Where Should Your Email Signup Form Be Located?

Online Fundraising Testing Series Part 3

In support of using data to make better fundraising decisions, ProActive Content will be reporting on some online fundraising experiments from NextAfter for the next four weeks.

See Part 2 – Are Your Emails Over-designed?

Today’s question:

How Does the Location of Our Email Signup Form Affect Conversion Rates?

Image by 200 Degrees from Pixabay

Online marketing and fundraising must continue to be tested because conventional wisdom can easily become unconventional, especially when a disruptive technology takes hold and becomes the norm.

A big shift in website marketing happened when the one-page scroll web design format took hold a few years back. This happened mainly because of mobile devices, which couldn’t as easily display websites with more complicated page structures.

Remember that? It wasn’t so long ago that you’d visit a website, and you saw lots of content all on the first visible screen. Pages were busier. But that worked because people could find what they were looking for without a whole lot of effort.

Today, most sites have a much simpler design. Again, this shift is mainly attributable to the proliferation of mobile devices.

With that change came new questions about things that used to work.

Do they still work?

NextAfter performed an A/B test on one such question, about the placement of email signup forms.

Version 1 put an incentivized email signup form in the middle of the page.

Version 2 put it at the end of the page, meaning the reader would have to get through all the content before being given the chance to opt-in.

Natural wisdom might expect Version 2 to see fewer signups because more people will disengage the more you expect them to read.

But that’s not what happened. Version 2 saw 101% more email signups than the original.

See the actual web page versions here

Email Signup Form Placement Analysis

I must admit that this study challenges me. I have always been a big proponent of putting signup forms near the top of the page. Make it easy to do. Make it clear.

So why would you see more signups with a form that’s harder to find?

It probably speaks to the value of content. Someone who arrives on your page and hardly looks at anything is unlikely to sign up for your email list, even if there’s a good reason to do so, such as the incentive given in NextAfter’s study. Some will if the incentive connects with them. But most won’t.

On the other hand, anyone who takes the time to read through your content will now be thinking about it, and your call to action will have a higher chance of connecting.

So while fewer people will see your opt-in form, more of those who see it will want to click on it.

But that raises the question: Why doesn’t the same thing happen when the form appears in the middle of the page? I suspect the answer has something to do with the interruptive nature of the form in the middle of the article.

In the middle of the article, it feels more like an advertisement, even like a popup. Online consumers have been conditioning themselves to recognize advertisements and skip over them if not interested. In the middle of an article a person wants to read, that signup form feels like an advertisement. So they skip it and keep reading, and then forget to go back and fill it out, even though they would have done so, as this study reveals.

But at the end of the article, the call to action hits them at the right time. They’re now ready to act, ready to consider your offer.

Where Should You Put Your Email Forms?

While this study offers compelling data, it falls short of justifying truly definitive recommendations.

A more complete study (or a follow-up to this one) would test at least two more versions of this page:

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

Variation 1: Put forms in the middle AND at the end of the page

Variation 2: Put a form on the sidebar that scrolls down the page with the reader

I suspect that Variation 1 would gain more signups than either of the two tested here. Why? Because now you’re meeting more people where they are when they’re ready to act.

It IS true that not everyone will make it through the whole page. It’s also true that some readers will connect with your message quickly and be ready to act without reading the whole thing.

By removing the form in the middle of the page, you’re depriving those readers of that opportunity.

That’s why ProActive Content recommends this strategy:

The more forms, the better

The easier you can make it to find your form, the more people will act on it. Another way I’d put this: Mobile schmobile. Use your sidebar. Yes, you should make your site mobile friendly. But not at the expense of things that work on desktops. Do both.

And, get forms on all your pages so it doesn’t have to be directly connected to your content.

Also, create forms unique to your content, as in this experiment. And then put those forms in the middle and at the end of the page, if the length warrants it. If it’s a shorter article, then use this experiment’s findings, and put it at the end.

If you’ll notice, ProActive Content’s site has an email form in the sidebar – on almost every page.

And by the way, if you want weekly fundraising and copywriting tips with a dash of inspiration and humor, sprinkled now and then with amazing deals and special offers for nonprofits, you should fill it out.

Want More Online Fundraising Experimental Data?

See the discussion of three other NextAfter experiments:

Part 1 – How Much Donation Page Copy Should We Have?

Part 2 – Are Your Emails Overdesigned?

Part 4 – How Much Copy Should Your Facebook Ads Use?

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