Your inbox is your personal space. On the web you have plenty of addresses and spaces, for example social sites like Facebook, Instagram etc. have profiles, other sites like Quora, Linkedin, Medium has blog post options and there are others who offer sub-domains and other form of addresses. The difference between these and your email is the simple fact that your inbox is much more private than any other form of online presence.
As a marketer, your target should always be about getting as close to your customers as possible and reaching and occupying a good deal of inbox space is one of the best ways to go about it.
The first step in email marketing is to get as many email subscribers as possible. These subscribers can be received from your blog, social media traffic, guest posts etc.
Here, in this article, we will cover several ways by which you can boost your email subscribers.
1. Add an email subscription pop-up: One of the very first things that one should do after making their blog live is to setup a site-wide email subscription popup. This is the single, most effective way to get a lot of subscribers. Even if your blog has very few visitors, still you will see regular emails subscribers growing.
This process can be further improved by creating an ebook and donating it for the subscribers. In that case, your email pop-up will say something like – get this ebook for free, just enter your email id and we will send the free ebook to your inbox.
2. Do Guest Posts: When you guest post on someone else’s blog, you bring in the audience from the host blog to your own blog. The same thing happens with the subscribers.
When you post on a popular blog, several people follow you from the popular blog and many of them end up as subscribers. Much of this process depends on how well your post does on the popular blog where you are guest posting. Generally, people consider you an authority figure since you got the opportunity to post on a bigger blog. This boost in reputation also helps you to gain subscribers quickly.
3. Exit Intent Popup: We discussed pop-ups earlier, but this is different. This is the evil popup, one that knows when you are about to leave the site. The moment you even think about closing the site, this popup jumps over and surprises you with a gift offer of some kind, asking you to subscribe before you leave the site.
As the same suggests, your visitor is already about to exit so why not try and do a final pitch and see if he subscribers. It is worth a try?
4. Gated Content: Am not a big fan of Gated content and am sure even search engines like Google isn’t a big fan of blocking content. But guess what, people do it anyway. Recently, I even had to download an app to get access to a content that I searched from Google and if a search engine can rank gated content, then I guess it is fine to do it ourselves.
While we are suggesting some very technical points and tips here, but as you might already be guessing, there’s free wordpress plugins that has all these features. So just install and activate it and use the benefits it brings.
5. Do a Giveaway: Giving things away for free always help. Host a contest of some kind and start giving away stuff for free. You can set your rules, you can even use something like RaffleCopter to manage the giveaway. And in the rules, mention that subscribing to your list is a requirement of your contest giveaway which will automatically boost your newsletter signup.
Giveaways need not be expensive, you can giveaway ebooks or other digital assets that you might already have, but surely nothing can beat cash giveaway even if it is just a few bucks.
6. Ask your subscribers to share your emails further: Just like any other form of content, emails from your newsletters can be shared and forwarded. But it does not really happen much on its own. This is where you can be sneaky and mention in your newsletter that people can easily share this email with their friends and family. This small little mention can help you in reaching more inboxes and eventually some of them will subscribe as well.
7. Take part in Interviews: Just like guest posts, when you give an interview, the readers of the blog which is hosting your interview marks you as an authority person and starts to follow you. In most cases such followers becomes subscribers and if your newsletters are good, such subscribers tends to stay around longer.
If you are wondering where you can give interviews then start searching for such interviews. You will find several blogs that hosts interviews, just send them an outreach emails and give them your interview.
8. Drop extra fields from the subscription form: An email signup form should only have two fields, which is name and email id. Most people skip the name field which is a bad idea because you should never send unsolicited emails. Other than that, you don’t need any more fields.
Make it easy for people to signup, if you have way too many fields then most people will just skip the whole process.
9. Talk about your newsletter on your social profiles: Social media networks like Twitter, Facebook or Instagram are excellent places to talk about your newsletters. All you need to do is to post a status update, give a link to your newsletter and ask people to subscribe and get the goodies.
Social media is a busy place and to make people take a decision your pitch should be short and catchy. It should be tempting so that people can quickly jump on it and signup.
10. Place a permanent signup to newsletter form below your blog posts: Popups are good but sometimes they don’t work. Some people, especially those that are old ones who have grown up to hate popups because they had a nasty past with popups, might not take a popup action. This is where a simple approach of placing a signup form helps. If the user wants to signup, they will, else they will ignore it and move on. However, do consider this, if the user has read the post in full, chances are that he might want to signup for more such useful content.
Getting email subscribers is a process and it does take a lot of time. One needs to keep patience and whenever someone signups, take that subscriber as an asset and keep working on sending good content to every subscriber that signs up.