The Messaging Times

The most effective (and by effective I mean responsive) email lists are those grown organically, in house and over time. But growing an in-house email list doesn’t happen overnight. For that reason, some email marketers get impatient and take shortcuts like renting email lists. In email marketing, faster doesn’t necessarily translate into better. We’ve talked about the value of building your own in-house email lists on this blog in the past.

Here are 5 tips to help turbo-charge your email subscription rates:

1. Provide an incentive, and promote the incentive rather than the email subscription itself. Many people might be reluctant to sign up for yet another email newsletter; but everyone wants something for free. A link to “get a free book” will encourage more people to sign up for an email than the presence of a subscription form on your website will. Don’t make the incentive too attractive, or you will attract a lot of people who are solely interested in the prize. Ideally, make the incentive attractive to the type of subscribers you are looking for (i.e. related to your industry, products or services)
2. Make your incentive offer/subscription form available on all entry points to your website (not just on the main page.) Also, place it in the same place on each page, preferably on the top, right-hand corner of the page.
3. Make signing up easy to do. If you ask for too much information on the initial subscription form, you will lose some potential subscribers to form fatigue. You can always collect more information from your subscribers later. Initially, you just need an email address and a first name to personalize your message.
4. Explain clearly and briefly on the subscription form what the email will consist of (content) and how often they will receive it (frequency). This establishes trust from the start as it provides transparency about the offer.
5. Design is divine. Make the subscription form or incentive link to your form prominent on your website. Set it apart from the rest of the content on your page with an attractive border or a different color/style. Don’t make potential subscribers look too hard to find a way to subscribe to your content.

In-house email lists regularly outperform 3rd party rental lists simply because those people who subscribe directly on your website know what they are signing up for and are requesting to hear from you first-hand. When renting an email list, you are assuming that the people on that list are interested in what you have to say and sell. And you know what assuming does.

Normally, the email subscription process is pretty standard. A visitor comes to a site, they see a link to opt-in to a newsletter, fill out a short form and leave. What would happen, I wonder, if you asked each subscriber if they wanted to tell a friend about your website, blog or newsletter before leaving though? Something tells me that it might very well increase the number of visitors and, ultimately, subscribers.

The most effective marketing is word of mouth. Referrals from friends work because those who receive the invitation trust the person sending it. So they are more likely to visit the link and consider it to be relevant to them. Their friend sent them after all.

The problem is, Send-to-a-Friend (STAF) forms aren’t easy to create unless you know some code.

Well, that used to be the case anyway.

Now, yourtellafriend.com makes adding a referral mechanism to your subscription process easy. In only a few minutes, I was able to create a form ready to use in a subscription process. Of course, not every subscriber will refer a friend, and not every friend invited will become a subscriber. But the odds are that your subscription rates will increase if each subscriber tells others about your site or offer.

For more information, watch a short introductory video about Your Tell a Friend

* I have no affiliation with yourtellafriend.com. Just happened to find their site last week.