Sidebar email opt-in redesigns: all 0.3-0.6%, inconclusive
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsA few redesigned sidebar email opt-in forms all converted between 0.3% and 0.6%, too low and too close to pick a winner.
Devesh Khanal of GrowthRock ran the test on a marketing blog with over 100,000 monthly unique visitors and published it on the GrowthRock blog.
With about 18 conversions from 4,000+ impressions, the test was abandoned as inconclusive.
- Opt-in rate: every version converted between 0.3% and 0.6%.
- Total of about 18 conversions from 4,000+ impressions. The author warns that a gap of 9 versus 4 sign-ups is just noise.
- No winner. The test was stopped as inconclusive.
The change
Only the sidebar opt-in form's design changes
Simplified mockup drawn by LiftArchive from the shared screenshots.
Control
The blog's existing email opt-in form in the sidebar.
Variant
A couple of redesigned versions of the sidebar opt-in form.
Why it likely came out this way
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- Readers come for the article and tend to ignore sidebars, so design tweaks there reach few people.
- With conversion rates under 1%, even a big relative lift adds very few subscribers.
- The author's view is that content upgrades, pop-ups and homepage gates convert far better, so time is better spent there.
Caveats: Only about 18 conversions in total, far too few to separate the variants. The post dates from 2015, and exact designs and rates per variant were only shown in an image.
Who ran it
Devesh Khanal ran this test for a marketing blog with 100k+ monthly uniques and published the results (GrowthRock blog). The numbers are theirs; the summary and commentary on this page are ours.
Read the original case study on Devesh Khanal →
How to run this test on your site
- Hypothesis
- If we redesign our sidebar opt-in form with a clearer offer, then more readers will subscribe because the form will stand out from the sidebar.
- Primary metric
- Email opt-ins per post view
- Guardrails
- Opt-ins from other forms on the page
- Time on page
- Unsubscribe rate of new subscribers
- Who should test it
- Only high-traffic content sites that can collect hundreds of opt-ins per variant. Most blogs will get more from testing content upgrades or other capture points first.
Questions
What is a typical sidebar opt-in conversion rate?
On this blog it was 0.3% to 0.6%.
The author reports seeing similarly low rates on many blogs, though that is one practitioner's experience.
Is it worth A/B testing a sidebar form?
Usually not first. Rates are so low that you need a lot of traffic to see a difference, and even a big relative win adds few subscribers.
What converts better than a sidebar form?
The author reports better rates from content upgrades, pop-ups, homepage gates and homepage feature boxes. Test those against your own baseline.