At TechLoaf, we experimented with a lot of different, elaborate, shiny landing pages that expounded on how amazing our newsletter was, etc...
And after falling flat on our face for months, we realized that an incredibly simple, borderline-mysterious landing page converted users far more effectively.
About 35% of all visitors to our site end up subscribing.
(For the curious, this is the landing page: https://techloaf.io)
For this use-case, it's probably a good thing.
I started my website to help people, not make a petty few grand in profits or grow an email list.
However, I know this is bad capitalism. I just don't know if I want to restrict access.
OP meant that this "restriction" piques interest instead of merely closing the tab on ten articles you skimmed the headlines of.
No need to charge for the emails or profit from them. But people will give you more attention if your writing is in their inbox.
Have a simple landing page asking for an email address when someone first visits, but provide a way to bypass it if they don't want to give it out.
A simple direct ask up front is more effective than having lots of distractions on a page.
That's exactly what is there. You can click View The Archive, if you don't want to give your email.
In the early 2000s at Rent.com we found that forcing an email address to get content gave us a great conversion rate, and fit our business model. But over time people came to be less and less willing to hand over email addresses, and more and more convinced that equivalent content was available elsewhere without the prospect of spam. Our conversion rate therefore slowly slid.
A decade later the conversion rate slid so much that Rent.com eventually abandoned its business model.
To do this we needed to present the apartment owner with evidence that we really were the ones to find the renter. Which means that we needed all of the touch points. And we also needed to help renters find an apartment then tell us. (We had data indicating that only half of renters we placed actually came back to us to tell us so that we knew to tell the apartment owner to pay up.)
We needed the email both as a login to track and tie back to that user, and to send people apartment listings and convince them to report their lease to get the $100.
So emails weren't actually the core product. But they were very, very important.
Edit: I take that back. I went to the page after writing this and signed up. Well done.
And agreed, conversion numbers are highly dependent on how thoughtful our targeting is. We generally shoot for almost laughlibly small, but super targeted, outreach. Certainly factors into our unusually high conversion.
We had a landing page that always won the AB test for over a year, but our lawyer wanted us to change the chart on the top.
We didn't know what to replace it with so I decided to test what will happen for a week if we removed it to better understand the value it provided.
It turned out that removing the chart increased email capture by 20% and we now have a bare bones landing page.
It isn't always the case, but often times less is more.
About 50% of visitors click either the “preview” or “archive” link
They were very similar to the CNN or NY Times home pages, but with less content visible and more (obnoxious) calls to subscribe to the email.
We also experimented with a minimalist landing page similar to the current one, but with screenshots of the email in the background. In hindsight, it was distracting and slightly confusing.