Outdoor Events & Advance Ticket Sales

Have you every tried to get someone to opt-in to one of your online forms?  Traditionally you ask your web site user for their first name and email address.  Today users are very hesitant to give out any personal information.  Their mindset is, “The moment I sign up they’ll start spamming me with useless information.” In most instances the users are absolutely correct in their bleak assessment. Too many web sites have abused people’s good will. You don’t have to let the same mindset prevail with your opt-in form. There are small nuances that make a world of difference when trying to build a subscriber list. Your subscriber list is a critical link in your event marketing and promotion efforts. Event organizers with highly responsive lists save a ton of money on advertising and sell out their events well in advance. Today we’ll look at the importance of opt-in box placement and prominence.

Placement - Above the Fold
In two previous posts, “Building Your List Above the Fold” and “Are You Opting-In Above the Fold?” I explored the importance of putting your opt-in box above the fold. The fold is the initial area that appears on your web site and requires no vertical scrolling to see. On a web site, anything that requires vertical scrolling downward is considered below the fold.  The analogy is borrowed from the newspaper industry. If your sign up box is above the fold, you will get more voluntary opt-ins. Read through the posts above for more information.

Prominence – How Obvious are You Making Your Opt-In Box?
How obvious and prominent you make your opt-in box accounts for a difference in sign ups. Recently I had access to comprehensive web stats for two events in the same niche market.  One event web site had 56,000 unique visitors for the year and the other site had 80,000 unique visitors in just one weekend.  Both web sites had subscriber opt-in boxes. One web site collected 3200 email addresses and the other collected a little more than 200 email addresses. More email addresses were collected by the event web site with significantly less visitors. The difference was in how prominently the opt-in in box was displayed.

Don’t be afraid to make things a little ugly. One of my coaching clients moved his opt-in from the left hand column of his site to a huge box at the center of his site.  The new opt-in box is ugly and intrusive on the web page.  Initially my client was very hesitant to make the change.  We both agreed to test the results for thirty days to measure the impact.  At the end of thirty days we tripled the number of new newsletter subscribers from an average of three a day to over nine new subscribers per day. He doesn’t seem to mind the big ugly opt-in box anymore. Of all the people becoming subscribers on his web site, 30% buy from him within 30 days of sign up.

If you don’t attract enough attention to your opt-in box people aren’t going to sign up. The higher your opt-in box above the fold, the more likely people are to opt-in. In addition to keeping your opt-in box well above the fold, make sure that it is also very prominent.

Here are some additional list building resources:

• Simple Customer List Building Suggestions
• Start Building Your List Early
• Late Event Promotion - Big List Growth

Want to get more great info? Check out the articles below:

• Advertising and Marketing that Sells
• P.T. Barnum on Advertising
• Online Marketing Like P.T. Barnum (Part I)
• Online Marketing Like P.T. Barnum (Part II)
• Why Well Planned Events Fail
• Turn Your Event Into an Experience

• The Event Promotion System
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