How to Get More Email Sign-Ups

“Email reaches three times more people than Twitter and Facebook combined.”    ~ Buffer

That is a lot of people! And precisely the reason we’re doing a series on how to ‘do email marketing’. Last week, I shared that email marketing is the most powerful method available to gain more clicks, sales or views on the website. And we broke down how to make it work for you. (see the Email List-Building Argument here)

Today I’m stuffing this post full of a lot of information. It’s all good stuff to create sign-ups, where to place them, and what words to use. If you can believe it – just a change of words in a call to action can drastically change the number of sign-ups!

[Bookmark and come back to it later if you don’t have the time to DO all the stuff mentioned] 

How to Instantly Get More Email Sign-ups

Before we bring more people to the site, we need to prepare the website to make the most of each visit. Every single reader has given you the most valuable commodity there is – time.

When someone lands on your site, you have an entire TWO seconds to make an impression and more importantly you also have the attention of a real live person: use it wisely!

Step 1: Keep them on the site!!

Immediately answer their questions:

Attracting NEW readers is a lot of work – usually involving a lot of value given away on social media networks or through guest posting/ etc. Once you have that one person who clicks through to your site, don’t let them disappear forever!

And for goodness’ sake don’t send them away to a social media site (don’t link to your social media properties!!) so they get lost in the perfect distraction-machine. Just because someone found your site once does not mean they will find it again – assuming they want to. You must find a way to stay in touch so they think of you next time they’re looking for that thing you do. In other words, email marketing.

When we’re talking about email, we’re talking about nurturing a relationship and moving people further into the sales funnel by providing real value. But even if you just start with sending them daily posts or a weekly summary of posts… at least you’re staying in touch, providing useful material that they’re interested in and staying top of mind.

That brings us to how to actually get the email addresses. No, you can’t buy them. Well, you can but you shouldn’t. No one likes to be spammed.

You may NOT:

• auto-sign-up anyone from your contacts
• sign-up anyone from their business cards
• automatically sign up buyers/clients

There is one way to get emails, without fines and/or jail time – and that is for them to offer it to you. And then click ‘confirm’ on the confirmation email. This is called ‘double opt-in’ and it is the best practice to keep your email list safe from being marked as spam.

Let’s talk about what it looks like to persuade someone to give up their email. It is very much like a sales transaction. They are trading their email for something else of perceived value: the newsletter or incentive offered.

This kind of transaction – email for incentive – best works on a landing page with great persuasive copy, a call to action and… an incentive.

Step 2. Create Email Sign-up Landing Pages

If you’ve done your attraction strategies correctly, you’ll have a landing page link in all your social media profiles and email signature. The page the new reader will land on should be the email sign-up Landing Page.

Landing pages are page designed for one purpose: entice an action of some sort.

• “Squeeze” pages (isn’t that a horrible name?) are to encourage the reader to move down the page keeping in touch with the story without any distraction.
• Content landing pages are to provide such a library of indexed content that it’s too useful not to share (a great traffic strategy).
• We’re talking about a subscribe landing page. And it works similarly to a sales / squeeze page.

How to Create an Email Sign-up Landing Page

Great Persuasive Copy

The basic idea of an email sign-up landing page is to remove all distractions, add persuasive copy, share a story, show your voice/ personality and demonstrate what you can offer.

Other copy suggestions include:

• tell a story
• first headline is the most important: show empathy
• second headline is more important than the third… leave the reader curious
• third headline is more important than the fourth, and so on
• remove any friction visually and experientially to sign-ups
• this is a good place to ‘sell’ your incentive
• satisfy objections
• provide assurances via guarantees, if applicable
• social proof and testimonials are a good idea too

Chris Brogan Newsletter Sign-Up Page and our Sign Up page are excellent examples of landing pages.

Email Sign-up Form

Now that we have a great story with persuasive copy on the landing page, we need that email sign-up form. It’s actually suggested to put this 2-3 times within the sign-up page. The sign-up form includes any required fields – first name, email, etc, and also the call to action button.

The sign-up form can be anything from Mailchimp’s standard copy/paste to a snazzy one that you develop yourself. As far as design is concerned, the only important thing is that it is absolutely congruent with the rest of the site, or the social media profile from which the reader came. A disruption in the design produces friction and a subconscious distrust.

Once you have a sign-up form that maintains consistency with your brand, put them everywhere. I recommend sign-up forms on the email landing page, home feature (big prominent hero image), top / bottom of your site(ie: hello bar), sidebar and after every post. Yes, that is a lot of places. Yep – I totally think it’s a good idea. (Bufferapp blog doubled their subscriptions by doing this in one month)

Call to Action

The call to action is the copy that you put in the ‘subscribe’ button. “Go” “Subscribe” “Send”

Of course there are even best practices around this – or at least current research! It’s kinda interesting that if you say, “Find out more” you’ll get more clicks than if you say “Learn more here”? Do you sense the difference?

The best advice seems to be – action words and first person voice get the best results.

Phrase the call to action button with:

1. action words like, “Sign me up”, “Get it!”, “Download now” and “Claim the …” get the most action.
2. first person like, “I want in!” “Let me have it!” “Send it to me” “Send me the ” “I want the…” “I’ll give it a try”

How to Create Email Sign-Ups & Incentives

Have you ever signed up for something just to get the incentive? Me too. Get incentive ideas and content for your newsletters, in the free Newsletter Guidebook for Bloggers.