We hear this question a lot: How can I grow my email list? How do I gain more email subscribers? Having a healthy list growing strategy is key to your email marketing strategy.
Here are 3 easy ways to increase email signups on your website:
1. Highlight the value on your email sign-up call to action.
Are you conveying why someone should sign up for your emails? If your sign-up form just says “Sign up for our newsletter,” what value or message are you giving your visitor or future customer? Answer the question: “Why should I receive your emails?” to really grow your email list. Check out this example from The Roasterie:
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By adding just a short sentence that answers the question, “What’s in it for me?”, they saw a 17% increase in signups.
2. Move your email sign-up above the fold of your website.
Ideally, retail marketers would love for everyone that comes to their website to convert into a sale, but not everyone is ready to buy now. The next best thing is to get their email address, so that we can entice them to come back.
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In this example from Jeanne Jennings, the email sign-up form was at the bottom of the home page. By moving it “above the fold” of the website — meaning visitors can see it before they scroll — they got a 24.7% increase in email signups.
Don’t stuff the email sign-up in the footer of the website and hope people will find it. Give it a position near the top of the page! And put it on every page. Remember, the second best thing someone can do when they come to your website is give you their email address.
3. Ask new visitors to your website for their email with a pop-up.
If you need a more aggressive approach to growing your list, you can implement a pop-over box. This is gaining popularity — partially because it works. It’s not a pop-up window that opens a new window, it just shows over your current window, graying out the rest of the content until you either subscribe or close the pop-over. You can set different parameters to only show new website visitors or wait to show after a certain amount of time on the site so as to not be a bother to your best site visitors. Check your website analytics (i.e. Google Analytics) to find out how many seconds people are staying on your page. You can set the pop over to show up a few seconds before most people leave the page to try and get them as they’re going rather than blocking them as they arrive.
In this example, we had just a regular incentive sign-up form on the home page, but we wanted to turn up the sign-up rate and grow faster.
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By switching to a pop-up, we saw a 217% increase in email signups compared to the control (having the sign-up form static on the page)!
There are a lot of great ways to grow your email list from pay-per-click ads to affiliate marketing to trade shows, but these are 3 quick ways to test the actual sign-up form to start increasing your email list size right away with the traffic you’re already seeing on your website.
