You know you should be working to increase your email subscribers on your site, but it’s usually this distant thought with abstract numbers. So today we’ll show the details of how much one person increased his subscribers by using OptinMonster.

Bryan Harris has been getting attention with his blog at VideoFruit by breaking down strategies and techniques of other successful online businesses and creates incredible step by step tutorials that you can implement on your site as well. He’s been featured on Mixergy and Noah Kagan’s site.

How he grew his list

From the beginning, Bryan set up an OptinMonster pop up on his site that would ask for email addresses and once opted in, he would send them to one of his more popular blog posts.

This is what it looked like:

If you have a great, high quality post that gets a lot of engagement and shares, it’s great, but after you initially publish it, that post will get buried by all your new content.  Bryan used OptinMonster to create a pop up that would collect the user’s email and redirect the user to that great post to read.

Using this technique, he was getting a conversion rate of 2.8% on all readers with his first pop up.

Some techniques to use for the pop up:

• Share a link to your popular posts
• Create a downloadable pdf of your longer posts
• Create an infographic of your data heavy posts to share
• Record your post as audio and share as a podcast
• Video record your post and publish on YouTube

Adding Exit Intent

Then he changed to a pop up using OptinMonster’s exit intent technology and saw conversions over 6.5%.

The exit intent allows your readers to engage in your site and doesn’t show a pop up until they go to leave your website. When their cursor moves outside the browser viewing area, the pop up engages the reader to enter their email address and it takes them to another popular blog post with high quality information.

To find out which post to send his users to, Bryan looks through Google analytics to see what posts have high spikes or high volume of readers. From this he sees where traffic is coming from and offers a pop up to capture emails before sending them on to those popular posts.

What if you have a new website?

Bryan was able to run these techniques because he already had great information on his site that he could use to incentivize readers to sign up. But what if you are just starting out?

Even with a brand new website you want to start collecting emails immediately. But if you don’t have as much content to share, then he recommends this technique.

Go to BuzzSumo and enter the keywords that your site is about to see what is being shared the most in your market. From that list, find gaps in the content or find ways to create similar content to share and add it to your site. Then use OptinMonster to collect email addresses.

What to do with your email list?

In the first part of this post, I’ve shown you how to use OptinMonster to grow your email list and how you can do that quickly. But let’s go a little further and do some back of the napkin calculations on what your list can do for your business as you start promoting products or services.

Crunching the Numbers

In his post where he talks about using OptinMonster, Bryan shares that at the time, his email list had grown to 5,625 since he launched his site in 2013, which is really good for a new site and just implementing tactics for list growing.

On average he gets about 10% click through on his emails that he sends out to his list so he gets over 500 reading his posts immediately.  If his list grows at the same rate as it is right now, he’s expecting to have 25,000 email list within a year. Which is great because email lists seem to have a tipping point involved in them where it’s growing, growing, then it hits another level as you continue to add great content on your site.

If he decides to create a product that sells for $220 and does a product launch with his email list of 25,000 and gets a modest conversion of 1%, he’d make 250 sales for a total of $55,000 for that one product.

Recent Results

That all sounds great, but let’s look at some results that he’s recently shared of sales that he’s had in the last year with his current list.

In his case study, he shares some revenue he made from the first year of VideoFruit.

Summary

With a list of 1,200 or fewer, he did:

• 3 different product launches
• Sold almost $30,000 of products and services to his tiny list.
• Grew his list to over 5,600 since

Read more about his tiny list case study here

Which optin techniques do you use to grow your email list?

It’d be great to hear from you in the comments!