Increasing Newsletter Signups

Increasing Newsletter Signups

Whether it be effort, money, time or all of the above, in my opinion, there is always a cost of bringing traffic to your site. After spending resources in bringing a visitor, isn’t it a shame that you lose out on the possibility of furthering your relationship with them once they leave? The solution is simple. Ask for permission to re-market to them.

There was a reason why someone visited your website. The trick is finding out exactly what that reason was and offering them something (either a complimentary product or service) that they simply cannot refuse.

For instance, let’s say you operate a gardening website. Most users visiting your website would be arriving from a link on another webiste, a search engine or some form of marketing material (business card, flyer, paid ads etc…). Here are a few steps to consider when trying to increase your newsletter signups.

Step 1: Determining your traffic type
What are visitors looking for when they arrive? Since you run a gardening website, you can assume that they are looking for gardening related information. The more specific you are in making your determination, the better you would be able to make an offer that is difficult to refuse.

Step 2: Concept out a potential offer
Once you have determined exactly what your users are looking for (gardening related information in this case), it’s time to concept out your offer. An easy offer in this case would be a newsletter of gardening tips. Since the website is about gardening, let’s also assume that this is a passion or hobby of yours and you have some knowledge in the subject matter. Then coming up with a few tips a month would be easy.

Step 3: Run your newsletter signup form
It’s not easy trying to build a list for secondary marketing but if you never start, it will never happen. Try putting the offer on more expensive real estate such as near the top of each page, or in a prominent area in your navigation bar. Continue testing to see which placement works best for your visitor type.

Step 4: Run and tweak
Run this for a few days, weeks or months and note the number of users signing up. Concept out another potential offer and run that for roughly the same amount of impressions. This time, it could be an offer to alert your visitors of specials and discounts from major retail gardening centers. Keeping track of impressions is important. Running an offer during a good traffic week could mean more signups than a whole month when traffic has dipped. Roughly keep tabs on the number of times your offer has been served up to calculate a sign up rate during your test period. Here is the formula for calculating your newsletter sign up rate.

Keep testing and changing the offer at set intervals of impressions and in a few weeks/months, you will begin to see which offer(s) generate the highest signup rate. You can then go back and further tweak your offer. The most important factor in trying to increase your signup rate is Step 1 (above), determining your traffic type. Only when you know what your users are looking for can you begin to make offers that they absolutely cannot refuse.

Now that you have the basis for increasing your newsletter memberships, find out how you can run an automated Push Email campaign to market to your new list.