How to Lose Subscribers

I’m guessing that you are not a blogger that wants to lose subscribers. However, you decide to do something on your blog that sounds beneficial. Why do I say that? Because lately bloggers have been talking about using the lightbox on Aweber.

The lightbox on Aweber is the way to get new visitors to sign up for a newsletter you have created or an e-book that you have created easily. When someone comes to your blog there will be a little pop-up window with the information you provide about your newsletter or product and a way for someone to subscribe. They can’t do anything on your blog until they click the close link.

Not all new visitors will choose to sign up for your e-mail marketing campaign. Most likely only 2.8% of new visitors will sign up. You think that might be beneficial considering you can make money off an e-mail marketing campaign and it counts as subscribers to your Feedburner account (yay!).

Here lies the problem. Many of the religious readers may decide to unsubscribe because the lightbox pops up on their browser every time they visit your blog (64% of People Won’t Stop Visiting Your Site Because of a Pop-Up). You may think this is okay considering you get more subscribers when people sign up for your newsletter or e-book. A lot of people that sign up will not read your blog though. Worst part is that many people will get annoyed when they find out that you are broadcasting your blog to all the people that have signed up to your newsletter and then decide to unsubscribe because they don’t want blog udates. Something your religious readers wouldn’t do unless they feel that you are forcing them to try to do something (Like make them sign up for something when they first come to your blog).

In two to three months you will realize that it wasn’t worth losing subscribers. The only way I see it working for you is if you are getting hundreds of thousands visits every month. Otherwise, I don’t see you getting much benefit from it. How can you get e-mail subscribers without trying to force it on someone? Well, one way is to only show the lightbox once for every unique visitor. It will then never be shown to them again after the first time seeing it (Read Sly’s quote below). Most people sign up right away so showing it more than once to people will not likely benefit you much.

So if you want to lose subscribers then use the lightbox everytime someone comes to your blog. Otherwise, give a person the chance to sign up once otherwise they just won’t have that chance again (You could always add in a form on your blog in the sidebar to let people sign up if they don’t sign up the first time).

“Yes, it is very annoying to see that lightbox pop up everytime you visit a blog. But that’s the thing. It doesn’t necessarily have to show up everytime. I’m a user of AWeber as well and I started using this popup feature a few days ago. But there’s a feature in it that let’s me choose whether I want it to show up once per IP (and only once), or every time someone visits my blog, OR on a specific interval of days. Guess what I chose? The one-time option of course. I totally understand the annoyance of something like this, so that’s why I’ve limited the amount of times it shows up. ” – SlyVisions

You’ll be happy with the decision three months down the road.