Email newsletter subscribers are valuable soft leads that, with the right amount of gentle cajoling, could end up one day as full-fledged customers or clients. Email marketing is here to stay and it can help you generate more visitors and increase your income.

“The money is in the list” has been a common mantra for years in the internet marketing world, and there’s a good reason for that. When you consider the intensity of the noise on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media networks, it becomes clearer that the best place to communicate with potential customers is via their inboxes.

We are going to look at practical ways you can grow and convert visitors using email subscriptions.

• How do I Increase Email Subscriptions?
• How can you Convert New Visitors to Email Subscribers
• What is the best Email Marketing Platform?

How do I Increase Email Subscriptions?

1. Create High Quality Content

Ensuring high-quality content is important for two reasons: Poor quality content will not attract new subscribers and will lose existing subscribers. Your content must provide value to the visitors of your website; your target audience and persona – there is no way around this.

Read Also: Email Marketing – How to do it Right For Effective Sales Conversion

Ensure your content is targeted, insightful, educational and entertaining. If it is not worth reading, it is not worth signing up for more. Look at your engagement metrics, such as time on page and bounce rate.

2. Ask for only the Email Address

To grow a list, and to send a subscriber an email, all that’s required is an email address. Additional details are nice to have, such as a name or organisation, but asking for too many contact details decreases the likelihood of a successful sign-up.

Data quantity/quality is a common discussion in marketing circles, but by removing barriers, and taking less from the subscriber, you will gain more sign-ups. An email address also often allows you to identify name and organisation without having to compromise on conversion.

3. Give Incentive for Sign-up

What do your website visitors and prospects want you can offer? Apart from sending regular content, include an incentive for subscribers that is emailed to them upon sign-up such as partner discounts or competition entries or exclusive content. Everyone likes freebies, and this is a perfect opportunity to offer something free in return for the email subscription.

4. Use Conversion Triggers

To convert more subscribers, remind visitors of the gravitas of your email subscription. Make it clear that you already have a number of subscribers that benefit from your content, as well as your data handling policy.

The goal is to build trust in the email subscription that you offer – so use trust content, such as social proof, to ensure you are converting as high as you possibly can.

5. Remove Distraction

If the key conversion goal of the web page where you feature a blog subscription form is a subscription sign-up, then do not promote any other unnecessary elements. Avoid multiple call outs and offers that may confuse the website visitor. One web page; one desired action; one CTA/form means that the visitor can focus and realise the benefits of your subscription offering.

6. Use Positive Statement and Active Voice

Every bit of copy within the subscription CTA and form should be written in a positive manner to motivate the visitor to take action. Always make your CTA positive by focusing on what the user will gain (fear tactics don’t work in B2B pharma). Also, use the present tense to convey the CTA as happening in the moment (right now) and present the benefits in an active voice (subject + verb + object).

7. Provide Different Subscription Types

If your organisation produces a range of content and topics, allow your users to choose specifically what content they would like to receive.

By doing this, you may limit the number of future sent emails, but the number of people signing up will increase because the subscriber is able to pick a topic that is relevant for their particular needs and avoid unnecessary ones. If you can, also give them an option on email frequency.

8. Create an Obvious CTA Button

The CTA button is just as important as the copy on the form or the placement of the sign-up form. CTA buttons should be unmissable as it is the conversion trigger. Create urgency in your CTA copy and use a colour that stands out, keeping in-line with your brand guidelines.

Explore the psychology of colours – red is usually a good choice as it stands out and is also exciting and warm that evokes strong emotions.

9. Make it a Risk-free Transaction

The subscriber will also see risk in a transaction that requires handing over personal data, even if it is just an email address. The risk is that the email address will be sold to a third-party provider or forwarded to another department where the likelihood is that the subscriber will eventually be sold to at some point.

Never sell data or misuse a subscription; make it clear that signing up is risk-free and all they are signing up for is blog subscriptions. Keep to this promise.

10. Create Gated Content to Create Demand

Blog posts are a great way to get visitors to the website. And if those blog posts are high quality, there will always be visitors who will subscribe to receive those blog posts in their inbox.

But gated content, which sits behind a form, can generate many more subscribers. Create content that your audiences will want access to, such as helpful cheat-sheets, templates, toolkits and checklists.

11. Create a Landing Page

Newsletter specific sign-up pages are a great way to build subscribers as the traffic hitting the page will likely convert since they have found their way to this sort of page in the first place.

Set up the landing page like any other landing page – with a headline, engagement/conversion triggers and CTA – and send traffic to the page via your distribution channels, such as your social media platforms.

12. Generate Subscribers from Facebook

Facebook allows a number of ways to generate sign-ups and integrates with mailing providers via their range of apps. You can also create landing pages via Facebook that, apart from building your subscriber list, can also build your Facebook page likes.

With a large pool of potential contacts, Facebook is an effective platform to consider and assess whether you can start building your email lists.

13. Promote your Newsletters Creatively

Every page on your website has the ability to generate subscribers. Consider using the “About” or “Team” or “Contact Us” page to discreetly promote your blog subscription.

Look at your analytics and find the pages that are performing better than others and provide the option to sign up to your email newsletters. On the team page, for example, allow visitors to subscribe to updates for specific team members.

14. Use Pop-ups only When Necessary

Intrusive pop-ups hinder the user experience and can turn website visitors away. But used appropriately, and discreetly, they are very effective.

Publish a pop-up form, for blog content subscription, on all pages of your blog and/or news section and ensure that the pop-up appears after an elapsed time of 30-60 seconds after users have shown a level of engagement that suggests that visitor is interested in your content.

15. Consider Locking your Content

Content locking is where most of a piece of content is locked and visitors are required to subscribe to access and read the whole article. This is common with large publishing companies with lots of authority in the industry.

Which is why you should use this tactic sparingly, and maybe use it on breakthrough and highly researched content that visitors are likely to want access. This is a tactic with a similar principle to gated content.

16. Encourage Subscriber to Share your Email

Most email marketing providers will have a built-in feature that allows subscribers to forward emails on to their network of friends and colleagues. (You do not want subscribers to simply forward the email via their email client as it gives the recipient of the forwarded email the ability to unsubscribe the original subscriber.)

Word of mouth marketing as such is built around trust and is, therefore, an effective method of generating subscribers.

17. Use Sidebars

The last thing we want to do is disrupt our own website visitors when they are reading the content on our web pages. But there are sections of the website that can be used to promote a newsletter subscription without disruption a browsing experience.

Announcement bars (at the top of the page) is a good start, as well as the footer and sidebar. If it doesn’t disrupt the user experience, it’s fine to adopt.

18. Use Email Signature to Generate Traffic

Possibly one of the simplest and often unused subscriber-building opportunity is within our personal email signatures. Just dropping a CTA and a link to a sign-up form in the email signature will generate a steady flow of clicks to the sign-up landing page.

You will be emailing contacts every day in your role, and the signature will be seen by everyone. You can even go a step further and drop the CTA at the end of your email (within the body); a personal request goes a long way.

19. Ask Subscribers Face to Face

We operate within an industry that favours a face-to-face approach which means that opportunities for effective face-to-face conversations are at large.

When in discussions with prospects, partners or friends, casually ask if that person would like to subscribe to the insightful content you are creating. If the time is wrong to pitch your product or service, pitch your email subscription. When you’re at events and trade shows, offer something to get that consent.

20. Ask for Feedback

We’ll conclude as we opened, with content. If a customer is about to leave your website without converting or signing up, why not ask for feedback? You can do this in a non-intrusive way on exit intent and all you could ask the visitor to do is click on an emoji that represents the appropriate emotion.

Then, you will be able to gauge if your content is worthy of subscribing to. Many website builders provide feedback features out of the box and plugins are also available.

How can you Convert New Visitors to Email Subscribers

Many online merchants have experienced traffic surges due to the pandemic. Converting that new traffic to immediate purchases can be challenging. The next best option is enticing visitors to subscribe to your email communications.

Find the source of current subscribers. Email subscribers come from dozens of sources. The first objective is to identify the top referring channels.

To do this, create a conversion goal in Google Analytics (Conversions > Goals) for your email sign-up or confirmation page. Check the sources of the most subscribers and the most purchases — they may be different.

Once you’ve identified the referring channels, look at the paths of those visitors on your site that led to the sign-up. Knowing those behaviors can help focus your optimization efforts.

Typical sources of new subscribers include:

• Social media posts,
• Articles and other free content,
• Organic search traffic,
• Paid search traffic,
• Display ads,
• Affiliate sites,
• Contests or promotions.

Target the sources that produce the most subscribers.

Provide an incentive. Email subscribers are valuable. Thus offering an incentive can be worth the effort and expense. Strong incentives, in my experience, are:

• Contests or giveaways,
• Gift or cart starter,
• Exclusive subscriber-only content,
• Discounts and free shipping,
• Rewards program.

Feedback and notifications. Requesting feedback such as surveys, product reviews, or quizzes can encourage sign-ups, as can notifications, as in:

• Availability of out-of-stock items,
• New product launches,
• Nearby store openings,
• Holiday shipping deadlines.

Increase sign-up locations. Adding more opportunities for a visitor to sign up will ultimately help conversions. Email sign up boxes should be easy to locate on every page of your site. Shoppers know to scroll to the bottom of a page to access info such as “about us,” shipping, and customer service. It’s a good place for an email sign-up, too.

Use pop-ups. Capturing email addresses via pop-ups is popular because it works. To maximize effectiveness, however, consider the following.

Dos:

• Do place pop-ups at the end of content or page exit.
• Do present a clear call to action with creative imagery.
• Do request feedback or engagement.
• Do test! What works for one site may not work for others. Optimize sign-ups with non-stop testing.

Don’ts:

• Don’t throw a pop-up immediately when a visitor lands on a page.
• Don’t take up the entire screen with the pop-up.
• Don’t block device-controlled autofill as it streamlines the process for the user.
• Don’t ask for too much information.

Find partners. Look for opportunities to partner with your affiliates, sites with complementary content or products, and co-registration options. Opt-Intelligence and AddShoppers, for example, can promote your email sign-up to a network of potential partners.

Unsubscribes

It’s important to grow email sign-ups. But the key is quality, relevant subscribers that will not unsubscribe. Check your analytics to understand the sources of unsubscribes. (An unsubscribe confirmation page can facilitate.)

A critical data point is comparing the subscribe and unsubscribe dates. If the dates are close, try to determine where the subscriber came from. He could be taking advantage of a lucrative offer — not long-term engagement.

How do you get your first 100 Email Subscribers?

Compared to social media, email has a lot more stability when it comes to communication. People may not log on to Facebook as much as they used to, or maybe they’ve dropped their Twitter account permanently. When it comes to email, you have a dedicated channel to talk to your audience that doesn’t change as often as social media does.

Directly contacting your audience gives you the opportunity to bring a visitor or reader back to the website over and over again. Whether your e-commerce business is having a promotion, or you’ve added new content to your website that you want your audience to see, direct email has a lot of value in your relationship with your audience.

1. Give away something

Offer something in exchange for an email address. Whether it’s a white paper, a pack of royalty-free graphics, a t-shirt, or anything that makes sense for your company, being able to deliver it by email is a great way to get subscribers. Make sure that you obtain the necessary permissions (e.g. an opt-in) when you are getting email addresses.

2. Use all the copy available to you

On many online articles, there will be a line of text underneath the title — that’s the byline. It’s a great spot to offer a service, such as alerting readers when new posts are made. When someone signs up for the updates, they’re opting into getting your emails. This is similar to the Instagram post notifications feature, which allows users to be notified when a certain user posts.

3. Use a widget

Having a space on every page dedicated to getting email subscribers is a good thing. You might choose to use a widget on the sidebar of your page to ask for emails.

However, if you have any significant length of content, that area will disappear as readers scroll down to continue on with your article. For maximum impact, make the widget stand out to really draw attention to it.

4. Use tools

Familiar with website tools? Try our favourite Opt-In monster , a set of tools aimed at collecting emails. There are so many options to help grow your list with opt-in monsters or sumome. Below are a few ideas.

There is a fine line to be toed when it comes to these tools. Overuse could be seen as intrusive and lead to a negative perception.

1. Make it a menu option.
   If you have the background knowledge on how your users are navigating through your website, there could be a big opportunity here. This works best in combinations with the method of giving away something. If you add a link to your giveaways in your menu, you can collect subscribers through that option as well.
2. Prompts after exit intent.
   This method relies on Javascript to track cursor and keyboard actions of website visitors . When the script senses the visitor is intending to leave the website (certain cursor movements or keyboard actions), a pop-up will appear, giving you the opportunity to ask for an email address.
3. Content specific extras.
   Again, this tip works best when combined with having something to give away. That give away, however, has to be relevant to why the reader is on that specific page in the first place — maybe you had a great article, interesting photos, or a how to guide. By making your content cohesive and beneficial for readers, and including a bonus that builds on what you’ve written, you can get more people wanting to hear what you have to say.
4. Welcome gate.
   Usually shown to first-time visitors of a website, the gate is a subscription box that loads before the webpage is shown. The gate can be modified to be shown in front of any page that any newcomer visits, just the homepage, or a strategy that suits your needs. You don’t necessarily have to give something away for this, either. Simply state what you intend to deliver to the reader that submits their email address, and follow through.
5. Landing pages.
   This can be used in conjunction with promotions through other channels. If you have a social following that you interact with, promote yourself through a link to a landing page that asks for an opt-in. Whether you’re giving something away or providing more information, you’ll be able to funnel a casual audience member (e.g. passive follower on Twitter) to an engaged audience member (one that opts in to receiving your emails.)
6. Contests.
   Continue to convert your casual audience members to engaged ones by giving them a reason to engage. As an example, run a poll on your website to get your readership’s opinion. Ask for the email address to count as a vote, and get their opt-in through this method. You could further the interaction as well by giving something away (a white paper, templates for their own use, etc.)

No matter what tip or tips you use, you still have to get people to your website! Like all businesses, you rely on traffic, and converting that traffic into sales. How can you get more traffic?

1. Be the poster child.
   You might have hated that one kid in your class growing up — always the example that you were supposed to follow — but if you can be that person, it can pay off. When you use someone else’s advice, let them know, and share the impact that it had on you. Dig for resources online, track the ones you use, follow them to a T, and then let the creator know what you did, how you did it (which should be exactly as outlined in their original resource), and what the impact was.
   
   After you share with the creator, share with your audience! Your readership deserves to know what makes you successful, as it may help them in the future. Let the original creator know, again, about your success and how you shared it with your own audience. The original creator may share your results as an endorsement, helping lead traffic back to you.
2. The social formula.
   There are a few steps to the social formula. What it consists of is:
3. Writing your content — a blog post, an article, whatever suits your company. It has to be great quality, and of significant length. Do your research — what are people looking for? Try to find comments in other articles about the topic you are writing about, and make sure you’ve addressed them in your own content.
4. Make a list — find the current most-shared articles on the topic of your original content. You can use buzzsumo.com to find these. If your topic was on “how to grow website traffic,” you would probably use terms like build a website, increase site traffic, and so on. Using Buzzsumo, you can find who’s shared an article — voila, you have now found your audience.
   Next, contact them! There are many ways to get the email addresses of this audience. Reach out to them and explain that you noticed they shared the article in question, and that you’ve written content that has more information about the subject. Link them to your post, and watch the traffic come.
5. Reach out.
   You probably see this yourself as you surf the Internet — users commenting on blogs, joining forums, talking to Facebook groups, all the with the intent to increase traffic to the content they’re promoting. How can you do this yourself?
   
   If visitors are coming your site because of Facebook, use it! For example, let’s say that you have a website that you want to share with small business owners. See who on Facebook is in your target market, e.g. groups specifically for small business owners in an appropriate geographic area. Join these groups and engage with them, genuinely. Add feedback on posts and comments, read what is relevant to them at this moment via shared articles, and more.
   
   As you continue to engage with the community, make posts yourself. You don’t necessarily have to be promoting your website itself, but contribute to the well-being of the group. This brings you to the top of mind, and drives more traffic to your website. Don’t spam, though — you need to show since interest and deliver on what you say.

With the number of tactics outlined above, it can be overwhelming to know where to begin. Some will be more appropriate for your website and email list than others. Gaining email addresses and driving site traffic takes time, but all it takes is starting on one — and maybe only one — tip to get the ball rolling for you.

What is the best Email Marketing Platform?

A good email marketing service should enable you to create highly engaging email newsletters with an easy user interface (ideally drag-and-drop editor).

You should be able to easily send bulk emails that are actually personalized and targeted without a lot of work. This is also known as marketing automation.

Aside from that, your email marketing service must make it easy to manage your contact list, segment users into groups, and track the performance of your email marketing campaigns. Most importantly, a good email service provider ensures that your email campaigns do not end up in the spam folder.

Having said that, let’s take a look at some of the most popular email marketing service providers and how they stack up against each other.

1. Constant Contact

Constant Contact is one of the largest and fastest-growing email marketing services in the world. It is also the most easy to use and beginner-friendly email marketing service. You can easily manage your email lists, contacts, email templates, the marketing calendar, and more.

Each account gives you access to easy tracking and reporting, built-in social media sharing tools, free image library, list segmentation, Facebook ads integration, and a powerful eCommerce integration for Shopify stores.

Their Email Plus accounts also come with powerful features like email automation, drip campaigns, surveys & polls, coupons, online donations, and subject line A/B testing which helps you send targeted emails to maximize your open rate.

Constant Contact offers unmatched customer support with live chat, phone calls, email, community support, and a vast library of helpful resources.

Aside from online training, they also offer in-person live seminars across the United States. This allow small business owners to quickly learn the basics of email marketing and start using it to grow their business like a pro.

For all the reasons above, we rate Constant Contact the best email marketing service for small businesses.

Constant Contact has a 60-day free trial (no credit card required). After that their pricing starts as low as $20/month. WPBeginner users can use our Constant Contact coupon code to get an additional 20% off.

2. SendinBlue

SendinBlue is a complete SMS and email marketing software for businesses. They are one of the fastest growing email marketing platforms in Europe.

It is an extremely easy to use platform with excellent tools to create beautiful and highly engaging emails. Their simple drag and drop email editor is perfect for beginners with no experience in email marketing.

SendinBlue includes beginner-friendly marketing automation tools that allow you to send transactional emails, create workflows for automatic follow-up emails, and segment users. It can also select the best time to send bulk emails using their AI algorithms to ensure the best email deliverability.

SendinBlue offer a completely free email marketing plan that lets you send up to 300 emails per day, but all your emails will have their branding. Paid plans start from $25 per month. You can also include SMS to your account, but the pricing will vary based on your sending requirements.

They have improved their premium plan to recently include more advanced features like landing page builder, live chat, CRM, and Facebook ads integration. This means users now get more value for the same price.

SendinBlue also offers a separate SMTP bulk email marketing service which you can use to power automated or transactional emails from your WordPress site. You do not need this for email marketing campaigns, but it’s a nice to have feature if you have a large website, and you want automatic real-time content based emails.

3. Drip

Drip is a powerful enterprise email marketing platform for eCommerce, bloggers, and digital marketers. They offer a wide range of tools to make marketing automation, sales funnels, and personalization easy.

Their email software offer seamless integration for all popular website builders including WordPress and WooCommerce. This allows you to easily add pop-ups/sign up forms to your website and capture more leads.

What sets Drip apart from the competition like Campaign Monitor is their intelligent marketing automation tools, smarter email segmenting, split testing features, list groups, and a visual workflow builder. These features allow you to reach targeted customers in your email list to get more sales.

Support options at Drip include live chat support, webinars, automation training, detailed courses, free guides and excellent documentation.

We use Drip for several of our businesses because it allows us to send bulk emails while connecting and engaging with every customer on a personal level using their smart eCommerce marketing automation.

Even though it’s a bit pricey, we believe Drip is the best email marketing software for eCommerce websites and business owners who want more advanced features to maximize their marketing efforts.

Drip offers a free trial, and their plans starts from $49 / month which includes all their features.

4. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is a robust email marketing platform for professional bloggers, authors, and marketers. It is extremely easy to use and incredibly powerful.

ConvertKit’s unique feature is that allows you to easily offer content upgrades and incentives with email signup forms. It also comes with easy to manage auto-responders allowing you to send drip emails from their emailing service.

Read Also: How To Earn Money Online With Email List Marketing

With ConvertKit, you can easily segment subscribers into those who are interested and those who have already purchased. This helps you increase conversions with automated emails that feel more personal. In marketing terms, this is called targeted email marketing.

ConvertKit offers email-based support and has an extensive knowledge base with great learning material. A lot of ConvertKit features are specifically designed for creators and professional bloggers that’s why we rate them the best email marketing service for professional bloggers.

ConvertKit offers a 14-day free trial, and their pricing starts from $29/month. They also offer a 30-day refund policy.

5. AWeber

AWeber is one of oldest and most popular email marketing service providers in the world. They offer a wide-range of tools for small and medium sized businesses to manage their email marketing.

Getting started with AWeber is easy. It connects seamlessly to most platforms including WordPress. You get access to ready to use html email templates, list management, autoresponders, and email tracking with detailed insights.

Support options include live chat, phone support, email support, live webinars, and a vast library of how-tos and tutorials.

AWeber offers a limited free plan for up to 500 subscribers. After that, their pricing starts from $19/month. You can also signup for quarterly or annual plans to save even more.

Finally

Growing and converting your visitors to with email subscriptions will not be an easy task, but with the tips mentioned above your job is easier already.