Building a database of email subscribers, or “building a list” as it’s know in the Internet marketing world, ain’t easy. There are a few key ingredient that go into building a list (all of which are covered in Module 2 of The SBBM Academy BTW 😉 . But here’s a tip that might help you double your subscription rate if you already have the other bits in place.
I recently discovered a tool that helped my more than double the number of people signing up to my email list.
Not bad huh!
The graph above shows the number of weekly email subscriber generated by a niche website I’ve owned for about 2 years now. The site generates a modest 5000 – 6000 visitors per month and ranks well in Google for a hand full of search terms.
So, what contributed to the significant increase in email subscribers? Well, it’s a technique that’s not exactly popular – but as you can see, it works.
At the start of November, I started using a pop-up subscription form. I installed a small script that you can add to any website that will present a form to your website visitors after a certain amount of time or when they decide to leave your website.
The script lets you choose to be as aggressive or benign as you like, specifying how often the form is presented to you visitors.
Of course it’s not for everyone. It will piss some visitors off, yes, but it will also allow you to re-market to your website visitors via email.
There are many scripts on the market both free and paid, that will make this easy. Most email marketing services such as Aweber also provide simple popup scripts. However, after trying many of these, I’ve had the most success with a little application called Popup Domination (aff).
Popup Domination works with most email marketing providers including Aweber, Mail Chimp (my fav), Constant Contact, iContact and Get Response. It can be installed on any website and has an awesome WordPress plugin that makes installation and setup dead easy.
Pop-ups aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, some see them as spammy and annoying. But before you dismiss the technique, take a look at your website statistics and see how many unique monthly visitors you’re website receives. If you operate a small business website, many of your visitors will never (or rarely) visit your website again.
Would you take the risk of pissing visitors off so you could re-market to them again via email? I would. Particularly if you’re not going to see 60%+ of these visitors again.
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7 thoughts on “How to double your website’s email subscribers”
I just had to deal with that #$^$% popup AGAIN, just to read what I was hoping would be great content.
Can’t you distinguish between repeat visitors and new? Those of us who already subscribe get this every time we try to read your content — it’s quite frustrating.
I don’t like the tip: I prefer to look after my loyal readers and customers, rather than chase anonymous new leads.
I did say it’s not everyone’s cup of tea! I’ve reduced the “agressiveness” of the pop-up Anne, thanks for your comments.
In regards to chase anonymous new leads, if visitors have come to your website via Google then there should be some degree of qualifications. The visitor has obviously typed something into Google that is highly relevant to what you sell. Wouldn’t you like to have a mechanism to turn that visitor into a loyal reader by sending them relevant and valuable information?
Point taken 😀 I guess popups just bring out the angry in me. Definitely not for me, but I can see the use.
I think that your fix is a great compromise.
Yuck … Lukeee put a graph in a blog post. That’s revolting. What on earth was he thinking. What about us poor old souls that freak out when they see numbers or graphs. Other than that, great post Cool Hand.
Personally, pop-ups don’t really annoy me that much (As long as it isn’t happening 5 times in one visit). However, if I visit a new site and get a pop-up straight away, I’ll just ignore it and close it down.
Would you get more subscribers if you gave visitors a little time to view the site and gauge the value in joining up before asking them to do so?
Jake, Popup Domination gives you great control over when to present the popup to users. As you’ve suggested you can tell the script to popup only after a number of page impressions or after a certain period of time, or only when the visitor goes to leave the site.
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