Clickbait and why it works
I am currently obsessed with growing my email list and I recently started Monthly Prize Draws on my website as an incentive for signup up to my newsletter.
I've had success but not as much as I hoped for. I never thought it would be so difficult to get someone to part with an email address.
Then I did some research about clickbait and it made very interesting reading. It's all about the information gap and how curiosity can lead to click-throughs.
There's more to it than that of course, but another theory was trying to bridge the curiosity gap and playing on people's emotions.
It has to be something that is desirable too but curiosity seems to place a big part. With that in mind, I decided to re-design my sidebar with a clickbait routine to try and get more sign ups.
I saw this on another website and instantly fell in love with it. Clicking Start Here takes the reader to a new page where there is a little more information (but not too much to waste that curiosity). Here the reader can sign up to finally get that information.
It's only gone "live" today so it will be interesting to see how the stats pan out later. This appears at the top of the sidebar.
The graphic was made using Canva (https://www.canva.com/) and Lunapic (http://lunapic.com/) for cropping the photo as a circle.
Recent Comments
27
Clickbait has many negative connotations, but you are using it in a productive way! (For that reason, I don't think you can really call it clickbait)
Multiple layers driving curiosity, that's ingenious Craig! Now I am really CURIOUS to know by what % will your signups increase compared to what you were doing before. Good luck!
I hope this works out for you. I tend to think about how I respond to something like this. I would click on the first out of curiosity; but I would decide I wasn't curious enough to be forced into giving my email address to get the information. Not everyone thinks like me though. Fortunately. Good luck.
Thanks for the feedback Jean. I'm still learning new techniques but when I saw this on another website I liked it.
See more comments
But Canva also has the circles you can upload your picture into, and the cropping tools, too. Is there a reason you went with lunapic?
Where is the circle crop feature? When I select crop it's automatically a rectangle and I can't see where to change it.