Getting people to subscribe to your blog or newsletter is no easy task, in fact, it’s one of the hardest things a site owner has to do. Most people don’t trust newsletters, seeing them as spam, but that’s because most newsletters offer email subscribers very little value.
Today, we’ll show you how to create valuable newsletters and blog posts that will have your users eagerly anticipating your next installment. More importantly, you will learn how to increase your email list. This should help you to get a much healthier subscription base for your blog or newsletter, which will lead to increased traffic to your site.
Before we analyze all the tactics to increase our newsletter subscriptions and email list, let’s understand what exactly a newsletter is and why it’s important for your email marketing strategy.
- What is a Newsletter?
- Importance of Email Newsletter Marketing for Your Brand?
- 10 Effective Tips to Increase Your Newsletter Subscriptions
- Take Action and Watch Your User Base Grow
What is a Newsletter?
A newsletter is a content piece that is used as an effective tool for email marketing. It is a way of staying connected with your subscribers and customers with engaging and relevant information about your products and services. It can also include incentive-based offers like discount coupons and free trials to keep your audience hooked.
Where newsletters don’t directly sell your product, they speak volumes about your brand identity and add value to your products through sneak peeks and benefits to entice your customers into purchasing.
Newsletters are also communication tools to keep your customers abreast of the latest updates, trends, and changes in policies if any. Through these content pieces sent out periodically, you not only advertise your products but also build a valuable relationship with your loyal audience in your email list.
Importance of Email Newsletter Marketing for Your Brand
According to statistics and research, a well-crafted newsletter is 40 times more effective in bringing about conversions than any other digital marketing tool. This figure tells us a lot about the importance of newsletters and how potent a force these are in converting your email list members into customers and driving them to make purchasing decisions.
Unlike other marketing methods, a newsletter helps build a relationship based on trust with your audience. They hear from you from time to time and are constantly aware of your brand and its offerings. This leads to better informed and more consistent buying behaviour than another strategy.
10 Effective Tips to Increase Your Newsletter Subscriptions
Follow these ten effective and foolproof tactics to increase your newsletter subscriptions and grow your customer email list.
Offer Incentives That Lead to Conversions
This is one of the best pieces of advice for a site owner who relies on a loyal user base for the success of their website or business.
People want value when they sign up for a newsletter, join a club, or opt-in to receive promotional content. They’re busy, so if you are going to ask them to take time out of their day to subscribe to your newsletter or join your website, you’ll need to offer them some kind of reward.
For example, you could host a competition that only subscribers can enter. Make the prizes something your audience can use and enjoy. You can also set up promotional campaigns with discounts and giveaways that will help boost user interactions and signups.
Offer your users content that they need, like tutorials, instructional videos, or anything else that fits in with your audience’s interests.
Once you have suitable content that will create benefits for your users, you can start sending it to them as part of your newsletters. Another approach is to make some of the content available on your website while you offer bonus content only to those who subscribe to your newsletter. Your website is a good place to tell users that, if they sign up for your newsletter, they’ll receive even more tips, tricks, and useful content.
Include Your CTA on Your Main Landing Page
Getting people to click your CTA is hard, and sometimes it can feel like you’re fighting a battle, especially when you have a carefully crafted subscription CTA that nobody is responding to.
This is a frustrating problem, but it’s one that’s easy to solve.
Is the signup button large and visible on your webpage, or is it tucked away somewhere in a less-frequented section of your site?
Your subscription CTA needs to be a prominent feature on your website. That will help you not only gain user traction through valuable interactions online, but you will also gain insight into what your user base is willing to follow through on.
You should keep your subscription button or form on your main landing page so that people can easily find it and follow through with a short and simple subscription process.
Keep Newsletter Signup Form Simple
Take a look at what you’re trying to get people to do, and then consider how easy it is for them to do it. If you’re trying to get people to sign up for your newsletter, make sure the signup process is quick and easy to complete.
If you find that people are registering on your website, but they aren’t signing up for your newsletter, you should consider adding a one-click subscription checkbox to your signup page. People who click the checkbox will start receiving your newsletter without having to use a separate form to subscribe.
If you provide a link to a subscription page, consider you’ve lost your subscription entirely, You end up diverting your site visitor from your main page, which can be a technical mistake. Most people don’t have the time or the patience to click a few extra times, and especially not to subscribe to email newsletters, even if they’re free. So keep your data capture form or signup form on your main landing page, preferably placed within the header, footer, or sidebar.
Also, make the entire signup process as simple and short as possible. There’s a debate going on in the market currently of whether a signup form should even ask for your first name, and whether leaving the name out is useful in making the signup process even simpler.
Pay Attention to Your Subscription Button Copy
You might find that people are perfectly happy to like your social media posts and follow you, but they won’t sign up for your newsletter. In that case, you need to change the way people see your CTA. Responding to it shouldn’t seem like a chore, but, instead, a way to get the valuable content you offer.
You must ensure that your users have no doubt about what you want them to do, which is to sign up. For this, make sure your button colours and copy should be spontaneous, attractive, and to the point.
Surprisingly, the colour of your subscribe button plays a major role in driving your visitor to click it. The right colours can create feelings of trust or a sense of urgency. Your button copy has to spell out the right text. Step aside from the mundane ‘subscribe’ wordings, and opt for something more incentive-based, like ‘get 10% off’, or ‘get new trends delivered to your inbox’.
Use Social Media to Build Relationships With Your Users
When you’re dealing with a large number of users, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that they are individual people, not a faceless user base.
People want more from your brand, business, or platform than just a generic business agreement. They want to trust you and have a close connection to you and your brand.
To create that connection, you need to build a relationship of trust and mutual benefit. Be engaging and relevant by creating valuable content that will start a dialogue.
Perhaps the best way to do that is through social media and direct communications. You can get people involved by encouraging them to sign up through subscription boxes placed on your social media platforms, hence building interaction with them on all these channels.
Your newsletter can be customized so that it feels tailored to your readers. It adds a personal touch if you use their first name. Make sure that the content is relevant to the user base that you’re engaging with.
All of these efforts to build a relationship result in your users and customers becoming unofficial brand ambassadors that speak highly of you and your products. That helps attract more people over time and grows your email list. This is especially great for your brand’s social proof. You can happily display your growing fanbase or list as social proof of your credibility and popularity on your website or social media pages.
If managed properly, your relationship with your user base can also lead to exciting events and campaigns, so don’t neglect this aspect of your website and online business. In an age where digital communication is so important, you must keep your users engaged and happy with your business.
Create Interesting and Relevant Newsletter Content
Your users are looking for new and exciting things to try, so give them something to look forward to. If you’re an expert in a particular field, make sure that you share your insights regularly and invite users to interact and share with you through your newsletter content. If you keep things engaging and on-topic, you will grow your online audience, making more people aware of your business and the services you offer.
If you’re interested in a topic that’s related to the one you’ve been covering, slowly introduce your users to that topic as well. You would be surprised at the level of cross-pollination that occurs between similar websites even though the connection is not that obvious.
You also need to stay current on any topics that you write about. Don’t be complacent when it comes to staying relevant. Trends and markets change, so make sure that you don’t get left behind.
Another important aspect of keeping your content relevant is making sure it’s easy to share. Your website should have dedicated sharing features that make it a breeze for visitors to share your articles and stories on social media platforms, via links, or by email.
By making your content accessible to a larger audience, you’ll become more popular and more recognizable over time, which creates more flow to your website, and more people that are likely to become subscribers.
Place Your CTA in Multiple Locations
We have already discussed your CTA and how you can make it highly visible and easy to use, but have you thought about where it should appear?
A successful strategy that many websites use is to display the CTA in as many places as possible, such as email signatures, social media bios, and anywhere else that people are likely to see on a daily basis. This is a great way to keep people up to date with other features on your website too, like new content and posts.
Your CTA link can be on its own, or it can be shown on the landing page of your website that the link points to. This is a good way to hedge your bets as it lets people look at your latest content and sign up at the same time.
Visitors often click away from the main landing page to visit your other pages. Its great to have your CTA across your entire site, on all your web pages. This will encourage visitors to subscribe at any point in their website engagement time from wherever they are. Speed and convenience are the two keywords you have to build your entire email newsletter campaign around.
Offer Freebies Through Contests or Giveaways
People love freebies, and what better way to become popular among your users and advertise yourself far and wide than by initiating contests and giveaways. You can encourage your visitors to enter the content by subscribing to the newsletter. They’ll be happy to get some free goodies. You don’t have to offer something too valuable, rather play around with the consumer mindset.
Conditions for giveaways can also include email subscriptions and forwarding your newsletter to their entire contact list or circle.
Provide Different Subscription Options to Your Subscribers
Sustaining your email list can be tough when every few days you notice a couple of unsubscribing requests. The average email user receives around 100 emails daily and is bound to unsubscribe due to inbox anxiety.
You don’t want to overwhelm your users by adding to the flood of emails they already receive. So it’s better to give them more control over the subscription process by getting to choose from a list of options on the frequency of receiving your newsletter. You can offer them options to receive your email weekly, monthly, or daily. When the user feels more in control of this process, there are more chances of them getting down to actually reading the newsletter instead of deleting it to clear their flooded inbox.
Use SEO and Paid Marketing to Gain Traffic
Improving SEO is one of the most fundamental ways to boost your website’s traffic because it directly influences where your website is listed in search engine results. Focusing on SEO has the potential to take your website from the 10th page of Google search results to the 1st page. That higher ranking will boost traffic to your website and will improve the chance that people will subscribe to your newsletter, sign up for your website, and follow you on social media platforms.
If you’ve tried some of these suggestions but are still not getting the numbers you were hoping for, you should consider going with a paid promotion. You can reel in a lot of new people if you target your audience properly through a paid marketing campaign.
Twitter and Facebook will help your promotions pop up more often, and the targeted audiences are quite specific. That’s a way to get accurate advertising that has the potential to attract new users who are interested in the product, service, or platform you offer. Users will more likely be drawn to your landing page and become email subscribers when they find social proof of an already growing customer base on your website.
Take Action and Watch Your User Base Grow
You shouldn’t be losing sleep over getting more users to your website and newsletter. As we’ve seen, it doesn’t have to be difficult or time-consuming.
The main points you should take away from all of this is that you need to create content that inspires people and compels them to follow you and your website. If you have high-quality content that gets sent out on a consistent and predictable release schedule, you will start seeing positive results.
By offering true value to your subscribers, you’ll find that current ones will engage with you more and that a greater number of new readers will subscribe to your newsletter. If your content is of value to your subscribers, you’ll be amazed at how much organic growth it generates over time.
How are you getting people to subscribe to your newsletter?
