Sumo has a wide collection of site based email opt-in tools, and publishes some great stats and tips. According to their latest report, in 2017, 1.95% is their average opt-in rate. https://sumo.com/stories/email-signup-benchmarks They say they've served over 3.2B impressions and have generated more than 3 million opt-ins. Their tools are pretty slick, so I'd say if you're doing general website sign-up, 1% would be just ok, 3% would be really good.

These resources are awesome thank you

In theory it's a great idea, but in practice it should be used as a very rough benchmark.

I've done something similar in the past, but there are a tonne of flaws (I did mine for a physical product, not an ebook).

For example: let's say you measure success and viability of your product/market by the number of email optins you get - well, people are a lot more likely to do a free email optin, than they are to get their wallet out and actually buy something.

Let's say you run £100 worth of AdWords traffic to it that isn't particularly well refined or targeted, you might get zero interest, or very little interest. That doesn't mean your product or market isn't viable, just that you need to find another way to drive traffic - or refine what you're doing in AdWords.

Perhaps you can give away a free chapter of the book in return for people signing up to 'the waitlist' or similar?

It's a tough one - but if it's a digital product then at least you have a lot less risk than a full blown ecommerce operation, where a warehouse, physical stock etc. would all be needed.

Thanks for joining the discussion I'll admit this will be my first attempt at AdWords, I'm only running £10 a day so hopefully, I'll be able to refine it over the duration of the experiment.

Mine's is a physical book too, so I will need to purchase the print order but I plan on fulfilling/shipping from home in the beginning to minimise risk.

In exchange for the email I'd be offering an early bird discount so hopefully they'd sign up with intent to buy further down the line.

Have you tried any other validation techniques with more success?

FWIW it was Lean Startup, just read this section yesterday :)

You should expect high conversion rates for a free sign up page you describe. Based on my experience, you can get up to 20%-40% of users coming from AdWords to give you their email addresses. I was converting users into a free email course and had a 34% conversion rate. Also, please note that it depends not only on your landing page but also on the quality of AdWords keywords that you are targeting.

But unfortunately, you can't get too optimistic about results like that. Everybody loves free stuff, but since your real goal is to validate that people are going to buy your book, I’d like to mention one more approach.

Eric Reis calls it a “fake landing page test” in this article .

Rob Walling (founder of Drip) calls it “Mini Sales Site” and describes it in detail in his “Start Small Stay Small” book.

The idea is to set up a landing page that looks like it’s selling your finished product and then measure how many people click the “Buy now” button. They say that the only way you know if someone would buy your product is if they think they are really buying it when they visit your landing page.

So when someone clicks “Buy Now” track conversions using Google AdWords and notify the prospect that your book is still in development. Ask for their email address so you can notify them when you launch.

For conversion estimates, let me quote Rob:

"After sending 100-200 visitors to your site, look at the numbers of “trials” or “purchases.” Assume you will convert between 2% and 5% of people who clicked “try now” or “download free trial.” Assume 40% of the people who clicked “buy now” would have completed the purchase.”

I thought about the "buy now" button but felt a bit shady creating something that fake...\

Thanks very much for the literature

I'm a bot, bleep, bloop. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:

 If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don't vote in the other threads.(Info/ ^Contact)

I honestly don't think that £100 of Adwords can buy you a lot of insights.

If you run the numbers and assume a cpc of 1£ this equals to 100 visitors.

Sending 100 visitors to an untested Landing Page is not a lot.

I'd say if you get 2-5 conversion out of it I would call it sucessfull and do further testing.

From my searches on the keywords I'm planning on using no one else is running ad's so I was hoping for quite a low CPC.

I wouldn’t rely on a unique traffic source to make a decision. I would at least split 50% AdWords and 50% FB ads.

I'm likely to stick with google as people searching on google are looking to buy where as facebook has many more people 'browsing'.

My product is interesting to a lot, but whether it's worth buying is a different story. This is what I'm trying to test.

Hey, I tried this when launching a product, mixed results. I would not recommend this approach.

FWIW, I'm a big fan of Lean startup, went to the conference a couple of times. I just don't think this method delivers what was promised.

We spent probably $50k playing with different images, headlines, value props, landing pages etc. When A/B testing, we had a hell of a time trying to determine if the gain/loss was the audience selected for the ad, the message/headline, the image, the landing page etc. We could change one variable at a time, but unless we paid for a big audience, the number pushed thru the funnel was so small, we weren't statistically significant. Our n was too small to conclude anything. As we had so many variables in play, we couldn't afford to spend enough to get to an N that I would believe.

Running the same headline with the same audience and different images was helpful, as was trying different headlines with the same audience and the same image. We also tried lots of different audiences. We were able to optimize for click thru rate, and figure out which audience was the most cost effective to target.

We argued internally at length about the meaning of our results. We captured emails. Some members of the team argued that our landing page was not sufficiently credible to capture real orders. Others argued email capture isn't intent to buy. We also argued about opt in/opt out for email, if our email itself was getting captured by spam, etc.

I'd definitely do the audience/headline test again, but the capture at a landing page mostly just produced confusion and arguments for us. I'm not sure it helped us at all with our actual go to market effort later. If I did it again, I'd probably just test the ads, and point at a coming soon page.

If I did it again, I'd probably just test the ads, and point at a coming soon page.

My plan is a low adwords budget/day to start with to get the wording right which will lead to a landing page which is essentially a product page but instead of "Buy" there is a "Find out more" Button.

This will cause a pop up informing the user the product is coming soon, and to leave their email for an early bird pre-launch offer.

It's just me in the team, so no one to argue with! The money is coming from a small grant specifically for testing markets.