We all know the importance of email capture. Subscribers equal more money and we can market to them until they buy, die, or unsubscribe. I prefer them to buy, and then buy again and again. That’s why I have implemented “Operation Email Suck”. I want to capture as many email addresses from visitors as possible and market to them consistently with strong offers, valuable content, and other related affiliate products.

Therefore, as a part of “Operation Email Suck” I have been modifying my Audio Maker Pro website in order to effectively capture more emails. So far, the changes have garnered me a 500% increase in email subscribers.

Some background information on the Audio Maker Pro website. Audio Maker Pro is a software product I launched back in 2003. It is a program that allows anyone to easily record their voice and place it on their website as a flash audio button. The program has been wildly successful and one of the keys of that success has been email follow up.

To demonstrate Audio Maker Pro to potential customers I recorded a simple screen capture video of the program in action. Before my recent changes to the site I would entice visitors to download and watch the video by entering their email address, I would then email them the download link for the video.

This technique worked very well and I was able to build a list of several thousand people who were interested in my software. They all had some degree of interest and responded extremely well to offers and follow up messages.

I promoted the demo video in two ways, one was a popup, and the other was a subscription box on the webpage. Here are images of them both…

The drawback with those methods, although both very effective, were that many people never saw the popup and many people skimmed over the subscription box. I knew I could do better.

I tried using DHTML pop-ups so they couldn’t be blocked but it was still somewhat annoying to visitors, I knew there was a better way.

Flash forward to today. I decided that my website would be better if I split it up. Getting attention and interest on the first page, then selling them with desire and action on the second page. This process has worked well to increase interest and sales, so a few days ago I decided to take it to the next level.

Now, when someone goes to my website they will see the same Attention/Interest section of the site, but in order to continue they must submit their email address (a small action). Immediately after implementing this change I saw a 500% increase in email subscriptions over my old methods. As far as sales go, they over time will increase as I now can market my product via opt-in email. I can also promote other related products increasing my overall income further.

I decided entering an email address will be the only way people can enter my site to read more about the product. This is a two-fold measure however as on one hand it increases subscriptions on the other hand some people will not bother to enter their email address.

Through my experience I have found that more people will enter their email if they are really interested. I have also found I get a few more fake emails from people such as billgates@microsoft.com or asdf@asdfjkl.com. The fake mails are fine since I am getting more real email addresses overall than I did before. (I did not include the fake emails into my 500% increase figure.)

The next step I will be implementing is a split test of the headline that is over the email subscription box. I figure if I can provide some type of bonus that is delivered by email I can get more real email addresses and hopefully increase my subscription rate even further. I will keep you posted on “Operation Email Suck” as I continue to collect more emails.