How To Get More Email Subscribers On Your Website

How to Get More Email Subscribers?

It’s the question that seems to be on everyone’s lips today. As list building becomes more popular, techniques are getting more and more complicated (and costly) involving sales funnels, premium plugin-ins and marketing software and requiring blood sacrifices (maybe it just feels that way). 

And whilst these things certainly have their place, I often see that many people could increase their sign up rates by simply implementing the basic strategies, in a more effective way.  

So let’s talk about some simple but extremely effective ways to get more email subscribers today.

Give Your Email List a Purpose

So, in our aim to get more email subscribers let’s make sure that the basics are fully optimized and as effective as they can be.

Does your sign up box contain the phrase, or any variation of the following: ‘sign up for updates’ or ‘subscribe to our newsletter’ or ‘join to hear more news’ etc?

If not, great carry on to the next item. If it does, don’t worry, we’ve all been there, myself included.  On my very first WordPress.com blog I had an option in my sidebar to ‘subscribe to my newsletter’.

Now I’m not saying you will never ever get email subscribers this way. I certainly had a few people sign up. However, my friends, we can do better.

In order to encourage more people to sign up to your newsletter you need to tell them, specifically, what they are getting and what the benefit to your email subscriber will be. There are literally hundreds of thousands of bloggers and businesses big and small; asking people to join the emailing list and become email subscribers.

And you can’t join every single emailing list you see, right? Because if you did, your inbox would literally die.  

So you need to outline to your website visitor exactly why they should choose your newsletter over all the others out there.

The inducement of getting ‘updates’ is only really compelling for die hard fans of yours, that genuinely love you and want to get all the new information they can from you. However, if someone is visiting for the first time, they might not know you well enough for ‘updates’ to be compelling.

So tell them: what do they get by being on your email list?

Some Examples:

• Sign up to the email list and receive new marketing videos every Wednesday
• Sign up to the emailing list and receive extra book content and previews of new chapters
• Sign up to the emailing list and get new recipes straight to your inbox every Sunday

 

Revamp Your Call to Action

Your call to action is simply any bit of content where you encourage people to join you and become an email subscriber. Now, you may notice above that I’ve purposefully used the phrase ‘sign up’ in the examples because this is the second thing I want to address. Sign up is not very exciting. I don’t feel particularly excited that I’ve ‘ signed up’ for something. So if, for example, let’s take our theoretical book seller example. In the example above the call to action read: 

Sign up to the emailing list and receive extra book content and previews of new chapters. Instead of using the phrase ‘sign up’ why don’t we change it to something a bit more exciting? For example:

Join the Book Club and receive extra book content and previews of new chapters

Am I more excited about joining the ‘Book Club’, as opposed to just ‘signing up the email list’? Yes, yes I am.

This goes for your actual button as well. Don’t go to all this trouble crafting the perfect copy to get people to sign up to your list and then have your button still say ‘sign up’. It’s so easy to forget but make sure your button is not only compelling but maybe also adds a sense of immediacy or urgency to encourage your potential email subscribers to take action now.

Some Examples

• Join The Club Now
• Become Part of the Gang Today
• Get Your Limited Edition VIP Pass

Create a Lead Magnet That Converts

When I started Creative and Coffee, I had the benefit of having run blogs for several years, as well as another online business. So the first thing I did when I started Creative and Coffee was to create a lead magnet. This ensured that Creative and Coffee had email subscribers rolling in right off the bat.

(I actually had email subscribers signed up before I even launched the website but I talk more about that over here if you are interested)

What is a lead magnet?

Well put simply, it’s a free gift or resource that you give to your audience in exchange for an email address.

Some examples of lead magnets:

• Checklist
• eBook
• Printables
• Recipes
• Templates
• Webinars

Basically, it is any form of content you can imagine that’s going to be useful to your audience, which you are going to give away for free, in order to entice people to join your email list.

The Two  Biggest Mistakes People Make When Creating Lead-Magnets

 

They Create a Lead-Magnet That Isn’t Right for Their Audience (and people don’t sign up)

So what do we mean when we say the lead magnet ‘isn’t right’? Well essentially, this is when you create a lead-magnet and no one signs up. Now, this isn’t to say that your lead magnet is bad. It might be a super useful and valuable piece of content.

However, if you have created your lead magnet without really thinking about, or knowing what your audience wants then it is unlikely that they will sign up. So, when creating your lead magnet, really consider what problem it is that your audience has and how you can create a resource to help solve that problem.

They Create a Lead-Magnet That Isn’t Right for Their Audience (and people don’t buy)

This is the second mistake I see, which is when people create an opt-in that works really well, they get people onto the list but no one buys. Now as this post is specifically about building a list, I won’t go into too much detail here but it is important to say that it’s crucial to not only build an email list but build an email list filled with the right people.

There might be many reasons why people might not be buying, however, one of the most common ones is that you haven’t created an opt-in that is attracting your ideal audience.

Trust me, an email list of thousands is great but if it’s full of a thousand people who aren’t interested in buying from you, then it is as frustrating as it is pointless.

Some questions to ask yourself:

1. What would my ideal customer want?
2. How does this opt-in lead on to my paid product?
3. Is there a clear path for my customer to follow, after they’ve opted in, which will logically lead them to my product?

Create Content Upgrades

These are basically a lead magnet but more specific. So, let’s say for example that we run a travel blog aimed a female travelers, exploring the world by themselves. Our general lead magnet, which we have on our home page and in our sidebar is 10 Tips For Females Travelling Alone.

Now a content upgrade is a more specific piece of content that instead of going within our sidebar, goes with a particular blog post.

So, if we continue with our example of a travel blog, we might have a blog post about our recent trip to Japan. Our content upgrade here might be a list of the ‘Top Ten Places of the Beaten Track to Visit in Japan’.

Why do content upgrade work so well?

Content upgrades are the highest converting form of lead magnet on my site. They work so well because they are tailored to be a natural next step to where your reader is right now. For example, if I have just read a post all about Japan, I’m going to be thinking about Japan and my trip there. So a recommendation of unusual places to go is something that is going to especially appeal to me within that moment.

So think to yourself, what is the next logical step my reader would want to take after reading this post? And then give that to them.

Some Examples

• Ten Quick & Healthy Lunches for Business Women on the Go (content upgrade: printable shopping list of all the ingredients they will need)
• Exercises You Can Safely Do with an Injured Back (content Upgrade: 10 exercises you can do at home)
• Ten Techniques to Use to Get More Sleep (content upgrade: a printable calendar to log your sleep patterns)

Keep the Ones You Have

I wanted to explore one final point to round off this post because it is one that can be sometimes overlooked. I, one hundred percent recommend, focusing as much, if not more attention on keeping your current subscribers happy and engaged.

A lot of the time I hear small businesses complain that they only have twenty or so people on their list. However, when I ask them what they are sending to that email list they say, oh well nothing yet I’m waiting to get more people on my list or well I just send them my weekly blog post at the moment.

Before you start vigorously trying to grow your email list make sure you have a plan in mind as to what you are going to send your subscribers once they are there.  Remember, building a list isn’t about the numbers, it’s about the people.

If you are just building an email list right now, for the sake of building an email list, I would really encourage you to sit down and work out what your end goal is first. This is so you can create a fluid journey for your customer from website reader, to email subscriber, to purchaser.