Email newsletters work. They captivate, they engage, and they are a powerful tool for turning soft leads in to active customers of the future. However, an average office worker receives 121 emails per day. How do you get people to sign-up to your newsletter subscription when their inbox is already inundated? How can you succeed in hooking the potential customer, and thus getting their attention, for the newsletter itself? You can have the best newsletters available, but if people aren’t subscribing, they are useless.
Follow our top tips for encouraging people to subscribe to your newsletters.
1) Let Them See You
First of all, have a little think about yourself not as the business owner, or marketer, or manager, but simply as yet another person visiting a website. How easy is it to identify that there is something worth signing up to?
When a potential customer visits your website, they are looking for information, and they are looking for it fast. You have just 10 seconds to hook someone before they leave your website, so within that 10 seconds they need to have been enticed in to signing up – easily.
That means, the newsletter sign-up needs to be prominent and highly visible, and everywhere that it might be seen – that includes social media channels, your email signature, and more. It needs to be an embedded data capture, and not a link to elsewhere, whilst being short and sweet. Consider a pop-up.
2) What’s in it for them?
Like it or not, your potential subscriber needs to know exactly how they benefit from signing up. This means you need to offer them an incentive to make it worth their while. What are your visitors getting as an immediate reward for subscribing? Perhaps they get a free e-book, or a guide, or even a discount. Then explain what they will be getting longer term through your newsletter subscription in terms of valuable content, discounts, and more. They need to know that handing over their email address is worth it for them.
3) Be a Valuable Source of Authority
Being sought after because you are a known source of valuable insight will bring great rewards in terms of people seeking out your content. If they can see the value of your content to other users, and to themselves, in a quick visit to your site, then they are more likely to believe that your newsletter will offer them something they need.
However, also ensure you have a likeable brand persona. You’re expecting readers to engage with your content – it needs to be pitched in their style. Postman newsletters can be edited to really suit your brand, using different fonts, colours and styles. Create an account here. Maybe even ditch the term ‘newsletter’ and give your newsletter a branded capturing name instead.
4) Let Them See What They Are Getting
One of the biggest problems, in getting people to sign-up for newsletters, is that you need to get them over the fear that they don’t know what they are signing up for. Don’t just have email newsletters as part of your strategy without careful thought about their content. If you can show them a past newsletter, that was compelling and clearly worth a reader’s time, then they are more likely to sign-up themselves for the future. Let them see what they would be missing if they don’t sign up. You finish up with a prompt for them to see the next step in the next newsletter.
5) Make Subscribers Your Favoured Web Visitors
Another way to get them to sign-up is to prove that they are valued as website users. Think about your user experience of the site and how elements can be made available to subscribers only. Psychologically we are drawn to what we can’t have, so make valuable content a condition of subscription and not just a free-for-all.
6) Are Your Newsletters Shareable?
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the only way of getting a sign-up is by someone signing up themselves. In each and every newsletter, make it possible for your reader to share the content with their contacts via email or social media. They are self-selecting those who are likely to be interested in your content, and your business, so a valuable avenue to pursue.
7) Refine and Test, then Test Again
Digital marketing is continually changing. Therefore, test and analyse what works, and what doesn’t. So once you’ve got your differing subscriptions offerings up and running, test them to see what works. Where are people signing up, and what works well?
Action these steps and you’ll hugely increase subscribers to your newsletters.
