How to Increase Your Email List Subscriptions

Unlike that RSS icon, which didn’t offer much flexibility at all, there are plenty of ways you can ask people to subscribe to your email list. You get to choose the words you use, the visuals that go around them, where they sit on your site, and even how your newsletter is delivered.

Unfortunately, all that choice can make it all seem a little overwhelming. So here are six things you should focus on.

1. What’s the benefit?

When you’re trying to get people to subscribe to your list, don’t just say, “Subscribe to get our weekly newsletter”. Tell them what they’ll get out of it (besides your punctuality).

On Digital Photography School we’ve tried things like, “You’ll take better photos”, “You’ll get creative control of your camera”, “You’ll develop confidence as a photographer”. Could you say something similar that’s related to your niche?

And don’t just choose one. Test out different calls to action you came up with to see which one works best.

2. Offer an incentive

While you may think receiving your newsletter is a good enough reason for people to subscribe, it doesn’t hurt to offer something else. Yes, you may find that some people only subscribe to get your freebie. But with the right incentive this can dramatically increase your email list subscriptions.

3. Try different colors and visuals

One of the tests I did in the early days of my blog was trying different pictures around my calls to action. I had a designer put together some really beautiful pop-up kind of calls to action, and we set up the blog so each one would appear in rotation.

I also designed one of my own.

Now I’m no designer, and when I saw my pop-up next to the designers mine looked nowhere near as smooth as theirs. But it was a bit cleaner and simpler (not to mention uglier).

And when we got the test results, the conversion rate of mine was 30% higher than all the others.

So try out a few different options. Try different buttons, calls to action, colors, photos, bullet points, and other ways your calls to action look. It can make a big difference.

4. Try collecting emails in different ways

When I first added the email subscription option to Digital Photography School, it was just a text field that said something like, “Enter your email address to subscribe to our newsletter”. And after putting it there I was getting 30 to 40 subscribers every day.

About a year later I added a pop-up that appeared on my site 30 seconds after people arrived and asked them to subscribe. I was worried that it would seem too aggressive, and would affect my bounce rate. But what actually happened is my new subscriber count jumped to 300–350 subscribers per day. (And my bounce rate didn’t change one bit.)

There are plenty of other tools you can user to collect email addresses. And they’re pretty easy to set up. Mailchimp and Aweber have their own built-in tool, but other tools are available. Right now we’re using SumoMe, which also includes other email list-building tools. We also use OptinMonster, a conversion optimization toolkit.

5. Don’t forget your blog posts…

One of the most effective ways I’ve found to grow my list is by asking readers to become subscribers in the content I produce.

This is particularly effective when you’re doing a series of blog posts that run each day for a week, or even once a month for six months or so.

For example, in Digital Photography School we run a week-long series of posts once a month. And in every post we had a simple line at the start saying it was part of a series and that you could subscribe to get the rest. It was the first time we’d used that type of approach, and our subscriber numbers that week were around 50% higher than normal.

So try and build some anticipation with a series of blog posts and see how it works.

6. … or your archives

Another good place to put calls to action is in any hot posts you have in your archives.

You probably have at least one post that gets a lot of traffic from Google. And because people are coming straight from Google (and may never come back), you can afford to be a little more aggressive with these posts. Put a call to action to subscribe at the top of the post. You may want to even include a graphic.

You can do the same for other key pages on your site — your about page, your contact page, or any page that’s getting a lot of traffic.

Over to you

I hope I’ve got you thinking about how you can increase your email list subscriptions. Let us know what you’re going to do in the comments.

Source: https://problogger.com/increase-your-email-list-subscriptions/

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