Offering a free report is a popular way to build a targeted optin email list. The essentials are pretty straightforward.

You design a landing page where the arriving visitor is presented with some tantalizing information about a report on a specific subject and requested to complete an email form  to get it.

As simple as the steps are, how effectively they are performed makes a world of difference.

How the report is presented, how much “pull” the copy (or often these days, video) has and what the visitor has to do to obtain it all have a tremendous impact on the number of people that will opt-in to your list.

How Not To Create An Optin Page

Earlier today on twitter I came across what to me is an example of an optin page done wrong.

First of all, consider the appearance. Dull, isn’t it?

It might be argued that little can be done with a landing page that uses the site’s standard page layout. But that’s not true of course. Even if we ignore the addition of graphic elements, there are still many ways to improve the impact of the copy.

Simple writer’s tools like line breaks, bullet points, bold and italics can all be used to make the copy more accessible and visually appealing. And result in a lot more optins.

Then there’s the copy itself. You don’t need to be a copywriter to see that the text above is boring. Long bland sentences that lack clarity and don’t actually say much anyway. I don’t know about you, but I can’t even read that first sentence aloud without running out of breath…

It’s not just that it’s far too long. The language is clumsy too. Lot’s of multi-syllabic and weak word forms, plus problems like the poor scanning of “search from researching” and all those “ings” one after another, “researching … marketing … prioritizing … reviewing.”

Plus there’s no call to action other than the vague, isolated “Click here”. You can’t even be sure what you’re actually being asked to click for, or what’s going to happen when you do. Even something as basic as “Click here to Download the Report” would be vastly more effective.

In fact, the whole thing smacks of text written solely to fill in the space because something has to be put there. But here, as is often the case, bad copy is worse than no copy. It confuses and dulls the impact. Deleting the text to leave just the title and a download link alone would likely result in far more clicks to the optin form.

The More Your Optin Form Asks, The Less You’ll Get

Let’s take a look at the optin form itself. Seven fields of information just to download a report! Some of it stuff that many people consider fairly sensitive, even if they are only an employee. Nor did I immediately realize what those last four boxes are for…

The hotter, more exciting, more valuable a report sounds, the easier it will be to get people to persuade themselves that it’s worth trading their details for, and consequently you’ll get a comparatively greater number of optins.

Even free reports have to be sold to some degree, and the copy needs to be stellar if you expect to overcome the natural resistance most first-time visitors will feel if asked to provide this much information. But as we’ve seen, that’s not the case here. In fact, the copy is awful.

Generally speaking, the more information you ask for, the fewer opt-ins you’ll get. If you really need all this information (and often you don’t), collect it in stages.

Make your first point of contact with a potential customer easy for them. Get the basic information you need to follow up, and request additional details in the download form for a subsequent report at a later date. At that stage resistance will be far lower thanks to the increased level of trust the quality of the initial report and the emails sent to your list engenders.

It seems to me that much of the potential of this report to generate email optins has been wasted. What do you think?