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Many people know about that famous song that says that diamonds are girl's best friend. It is the same with web sites and email newsletters. You can't have a great email newsletter without great web site. At least it is very difficult.
In our previous articles you can read about best practices in choosing your domain name and web hosting, which are one of the most important steps in having a successful site that will generate new email subscriptions.
In this article you will learn how you can design your web site and which techniques to deploy in order to increase subscription for your email newsletter.
Location, location, location
You should place a notice about your email newsletter on visible place on your web site. However, it is quite obvious if you visit many corporate web sites that you can have a hard time to locate their email newsletter. So how they can expect to have a good subscription rate and stay in touch with their visitors!?
Beside visible notice on your main page, you should put your email newsletter info on every page, preferably on side bar. Companies who know principles of successful Internet marketing make a special resource section in their main menu. This section is also great way for persuading your visitors to become your subscribers. There you can include value-added content for your visitors like best practices guide relevant to your business, tutorials for your products, white papers, newsletter archives and useful the page with useful links from your industry. It is very important that your visitors can read previous issues of your email newsletter in order to decide whether or not to subscribe to your email newsletter.
Subscription forms
Subscription rate is very much connected with subscription form. Many email publishers make mistake and require you to fill many fields that can turn your visitors away from subscribing. People are concerned with privacy, especially on the Internet so it is not wise to ask questions like "What is your salary?" If you still want to ask those kind of more private questions you can make them optional.
You have to focus on several most important questions like First Name, Last Name, Email Address, Gender, and Country. Of course it is recommended to offer your visitors to choose to receive your email newsletter in text or HTML format. For example, if you sell email marketing (or other any other) software or service you can place additional fields with question like "Do you plan buying or changing your current email marketing software?" If their answer is Yes and they chose to be contacted, you can contact them via email and ask for the best time to call them and to discuss possible arrangements regarding buying your email marketing software.
It is not recommended to ask only for email address because this way you won't be able to do personalization and segmentation which is very important for creating successful email campaigns.
Some publishers use pop-ups to increase their email newsletter subscription. Although, this way you can get many new subscribers, you have to be aware that many people (especially more experienced Internet users) consider pop-ups annoying and unprofessional. However, if you still want to use pop-ups to place your subscription form make sure to include a standard "[x]" character for closing your pop-up window. The best technique if you use pop-up for getting more subscribers is to use cookies in order to track new visitors. This way you can display pop-ups only to your new visitors. It is not recommended that your visitors see your pop-up more than once.
Techniques
There are several great techniques that you can use on your web site to increase your newsletter membership base. White papers are great way to turn visitors into members and members into buyers. White papers are considered as more "valuable" than "common" articles. You can create white papers full of quality content and offer it free only if your visitors subscribe to your email newsletter. You can include download links in your Welcome message. Studies show that this way subscription rates increase several times.
Of course, there are other techniques like incentives. You can announce that you offer discount coupon for your subscribers only. In every issue you can include unique promotion code and offer discount on all of your products. For example, you can always offer to your email subscribers 10% discount, but on some special occasions you can raise that discount. This way, you can be quite sure that they will read your email newsletter very carefully. It is a win-win situation.
When we are talking about improving sales using email newsletters you can promote your newsletter in your shopping cart, too. For example, at the checkout when you summarize their orders you can write something similar like this:
_______________
Total price: $100 This price can be even lower. Click here to subscribe to our Messaging Times email newsletter and get 10% discount on all orders. You will find your discount coupon in our Welcome message. This is our way to say "Thank You!" for subscribing.
_______________
So you see that shopping cart is also a great way to get new email subscribers. Giving discounts exclusively to your email subscribers are proven way to have loyal customers and to grow your newsletter base.
About the Author
Dejan Bizinger is a Contributing Editor for Infacta. Infacta is email messaging services company providing powerful, yet easy-to-use award-winning Group Mail, software for sending highly-personalized email messages and Group Metrics, software for email tracking. For more information visit: http://www.infacta.com