There was a time when growing an email list was not a difficult thing to do. You could throw up a PLR freebie and within a few days, you’d have a list. Unfortunately, or fortunately in some cases, those days are gone. A little thing called quality has crept in and turned all those worthless email lists upside down.
The good thing is that it just makes more room for quality marketers to reach their target audience with more compelling messages. But growing your subscriber list can be a long and frustrating process if you’re just relying on passive methods to generate optins.
Get Active and Boost your Subscribers
Essentially, if you want to boost your subscriber rates, you have to be willing to make some changes.
- The first step in increasing your subscriber rate is to take a good hard look at your own blog or website from a reader or visitor standpoint. Do you have an eye catching optin form on it? If so and you’ve been using the same form, the same set up for months, then it’s time for a change. This can be an easy fix – If you use Aweber, one of the more popular autoresponders, then try out some different fonts, different forms, different submit buttons. Sometimes just a simple change can make all the difference.
- The next thing to look at is add some in-content optin forms to your blog. Do you have the typical sidebar optin? Try adding an optin form at the end of your blog posts or on the About page of your blog. If the thought of creating all these forms yourself is unsettling, try an optin plugin. Some good ones to check out are Optin Skin and WP Subscribers. They are highly customizable and can add a much needed pick up to a blog. Plus it saves you from having to do all the coding yourself!
- If you don’t have a page dedicated to your optin, then create one. Adding a tab on the top of your blog, in the header menu is a great way to generate some additional subscribers. Readers can see at a glance what all your optin offer includes. This way, when you give out a link, instead of sending traffic back to your blog’s general address, send them to this page.
- Once you’ve changed up your optin forms, then you can take your message out to the masses. Twitter and Facebook are not the only places to hang out. What about forums? What about other niche groups? Most forums allow you to have a signature show up every time you add a response. Craft a compelling signature and you can add some highly targeted subscribers to your list.
- Have you ever been a guest blogger? If so, you know the mountain of potential that comes with it. But while guest blogging is great for exposure, credibility and a host of other pluses, there is one other crucial thing that often gets overlooked. Your author bio. Instead of sending readers to your blog’s general address, send them to a page dedicated to them. An example of this is below. This tells the readers that you created this page just for them and you have goodies for them!
Test Often
These are just a few ways of boosting your subscriber rate. Sometimes just changing a few things every now and then can have a huge impact on your subscriber numbers. Whereas you may see that number slowly rise, a change as small as a new optin form can garner a dozen subscribers in one day.
The key to a consistently rising subscriber rate is to test out many different options – find one that works and then later on, test out another. Something as small as border or font can mean the difference in readers opting in or not.
What about you? Do you have an optin form on your blog?
Would You Recommend A Subscription Pop Up ?
Hi Saad,
Yes! Subscription pop-ups do work. So, in a word, yes. PopUp Domination is a good one.
~Christine
Hi Christine, thanks for your article and valuable information about boosting subscriber rate. Special page for optin is a must 😉 And I know that I have to write a lot of guest posts to be noticed…
Once more thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience with us.
Chris
Hi Chris,
Thanks for having me!
~Christine
I just started mailing list. I hope these tips will help me to boost email subscribers!
I’ve already “subscribe” page I’ll update it now for sure 😉
Great work Christine !
Hi Christine,
Great suggestion there about changing your optin form. If people are used to the look of the form, they no longer notice it – they form can just fade into the background.
With changing the look of things from time to time, your optin form gets reemphasized.
I think it would also be a good Idea to change the Lead magnet on offer. If you have a freebie on “Social Media Strategy” , why not consider coming with an alternate freebie on “easy link building”?
That way, you can get reader-optins from members of your audience that would otherwise have been lost to you.
Great post – good job!
Hi Yeremi,
Excellent points!
Having a couple free offers out there enables you to capture more subscribers – just make sure you know what you’ll send them in your future email correspondence.
Thanks for commenting!
~Christine
Great points Christine. When we’re taking a hard look at our website, etc., we also have to decide if our “freebie” is really as good as we think it is! Thanks for posting.
Hi Tom,
Very well said! A targeted freebie is essential to capturing the right audience!
Thanks for stopping by!
~Christine
Hey Christine,
Thanks for that post. Here’s some wordpress plugins I like that all help increase subscribers!
Pippity
Optinskin
Comment redirect
wp-leads
Hellobar
Gravity forms
All the best,
Ian
Hi Ian,
Great list!
I am digging the hellobar right now – seems to convert pretty well.
Pippity is new to me – will have to check it out!
Thanks for your comments!
~Christine
You are welcome. I’ve an article on social media examiner which goes into detail on each of the plugins. Check out Thursday’s post on the site! Ciao!!
Hi Christine
I haven’t changed my opt-in form since I first put it up on my blog so I will definitely look at changing this!
You’ve made some great points and I will take these on board.
I have a few opt-in forms on my blog; a pop-up, a sidebar form and a separate page. So far the pop-up has been the best converting of all of them.
Thank you for sharing.
Tim
If you;re going to use dedicated opt-in page, I’d split test to variations over a substitutional amount of time and analyse which one has been getting the best opt-in results..
By doing this at the start you can then focus on pushing targeted traffic through your sales funnel.
Ace share Christine.
Hi Simmeon,
Sorry the late reply –
Yes, well said – testing those opt-in forms is essential!
Thanks for your comments!
~Christine
In my experience give away is the very effective way, but I found out later that they will unsubscribe when they get bored.
Hi Dlysen,
That’s where email marketing comes in – don’t let them get bored!
Keep up the enthusiasm and keep sending them interesting stuff!
~Christine
Very good tips on how to get subscribers. Ideally as you have also mentioned, a creative eye catching subscriber box is required. Either you can get someone to design it for you or you can get an optin skin or form to do the work. Also a form of this type in the blog post is a good idea to capture the eyes of the readers.
Hi Shalu,
Excellent point!
Definitely need a nice opt-in form!
Thanks for stopping by!
~Christine
Give First, Solve Their Problem and They’ll Come Subscribing and Buying
Ask yourself: Can your readers truly use the tips in any and every of your posts to solve a single problem or are your posts simply on general information that they sill need to go elsewhere searching? Make a goal to be the last ‘bust stop’ of every single target audience – find what they are hungry for and place exactly that right in front of them. If they use your DIY tips and see results, they’ll like and trust you AND they’ll want to stick real close – by subscribing.
Create relevant and useful contents that your prospective customers will be able to use to solve a problem or to feed their passion.
Hi Shamelle,
We are running into each other everywhere!
Excellent tips!
Thanks for your comments!
~Christine
Giving something away for free is also a good way to increase subscribers.
Thanks for the awesome post!
very useful tips….am working with your tips
Hi Christine,
I’ve never actually thought of changing the looks of my optin form and I’ve had for over a year now. I never really imagined that a simple change like that may potentially generate subscriber rates anew. I think I will try to change it every two months at least and see how it goes. Thanks.
Great post with really good tips. I just want to add that no matter how simple a tip sounds it still requires hard work and there is no place for laziness.
Hi Christine,
I have only the regular sidebar optin form. I will take your tips and will add an opt-in form at the end of my blog posts. Having a dedicated page for opt-in form seems to be a good idea but adding in the header menu don’t seem to be a good option, maybe using a comment redirect plugin; you could redirect visitors after commenting to the opt-in page, would this a better strategy. Thanks for sharing this article.
Very interesting list. I recently just began learning on how to create a subsribers list and now trying to get as much information as possible. Came across this post on Blog Engage, thanks.
Hi Christine! Thanks for sharing your insight and knowledge here. These are all great tips. I had never thought about using an optin page, especially when guest posting and pointing back to it. I might have to try that in the future.