Did you know among the top three uses of email marketing, Newsletters tops the list at 66%, followed by Promotional Content (54%) and Welcome Series Emails (42%)?
Email Newsletters are an effective way to help your brand stay on top of your readers’ mind and expose your brand to your audience; allowing for a regular engagement and as a constant trigger to bring them back to your site for updates and new brand stories. And not to mention - For every dollar you spent on email marketing, there’s an average return of $44 on investment, right back at you!
However, for both you and your audience/customers to reap its benefit and to create a win-win story; your audiences need to essentially sign up to receive the newsletters – In other words, you need to build up your email list; which many marketers believe, is a prerequisite or the ‘necessary evil’ to make any substantial money from online business.
Without further ado, let us jump into exploring 5 such techniques, which will quickly help you increase your newsletter subscriptions:
1. Direct Your Traffic To High Performing Lead Magnets
This doesn’t mean you need to have thousands of visitors to your website; any little traffic will do. First up, you need to figure out which of your landing pages converts best on your website; then funnel whatever existing traffic you have towards these pages.
For instance, you can also place a link at the website’s main navigation menu, as done here by socialtriggers.com on the right corner as ‘Free Updates’:
Here’s another one from social media examiner on the ‘side bar’ of their main page, inviting visitors to opt in with a giveaway/offer of ‘Free Social Media Marketing Report’:
The trick here is to help your visitors to have easy access to these lead magnets, allow for an easy navigation. But what if the landing pages are not converting as expected? In such a scenario, you should be improving them; a plain ‘email grab’ form may not quite cut it.
Take for example how smartblogger has used the same lead magnet for years on end, and it works wonders for them:
See how they’re giving away a great resource (eBook) absolutely free, but are also offering their newsletter ‘weekly blog tips’ in exchange for the visitors’ email. The copywriting skills for this lead magnet is what cuts the deal for the audience; instead of simply saying ‘download these headline tips’, they lure the visitors with a compelling value proposition – ‘a quick way to write viral posts’- thus improving the chances for opt-ins.
2. Leveraging Social Media – The ‘Twitter Bio’ Trick
A great way to promote your Newsletter subscription landing page is via your Twitter Bio, and the URL link provided by twitter – You can actually use these precious real estates to feature two different lead magnets and boost your email list.
For example, let’s look at the bio of blogger/internet marketer Brent Jones below; he is luring his followers to download a free e-book via a short link under his name. It’s a quick fix to take your followers to a landing page, which can then usher to opt-in for a newsletter sign up, while they download the freebies:
Here’s another one from LinkedIn Expert, Viveka Von Rosen; who is using one of the links to direct users for a giveaway on generating high quality leads; whereas she uses the other to funnel traffic to her website, Linkedintobusiness:
Once, the users click through to get to her site, she nudges them to download a compelling resource concerning ‘LinkedIn Lead Generation’, which doubles as a lead magnet to help build her email list:
3. The ‘Subscriber Only’ Exclusive Content Vault
Here’s a neat hack that offers more value to your visitors, while it also spikes your subscriber rates.
The idea is to take the best of your blogs or how-to guides and curate them into dozen or more useful resources and put them into a ‘vault’ under the name ‘Exclusive Content’; along with other menu on your homepage/blog page.
An example below from Blogging Wizard, illustrates how once the readers click on the ‘exclusive content’ link, they’re directed to a high-converting landing page featuring 15+ resources:
The resources can only be accessed via a password, which is mailed to you once you sign up for it. This way you’re getting a life-time free access to a vault of guides, checklists and templates.
Melyssa Griffin, an expert on online business and entrepreneurship, has similar trick up her sleeve. Her landing page directs users to join 100,000 others to access her free resources by subscribing/signing up:
4. Personalise your landing page
Personalising your landing page adds more value and authenticity to attract more subscribers. If you are a solopreneur, like the one above (Melyssa Grifffin), then a picture of you would certainly make for more opt-ins than the one without.
You can always put the C-level executives’ image to represent your brand; for instance a German financial site, Finanztip puts up their editor-in-chief’s image on their landing pages, to make it more personal:
Here’s another one from Unbounce, inviting users to signup for their newsletters. The co-founder of Unbounce, Oli Gardner is featured on this landing page:
5. Attract With ‘Delightful Designs’
When you add in little delightful details with the signup process, it entertains the readers while it also helps to keep the visitors focused on the job at hand and complete the task.
With the drop-off rates being high in the signup process, it is extremely effective to give the signup process a special touch for more opt-ins. An example below is a gif image from Patrick Rogan:
Click here to view the animated gif image
Just like the design above, you can always use your creativity to come up with other cool works that stand out from the crowd, making it easy for the users to give you their email addresses in exchange for a little dazzle.
Finally…
We hope you’ve found some neat ways to increase your newsletter subscription rates; whichever way you look at it, building you email list through creative and optimized landing pages; is one sure way to gain more subscribers for your brand; and eventually turn them into raving customers!
Call Andy Fox (me) on (03) 5249 5570 or email andy@element7digital.com.au
Our Website is www.element7digital.com.au
