirmed: $0.78

I have not emailed them as I am still thinking of a way to continuously monetize this list, but that may not be possible. I am planning to send a few things out sometime this week or next week, and I will let you know how it goes.

Building Email Lists – The Future

When I build email lists in the future, I will probably use a template just like page2 to start. I will also test moving the opt-in box around, switching sides of the benefits/picture, and a number of other things. If a small change like adding a picture and changing the order of the words can increase submissions by 92%, the sky is the limit in terms of optimizing your squeeze pages.

Have you done any list building with squeeze pages? How have different traffic sources performed? Let me know!