Grow Your Email Marketing List With Two-Step Optin Forms

Email Marketing has long been one of the most powerful ways to connect with your past, current and future customers online and that doesn't look to change any time soon. It's the reason that you see so many enticing offers across the web all in exchange for a simple email address. But this is also part of the problem…

With almost every site on the web constantly asking your customers for an email address and the amount of email in our inboxes seemingly growing by the day, we are becoming blind to email marketing optin forms that go straight for the kill the moment you land on a site. After all how do you really know that you want to give you my email in exchange for some bonus content when you haven't even had a chance to check out the content that you came looking for in the first place.

What is a Two-Step Optin Form?

Two-Step Optin Forms, such as the ones created by the Thrive Leads plugin, are a deceptively simple marketing tool for building an email marketing list. The way they work is by simply presenting a link, button or banner describing something that people will want on your website. When people click on this content it then brings up a simple optin form that people can use to provide their name and email in exchange for the advertised benefit. Whilst it may sound deceptively simple there is a whole lot going on behind the scenes that makes this type of interaction considerably more attractive than your traditional optin form.

Imagine the case where you arrive at a website and rather refreshingly you actually get to read the content that you came for. Eventually you get to the end of the article and the last paragraph recommends a useful download that compliments the article. You decide that the download might be useful (after all you just dedicated a few minutes to reading the article), so you click on the link and then a simple box appears offering to send the download straight to your inbox for free. Of course you are going to enter your email address, the article has sold you on why you want the download, you've decided to actually click on the download, and all you have to do is enter your email address to get access to the benefits of the download. This is far from the hard sell of instant popups going for the kill before you've even met.

The Hidden Benefits of Two-Step Optin Forms

There is also some subtle psychology in play with two-step optin forms. Dr Robert Cialidini, the famous author of “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” calls it “commitment and consistency”. When you have taken steps to access something such as clicking on the  link in the bottom of an article, or even a banner in the sidebar of a blog, you've already made a small mental commitment to yourself that you want the thing you are clicking on. At this stage it is both logical and beneficial for you to actually follow through on your commitment and take the next steps to actually acquire the resource you've clicked on.

With a traditional optin form you are always asking yourself two questions; #1 Do I actually want what they are offering? and #2 Am I willing to give this stranger on the internet my email address? The power of the two-step optin form is that it completely takes away the risk on the first steps because you only have to decide whether you actually want what is on offer or not. Once you've decided that “yes, this is something I want” you have made a decision and clicking on the link is a commitment to yourself that you will take steps to acquire this item. Only then you are presented with the optin form at the perfect moment, which provides you with a simple means to access the benefit that you just decided you want.

How to Create Two Step Optin Forms

There are a few ways to create these powerful two step optin forms on the market, however they were previously reserved for big ticket marketers and required you to lock your optin forms into a single provider with monthly subscriptions. After investing in one of these tools myself I soon realised that locking your lead generation, quite literally the lifeline of many businesses, into these tools where you are locked into monthly fees and everything can be cancelled by a third party at a moments notice is a bad idea.

That's why I would recommend the Thrive Leads plugin for WordPress that helps you to quickly and easily create two-step optin forms that you control. You can simply install the Thrive Leads plugin on your WordPress powered sites and within minutes you can add two-step optin forms to all of your posts and pages no matter what themes you are using and with no lock-in or subscription fees. In fact you can create pretty much any type of optin form you might need for your site with this plugin, it's definitely made an impression.

Whatever solution you take advantage of, if you want to increase the amount of leads in your business, I'd seriously recommend that you consider adding some two-step optin forms to your marketing mix to boost your conversions and grow your email marketing list.