AweberLOGOAweber has been my email provider of choice for over a year now. I have several thousand newsletter subscribers over the network of my websites and I think it’s a great service. Building a newsletter list is very important because it allows you to stay in contact with your subscribers by providing them current information from your blog. This helps you build a relationship and earn trust which you can in turn use to sell relevant products. There are numerous additional reasons why building a newsletter list is important, but those are the most important in my mind. However, what I want to cover today is how to get more newsletter subscribers.

One way to get more newsletter subscribers is with a light box pop up. Yes, there are some people that run from websites that use pop ups so it’s important to watch your bounce rate before and after implementing light boxes to determine if your causing more harm than good. In either case, they’ve still proven to be an effective way to get more newsletter subscribers.

How to Split Test Light Box Pop Ups

So if you’ve decided to try implementing a light box now all you need to do is create one web form and move on right? No of course not, you should never miss an opportunity to test the effectiveness of one page element over the other. You can do this using Aweber easily. From within Aweber simply navigate to your Web Forms tab > Create a Web Form > then after you have 2 or more web forms created scroll down to the Create Split Test section. Here you can set how often a form should be shown in the test (I suggest you set equal parts for each form).

My Split Test:

What I wanted to test was whether 15 seconds or 30 seconds was a better time for the LightBox to pop up. I also wanted to test out using an image or not, displaying text or not and different text types / colors. Here are a few examples of the pop ups I ran (click to enlarge):

Here are the results of my test:

What I learned:

From this test I learned that 30 seconds is more effective than 15 seconds (but not by much). The black text performed better than the red text. Using no image was better than using any image at all. However, even with these results it’s important to remember that with such a small sample size it’s difficult to take the results as the new standard by which I should design any future light box pop up with. Instead, I’ll let what I learned influence the elements in the new test that I start to run and I’ll use less variables so that I can complete the test in a shorter time (i.e. 4 different versions instead of 10).

You should be testing anything and everything on your websites because you’ll find ways to generate more traffic, more newsletter sign ups and more money through testing. If you don’t test everything you’re missing out.

If you aren’t running a newsletter on your blog now be sure to try out Aweber. They’re inexpensive and offer numerous ways to test and track your emails.

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Have you ever tried split testing light boxes before? If so, what did you learn?