As the audience engagement manager for Next City, one of my main jobs is building our database. For a news organization with as much traffic as nextcity.org sees, the database, while by no means small, could be a lot bigger. So over the past year, I’ve focused on building better landing pages to help convert readers into newsletter subscribers and donors.
Along with our art director and developer, we came up with designs and functionality that works really, really well for us. In fact, as I just learned, they do shockingly well. The main reason, I think, we’re so successful on landing pages is that our editors deliver high quality journalism that our audience trusts. That trust makes it easy for people to take the next step up the ladder. In terms of the first step on the conversion ladder, we’re doing really well. Once you’re aware of us and read our reporting regularly, you know what we can deliver.
These are not a one-to-one comparisons to my world, since they focus on for-profits, but they’re close. They say email signup pages (newsletters) convert 3-5% of the time, free app (free ebooks in our case) is 4-5%, and business to consumer (donations in our case) is 1.5-2%. Now these aren’t set numbers for everyone, but they’re still much lower than I expected. Next City is brining in 10 times the conversion rate on these pages.
After you build trust in your brand or nonprofit, you have to build landing pages that work. I will discuss what we’ve done to be successful in my next post. In the meantime, know that if you can get 5% conversion on a landing page, you’re doing pretty well. If you’ve ever thought that no one is signing up on your newsletter page, you might just need to focus on driving traffic to site and compare your numbers with what Moz says is about normal.