We’ve written before about how email marketing can be much more effective—and cost-effective—than social media. But the only way it will be effective is by having a large, relevant group of subscribers. In this post, we’ll tell you how to grow your subscription list much more quickly, using a number of tried-and-true tools.
Add multiple signup forms to your website.
If you’re using WordPress or Squarespace in combination with a popular email marketing tool like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, it’s very easy to add a signup form to your sidebar. If you don’t have one of these platforms, you can still easily add a button to point people to the signup form; you can download the code right from Mailchimp or Constant Contact.
We also recommend announcement bars that perch at the top of your website. They usually have an accompanying animated effect that helps draw the user’s attention, and we particularly like them because they aren’t offensive.
Speaking of offensive, as much as we hate those ubiquitous lightbox popups… they work. They work well. If you’re using a WordPress plugin, you have a number of plugin options to help you add a popup or its equally annoying cousin, the slide-in scroll box. Or for any website platform that allows you to inject code into the header of the page, you can add code from your email newsletter software (Mailchimp, Constant Contact, etc.). You can even choose to use a third-party vendor like Optinmonster, which gives you the advantage of a wide variety of analytics to track the success of your signup form.
You might also consider adding a signup form after your blog posts or scattering them throughout your post content. A user who’s engaged with your content enough to take time for a long read is a good target for your email newsletter.
Add a Call to Action button on your Facebook Business Page.
This is so easy to do that it’s silly not to. If you have a Facebook Business Page, you can change the button that appears below your cover photo to do a number of things, like shop for a product, download an app… or in this case, sign up for an email newsletter. Here’s a simple tutorial to get you started.
Offer something free in return for a signup.
Shocking, we know, but people love free stuff. If you offer a chapter from your e-book, a printable, or something else that costs you very little or nothing, people are more likely to sign up. These items are called “lead magnets.” In a similar vein, you might also consider offering access to restricted content in your website. There are (fairly complicated) WordPress plugins to achieve this, or you can use a third-party vendor like Optinmonster.
Whatever you approach you choose, it’s always critical to track what methods are working and which aren’t. You might choose to use Google Analytics to do so, or you might set up the forms so that it’s easy to tell where the user came from. And if you use a tool like OptinMonster, you can enjoy even richer insights into your users’ activity. Overwhelmed by the options? We aren’t—and we would love to help you.
