12 tactics to transform your email signups from a trickle to a torrent
Your email list is one of your most valuable owned assets. It’s the key to engaging your target audience and building trusted relationships with them. But most marketers don’t do enough to build and nurture theirs.
“But wait just a minute,” you protest. “I put a newsletter signup form on the home page of my website. Isn’t that enough?”
In a word, no.
At the most, you’ll get a trickle of subscribers from this approach. What if you could grow that trickle into a torrent – signing up a larger number of the right people and growing your list much faster?
Here are 12 innovative ways to do just that:
- Host a webinar. This type of event concentrates a wealth of knowledge and actionable advice into an hour or less, making it a great lead magnet. You can also record the webinar and continue to share it as a gated resource after the event is done.
- Use pop-ups to capture attention. Many people don’t like them, but study after study shows that they work. For best results, make the call to action something that’s of high value to the prospects you want to attract.
- Create page-specific pop-ups. For even better results, create offers that are customized to the content on the web pages where they appear. Consider the “next steps” you want your visitor to take after reading your blog post – and then tailor the pop-up accordingly.
- Add a form to the bottom of specific blog posts. The idea of this tactic is that the reader has gotten a taste of your amazing thinking. Now you’re giving them an opportunity to sign up to be notified when you publish more great insights.
- Offer a content upgrade. Update and expand an existing blog post that’s already performing very well. Then create an additional high-value resource on the same topic, and make it available via a pop-up registration form. Examples of effective content upgrades include worksheets, checklists and resource lists. A content upgrade lets people who really value your blog post to learn even more.
- Optimize your confirmation page. This is the page visitors see after they fill in and submit your enewsletter sign-up form. Most confirmation pages just say “thank you for subscribing.” But don’t forget as part of the double opt-in process, they must click on the link of an auto-generated email to confirm their subscription. Use your confirmation page to remind them of the value they’ll receive in return for completing the verification process.
- Insert a “learn more” link within your e-newsletter signup box. People who immediately see the value of subscribing can easily do so within the form on your home page. For the rest of your visitors, provide a link to a landing page where you can explain the benefits of signing up and enable them to do so there.
- Pitch your email newsletter to your Twitter followers. If you do this consistently, you’ll gain a small but steady stream of new subscribers. But don’t overdo it – once or twice a week is plenty.
- Use a blog post teaser. If you’re writing a blog post series, include a subscription form at the end of the first article. Encourage readers to register to receive notifications when you publish additional posts in the series.
- Convert your About Us web page into a squeeze page. It’s a frequently-visited page on most websites, but most bloggers never think to add a call to action and a newsletter subscription form to it.
- Add a newsletter signup link to your email signature. This is easy to do but it’s often overlooked.
- Include an email signup link in the author bylines of guest posts you publish on other websites.
It’s time to get intentional about growing your email list. The opportunities to expand it are many, if you think about the challenge creatively. Why not select one or two of the ideas in this list and experiment with them? Use the resulting data to decide which ones to keep and which ones to eliminate from your website.
Good luck experimenting!