Opt-in Rate

Optimizing your opt-in rate is one of the best ways to generate new leads and increase your conversions. By definition, an opt-in rate is the percent of consumers who agree with marketing advertisement - usually by e-mail, telephone, or SMS (thanks, Wikipedia!). While the metric seems simple on the surface, it gives valuable insights into areas of future growth and improvement. We'll take you through how to calculate this metric, how to understand it in the context of your industry, and how to apply it to the platforms you're using now.

How to Calculate Opt-in Rate

You can calculate your opt-in rate by dividing the number of opt-in conversions made by the total number of people who visited your opt-in page. The opt-in rate can be assessed for various time-periods (i.e. day, week, month, year) and, if your opt-in pages are tied to certain products or campaigns, you can assign a specific opt-in rate for each.

If you’re confused about how to define opt-in conversions and opt-in page, we’ve included some nifty definitions and examples below:

• Opt-in conversions are the number of people who agreed or confirmed their subscriptions to your email list. By giving their personal information such as their names and email address, they let you send them an email or message advertisements.
• Opt-in page is the landing page where visitors can give out their personal information through filling up forms. Rather than requiring an actual purchase, the website generates leads through an opt-in page.

When choosing what to include in your calculations, remember: consistency is key! That means, if you decide to include XYZ in your opt-in rate for the month, you should include it in the next month’s opt-in rate as well. Having consistent metrics will allow you to better identify the causes of good or bad performance. For instance, if you grew the number of visitors on your opt-in page for the past month but the opt-in rate is still low, then that may mean your opt-in page is not that effective.

Connecting Opt-in Rate to Your Business

Again, as you begin (consistently) monitoring the opt-in rate, you’ll be able to find insights specific to your strategy. Of course, it’s also important to understand your opt-in rate in relation to your broader industry. To help you know what to expect, we’ve included a list of the average landing page conversion rate per industry:

• Higher Education - 2.6%
• Real Estate - 2.9%
• Health - 2.9%
• Home Improvement - 3.3%
• Legal - 3.3%
• Business Services - 3.5
• Business Consulting - 5.0%
• Travel - 5.0%
• Credit & Landing - 5.6%
• Vocational Studies & Job Training - 6.1%

Further, while you can find opt-in conversions from many channels, we’ve identified popular platforms that are particularly relevant to the opt-in rate. These may be good places to begin if you’re getting started with this metric:

• Mailchimp: This is an email marketing automation tool that gives email analytics to its users. On its dashboard, Mailchimp presents a graph summarizing opt-in rate trends of a website.‍
• Klaviyo: This email marketing tool gives its users two options of opt-ins: the double opt-in and single opt-in. With its options, it also offers opt-in rate analytics to help its users!

Tracking Opt-in Rate with Lido

While opt-in rate is easy to calculate, it’s important to keep in mind that the opt-in rate is one of many valuable metrics to track your performance. If you don’t want to spend hours at the end of the month juggling numbers from your Mailchimp and Klaviyo accounts, consider trying Lido. Lido can help you build a dashboard to monitor your data and give a look into how your key metrics (such as opt-in rate) change over time.

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