The chatbot in the corner.

If your opt-in rate drops for no obvious reason, load your site the way a visitor would and check what else is competing for the same spot. On one author's site, an AI chatbot sat in the corner where the sign-up box appeared; it had produced three store orders in six months, and turning it off brought the opt-in rate from under 2% back to 3% within two days.

A client sells mostly by email (around 55% of revenue comes via email), and every one of those sales starts with somebody joining the list, so the opt-in rate on his site is one of the numbers he watches most closely. It had been sitting around 3%. Then it slid under 2%, and nobody on the team could point to anything that had changed.

So I went and looked at the site the way a visitor would.

Two things, one corner.

The opt-in that does most of the work on the site is a small box that slides up in the corner of the page. It asks one quick question, collects the email and drops people into the right part of the list. When I loaded the pages, an AI chatbot was sitting in that same corner. It had been switched on at some point, and it was taking up the exact spot the opt-in box needed.

Nobody had done anything wrong. The chatbot was a reasonable idea, and turning it on probably felt harmless. The two of them just can't share a corner, and the chatbot was winning.

Before I asked anyone to turn it off, I wanted to know what it was actually worth.

So I pulled the chatbot's own data and set it next to the opt-in box.

I showed both numbers to the marketing lead side by side, and that was the whole conversation. The chatbot came off the site.

If you've added anything to your site lately, ask yourself one question.

What is it sitting on top of?

Jason “Corner Office” Resnick

P.S. I didn't win that conversation with an opinion. Two numbers side by side did it for me.