Learn how to turn your website visitors into newsletter subscribers with effective strategies that grow your email list and increase engagement.
Ieva Treiliha
It can be challenging to engage with potential and existing customers online. That is why it is crucial to establish conversion opportunities on your website that help you communicate more effectively with your visitors.
Depending on your goals for your newsletters, you can use them to inform visitors about new services or products, share fresh content on your website, increase your social media following, or collect more reviews on Trustpilot.
Newsletters are a highly effective way to communicate with your visitors, but how do you get them to sign up in the first place? – You will find out more in this blog post!
If you do not already have an email list, it is important to start collecting email addresses right away. Newsletters are an effective – perhaps the most effective – way to reach previous, current, and potential customers.
On Facebook, Instagram, and many other platforms, your reach is determined by the platform’s algorithm, which means you cannot always reach all your followers in the same way as you can with newsletters.
Here are some email marketing statistics:
The main purpose of building an email list is to convert first-time visitors into loyal customers. You can achieve this by developing an engaging email strategy and sending the right emails at the right times. Remember, less is sometimes more – none of us want to receive spammy sales emails several times a day.
It is rare for someone visiting your website for the first time to make an immediate purchase. BUT if you can get these first-time visitors onto your email list, the chances of them making a purchase in the future increase significantly.
Once you have chosen an email marketing provider that offers all the features and tools important to you, you can start focusing on converting your visitors into newsletter subscribers.
When selecting an email marketing provider, remember that it is important to have access to features that suit your email marketing strategy. Some of the most important features you will need include:
If you are a beginner, MailChimp is an excellent email marketing provider, and you can try the tool completely free of charge.
There are several ways to encourage your visitors to sign up for your newsletter. Some methods are more discreet, while others are more direct. Read more about the different opt-in methods below…
Make it easy for your visitors. It should be simple for your visitors to find the sign-up option and subscribe to your newsletter. This process can be optimised by having a straightforward sign-up feature in the footer of your website or a clear menu item in your main navigation.
You can see examples from Dansk Outlet and Kylling & Co. below:
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A more direct approach to collecting newsletter sign-ups is through pop-ups. You have probably experienced it – you visit a website and suddenly a form pops up, encouraging you to sign up for the company’s newsletter, download their latest e-book, or something similar.
Too many pop-ups, or pop-ups that cannot be closed, are among the most annoying things you can experience as a website visitor. That is why it is important to carefully consider how and when you want these forms to appear on your website.
Usually, you can choose where on the website your pop-up will appear. Depending on your strategy, you will need to assess whether it is best placed in the centre of the page or perhaps in one of the corners.
It is a good idea to test several different pop-ups in various sizes and positions. Once you have tried several options, you can review the results – which version convinced the most visitors to sign up for your newsletter?
You can then use this information to refine the final version of your sign-up pop-up.
You can usually decide when a sign-up form will pop up on a visitor’s screen. Again, I recommend testing several combinations to find out what works best for your audience.
This is a pop-up that appears after a set number of seconds or minutes on your site. It is about finding the right balance. If the pop-up appears too soon, the customer will probably decline as they have not had enough time to look around, but if it comes too late, you risk they have already left. It is a good idea to test multiple timings and go with what works best.
This pop-up is shown to visitors after they have viewed a certain number of landing pages on your website. For example, you can define that everyone who has viewed three pages on your site gets a pop-up inviting them to subscribe. Test several variations to see what resonates best with your visitors.
With this type of pop-up, you decide how much of the page visitors should have seen or read before they are prompted to subscribe to your newsletter.
Exit intent pop-ups are very popular and, in my experience, a very effective way to collect newsletter sign-ups. Exit intent pop-ups appear as soon as the customer moves their mouse away from the browser window to leave the site. It is an ideal opportunity to grab their attention and offer an incentive if they subscribe before leaving.
To get customers to sign up for your newsletter, you need to make it attractive – ideally, they should not want to miss out. Even if you have the best and most exciting newsletter in the country, it can still be difficult to get people to subscribe.
To convert more visitors into newsletter subscribers, you can use small incentives – the so-called “carrots”. These can include:
People love exclusivity and the chance to save. It does not have to cost a fortune – small perks can make a huge difference 🙂
No matter how much you work on your email opt-ins or pop-ups, it can still be difficult to convince people to sign up for your newsletter.
This is often because many people worry about receiving irrelevant spam all the time. That is why it is important to not only offer something extra to your customers, but also to make it clear on your sign-up form that you will only send emails twice a week, or only when you launch new products, have a sale, or some other special reason.
You can also give your customers the option to choose how often they want to receive your newsletters. For example, customers can select whether they would like to receive daily, weekly, or monthly emails. You can then segment these customers into different groups and send messages according to their preferences.
Once people have signed up, you should work hard to retain them. There is a fine balance between too many newsletters and too few. However, it is not just the frequency of emails that matters – the relevance of your newsletter content is just as important.
After gaining new subscribers, remember the classic Marketing Funnel, where all consumers are divided into five groups based on their level of engagement with your brand:
1.Awareness – consumers who know your brand but little else
Each stage in the funnel has its own purpose. Your aim is to move potential customers further down the funnel until they become loyal customers. When planning your email marketing strategy, consider every funnel stage. How can you most effectively communicate offers and brand information to potential customers at each stage?
It may seem like a daunting amount of work to segment potential and existing customers and set up tailored emails for each funnel stage, but it is not as complicated as it sounds. Most email systems actually have tools for setting up automated mail flows, allowing you to customise your message for the specific funnel stage a customer is in. Read more about setting up mail flows in Klaviyo here.
I hope you now have a better idea of how to convert your website visitors into newsletter subscribers. If you have further questions or need help getting started with email marketing, you are always welcome to contact us here or call 71 99 34 74.
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