How to get People onto your Newsletter
Do you have a newsletter sign up box on your website? If so, this blog is a must read.
We are big advocates of Email Marketing and List Building, it simply works. However, you are not going to encourage people onto your email lists with forms on your website that look like this:
Let us ask you a question…when was the last time somebody said to you “I would absolutely LOVE you to keep me up to date with your company’s latest news, I have plenty of time in my diary to read about your latest recruits and some fantastic testimonials.”
Probably not all that often right? (If you do get that often, please get in touch and let us know where you find these people).
So, why do you think boxes like the aforementioned encourage people to subscribe? Well erm, actually they don’t!
However, with a couple easy tweaks they could…
If you have traffic coming to your website regularly, we would absolutely encourage you to collect email addresses and keeping in touch with a monthly newsletter is a good idea (even more frequent if possible). However the copy around the boxes NEEDS to be A LOT more persuasive than the examples above.
To improve, try hit on these 3 things…
1. Who should subscribe
2. How often you are going to keep in touch
3. What they are going to get
Bonus Point: Note that theirĀ information is secure and won’t be shared.
We found a great example on litmus.com that shows these 3 points:
This isn’t perfect, but look at how it hits all 3 points and instantly makes the thought of subscribing much more appealing. It talks directly to ‘Email Marketing Pros,’ it says exactly what they are going to get (this could be a bit more enticing to be honest), and it says how frequent. The icing on the cake is the privacy disclaimer to put the visitor’s mind at ease.
ACTION: Answer the questions for yourself. 1. Who do you want to subscribe? 2. How often are you going to keep in touch? 3. What are you going to send?
Question 3 is probably the hardest here, but we have wrote an article here on what to include in an email marketing campaign. The key is being able to keep in touch in a way where people welcome communications from you. So you need to provide value and be useful, interesting or entertaining. A lot of the stuff we receive in email newsletters is what we call ‘selfish content’ where it is ALL about the company sending the email and none of it is providing any value to the recipient. These will eventually get ignored and if you say this is the type of content you are going to share then nobody is going to sign up in the first place!
ACTION: Once you have these 3 questions answered, change the copy on your email sign-up form to get these points across.
FINAL TIP: Because the majority of newsletters are usually boring and heavily sales-y, the word ‘newsletter’ is a bit tarred (note how litmus doesn’t use it, and instead goes for the friendlier ‘let’s keep in touch’). We took this a step further and branded up our newsletter into a free service called ‘atomic lite.’ Think about the terminology you use, and maybe try avoiding the word ‘newsletter.’