Do you hear that? The grave silence on your newsletter subscription form?

Do you feel it? The undying urge by your visitors for closing popups on your website as soon as they appear.

Well, you are not alone in this. It’s a problem that most marketers deal with – turning visitors into raving email fans and customers.

We all know that email is here to stay. Whether you are an affiliate marketer, a blogger, or own an eCommerce website, an email list is among the most valuable business assets you will ever need.

One study shows that for every $1 you spend in email marketing, you can expect a return on investment of roughly $42. That’s an impressive return on investment, right?

So in this article, I will show you how to boost your conversion rate by converting leaving visitors on your website into customers.

Let’s jump right into it.

#1. Use heatmaps to know your audience better

Email marketing is dynamic. What used to be effective five years ago will hardly work today. Readers are getting significantly smarter nowadays. Just placing a subscription form in the sidebar a couple of years ago with a “subscribe to our newsletter” call to action would boost your email list.

What about today? Crickets!

This is why you need to know your readers very well. Specifically, how they interact with your site.

When it comes to monitoring your web visitors’ behavior, heatmap tools come in as useful tools. You get to know what area of your site your readers are spending more time at. What’s making them bounce back to SERPs. Where they click and what content or sections on your site are overlooked.

Say, for example, you have a newsletter signup form placed right at the sidebar in each of your blog posts. And then the form seems to be getting little or no attention from your readers. That indicates, your readers do not have any interest in signing up for your newsletter.

Your lead magnet is just a dead element.

In that case, you need to work on your form. Either by eliminating it or optimizing its copy to attract more leads or even maybe running an A/B test.

Heatmaps also help you understand the best places on your site to put your lead magnet. For example, you can use the scroll tracking heatmaps to know where readers reach while reading your content. If most of your readers hardly scroll beyond 50% of your page, and you have placed your “bribe” to the very bottom, your lead magnet will hardly convert.

That being said, it would be wiser if you move your lead magnet to the area on your site where your readers are. You have a high chance of making a conversion there.

Heatmaps also help spot the distracting elements on your lead magnet. This way, you can identify what’s distracting your readers from converting.

For example, take a look at this image.

This is an advert. But what do you see at your first glance? Scarlett Johansson and her spectacular red lips, right? You don’t even notice what product is being advertised.

Now, just take a look at the eye-tracking heatmap that was generated from this advertisement.

Most people moved their mouse over to the face of the model. Which shows that the image was just a distraction to readers. It prevented them from seeing what was being advertised and instead their attention was drawn to the image.

Now replicate the same scenario with your lead magnet. Whatever your image is can act as a distraction to your readers. It doesn’t have to be an image that is distracting your visitors. It could be the color of your call-to-action buttons, the fields on your form, or the general styling of your subscription form.

This way, you are able to know your readers’ behavior on the subscription form and what’s preventing them from signing up for your newsletter.

When you have that data in mind, you’ll know the best place on your website to put your lead magnet and solve what’s preventing your visitors from converting.

#2. Integrate exit intent popups

I love exit-intent popups for one reason: they don’t distract readers and they only appear when a visitor is about to leave a website.

At this time, when you throw in your popup you have nothing to lose. After all, your readers were leaving.

However, just creating an exit-intent popup won’t guarantee thousands of signups. Don’t forget; your readers are always looking for a reason to close any element that comes their way. Nobody cares about your free updates, your free ebook, or the free online course anymore. Just put yourself in the same shoes. Would you really sign up for a newsletter just to get free updates? Probably not.

In the same case, you need to give your visitors a perfect reason not to leave your site before taking any action. And this is where you need to get very smart with your pop-ups. How? By using content upgrade popups.

A content upgrade is a piece of bonus content that supplements what a reader is already interested in. Usually, the bonus is ultra-specific and more relevant to what the reader wants.

For example, I searched for a guide on “keyword research” where I landed on Backlinko’s blog. When I was about to leave the site, I came across this popup.

Brian knows that most probably when I read his “keyword research” guide, I would also love reading his “SEO guide.” Genius.

Instead of creating a generic lead magnet to show on all your pages, content upgrades can help boost your conversions.

This is what you need to do:

Find the pages that are receiving a ton of traffic. Then create your content upgrade. It can be a pdf copy, a spreadsheet, a template, or even a cheat sheet. Just make sure it’s related to what your visitors are reading. Then offer the bonus to your readers using the exit-intent popup.

That way, you have a strong chance of getting more conversions.

#3. The “free tool” hack

We are living in the age of Do It Yourself (DIY) type of marketing. Tools have affected that. For example, back in 2000, you couldn’t create a website without hiring a web designer. What about today?

Platforms like WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly have made it possible to create a stunning website without knowing how to code.

Tools help most online entrepreneurs improve the performance of their online business and automate everything. Which also reduces costs associated with hiring professionals.

In the same case, you can skyrocket your conversions by offering a relevant tool to your readers.

A good example, when you visit CoSchedule and you are about to leave, they will hit you with this popup.

If you struggle writing powerful headlines, you cannot resist signing up to use their Headline Analyzer tool.

#4. Use quizzes to boost your conversions

Sometimes you don’t always need to shout “signup” on your popups or subscription forms for visitors to subscribe to your newsletter.

As I said earlier, readers are getting smarter nowadays. They have experienced such types of popups that promise them “a free online course” only, later on, to be bombarded with a blast of promotional emails.

However, you can capture their attention before they leave and convince them to convert. And guess what, quizzes are one magical way to convert leaving visitors.

Quizzes help your audience interact with your site, convince them to make a purchase, and even help collect more data about your target audience.

That’s because, when you ask your visitors questions, they expect something in return. That is, how they have performed after taking the quiz. In fact, according to BuzzSumo, on average, a quiz gets shared 1900 times on social media.

Marketers like Neil Patel know exactly how to use quizzes to boost their conversions. When you visit his site, and you are about to leave, this quiz will immediately pop up.

To get your results after taking the quiz, you will need to sign up using your email and any identifiable information. And using this clever trick, he won’t have directly asked for your email. That way, you become his potential lead.

#5. Use push notifications to subscribe lazy visitors

Sometimes, it feels as if it’s a lot of work to sign up for a newsletter. You know it – filling in your email and moving to your email inbox to confirm your subscription. In places where there’s a slow internet connection doing all those things, especially on mobile devices can be hectic.

That’s where web push notifications become effective tools. With the click of a button, your visitors are subscribed.

Push notifications are an effective way to communicate with your audience. When used appropriately, push notifications have a much higher engagement rate than mass emailing.

However, the bad news is that push notifications can be annoying to your audience. If you overdo it and send irrelevant messages to your subscribers, they are more likely to block your notifications.

Just remember, when users enable notifications from your site, they trust that you will send them something valuable.

The question is how do you boost conversions using web push notifications?

The first step to the effective use of push notifications is telling your readers what to expect when they accept to be receiving push notifications from you. I love how Copyhackers do it.

Instead of showing you a generic message telling you to subscribe to their web push notification, they have customized it in a way that doesn’t sound robotic to visitors. Furthermore, they tell you what to expect from them.

What’s next is personalizing your push notifications. The marketing success of push notifications is personalization. The goal is to entice your audience to click on your messages. So, take time to segment your subscriber list. Don’t just send the same message to all of your subscribers. Write a custom notification to every segment.

This way segmentation will help minimize sending your subscribers messages that they don’t need. Use emojis, geotargeting, and the customer’s lingo to add a personal touch to your notifications.

Wrapping up

Upping your conversion rates can be a hectic task. You need traffic. And not just any traffic but valuable traffic to your website. Then after getting the traffic you need to create a perfect customer journey map to get more conversions.

I hope this article has taught you how you can convert leaving visitors on your website to email subscribers. Did you love this masterpiece? Don’t forget to share it with your friends, team, or your community.

Guest author: James Njoya is a freelance writer for hire who writes flawlessly on topics related to WordPress, CRO, and Digital Marketing. When he’s not writing in his blog he’s busy learning how to speak English with a Cockney accent.