Guest post: 8 easy tips to increase your opt-in email list

Guest post: 8 easy tips to increase your opt-in email list

Most people want to build a loyal website following and one of the best ways to do that is to allow your visitors the ability to opt-in to your email list. I have stumbled upon some good ways to increase your conversion to signup rates over the years. Here are my top 8 favorite ways that you can really boost your list numbers:

1. The most obvious tip would be to not hide your email signup form. Keep it above the fold and make it clear and easy for people to signup for your email messages.
2. Less required fields = more signups. I have found that the less fields you ask for is directly related to the number of people that will actually signup. Instead of having a large signup form asking for Name, Email Address, Address and Other fields, try just asking for First Name and Email Address. After you have that you have these 2 fields you can trigger an auto-responder email at any time asking for more information.
3. Offer incentives only available to people on your email list. This can be as simple as “Sign up and get valuable coupons or promotions via email before everyone else”. Sometimes this is all the incentive that a user needs to see in order to click the submit button and opt-in.
4. Contests. Offer a contest for people that are on your list. Again this can be a simple giveaway “Everyone on our email list is eligible to win our monthly prizes” With a link to the details about the contest.
5. Signup during the checkout process. Capturing opt-ins on the checkout page is one of the most important ways to get valuable subscribers onto your list. You must offer the customers the option of signing up during the checkout process. These are your most valuable customers and you need to keep in touch with them. If you are using BlueHornet, like I do, then you would use the BlueHornet API in order to pass the variables to the email database if the visitor checks the box to opt-in.
6. Add a signup box while leaving a product review or a blog comment. This is a great way to get new subscribers. Just look at how many comments or product reviews you have on your site. If you had a simple checkbox in this form you could allow your visitors to subscribe while leaving a product review, blog comment or even filling out your contact form. Very valuable subscriber data that will add up fast!
7. Ask for referrals in your email. Every once in a while promote the forward to a friend feature, in your email marketing software, and actually ask them to forward the email to friends. It never hurts to ask for help from your subscribers and most will like to help you. Make sure you have a link to subscribe to the email list in all the emails that you send out so people that get the message forwarded can easily find the opt-in information.
8. Social Media. Set up a tab or a link on your Facebook page asking for fans to subscribe to your email newsletter. They like you enough to be a fan, so they are likely to signup for your email list if presented with the opportunity. And set up a specific Twitter landing page that thanks the users for clicking on the profile link and asks them to signup for the email list. Most Twitter users will visit your site using the Twitter profile link, so setup a special page for these Twitter users and greet them accordingly.

Finding creative ways to build your email mailing list can be fun and rewarding. Just put yourself in your customer’s shoes and make sure you are offering an easy way for all visitors to signup for your list. Capturing and using this valuable data should be a big part of your online marketing strategy.

One way to track the success of all these different capture points is to setup different groups in your email software, so you can track to see how many users are signing up from all the different places throughout your site.

Did I miss anything? How do you capture email subscribers? Let me know by leaving a comment below.

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