Even if you have a fantastic offer, content, or a great product, you still have to get people to sign up or opt into your list to begin a relationship with them.

I often obsess over the design and copy of landing pages or offers and give little thought about the opt-in form.

These recent studies on the psychology of how people interact with forms were an eye opener. I’m revamping a lot of my forms based on this new information.

Research shows that you can increase your opt-in rate and grow your list faster with a few tweaks.

Here are a few tips you can implement right away to make your opt-in much stronger.

How many required fields is too many?

A recent Ascend study discovered that the optimum number of fields to use on a form are two to four.

A form’s conversion rate will drop by 20% for every field you add.
           
The type of form request that causes the most significant drop in participation:
Phone number
Age
Street address

Notable case study on the importance of required fields: Expedia removed one field from their forms and instantly made 12 million dollars.

For email acquisition, two fields perform the best: name and email.

If you have to ask for more information, include “optional” next to the fields. It has proven to increase convergence.

Another way to boost engagement is to optimize the inline text within the form field.
Conversion Voodoo did a test using “enter your email here” in the field, increasing sign-ups by 36%.

Color Psychology
Joe Hallock did a study on the response to different colors of call-to-action buttons. His findings were:

The top 3 female color preferences: Blue 35%, Purple 23% and green 14%
The top 3 male preferences: Blue 57% Green 14% Black 9%

Blue is mainly associated with trust and dependability. Most opt-in buttons should be blue.

As far as the text on the button goes, the top mistake is to use “Submit” or “Sign Up.”

What should the CTA button say?

AdeEvolver researched the highest performing button texts and found out they are made up of 3 or 4 words.

The most successful:
Get It now
Send me the tips
Give me instant access
I want it

One commonality is that most were in the first person.

Content Verve saw an increase in opt-ins by using first-person phrasing. They did an a/b testing:

“Start my free 30 trial” vs. “Start your free 30 trial “

The “start my free 30 day trial” had 90% more clicks than “start your free 30 day trial.”

Newsletter Sign-up trick.

As far as to sign up offers for newsletters, “sign up for my newsletter” is the worse converting option.

Use value terms: exclusive, advanced, secrets, access, proven, special offer, and limited time.

Brian Dean of Backlinko uses a great headline to get sign-ups for his blog: Get exclusive tips I only share with my email subscribers.

If you have more than 1,000 subscribers, using “join over 1,000 subscribers” has proven to increase convergence by another 10%.

I hope these will help you grow faster and, by doing so, make a bigger impact in your world.