2 Tricks for Increasing Your Newsletter Subscribers

If you’re wondering how to increase the number of people who sign up for your email newsletter, Don Nicholas, editor and managing director for consulting group Mequoda Group, has a tip for you: Don’t call it an email newsletter.

“That’s kind of an overused term,” he says. “It may have a little negative connotation.”

Nicholas, whom we profiled last week, specifically advises publishers on how to develop and refine their online strategies; but the recommendations he offers for converting website visitors to email subscribers are relevant for other kinds of sites too.

Nicholas estimates the industry average for conversions to be about a 10th to a 20th of a percent. That equates to one or two newsletter subscriptions for every 1,000 unique visitors. His clients, on the other hand, are seeing conversions between 3% and 12% — 30 to 120 subscriptions for the same 1,000 UVs. He claims that one European client held a 20% conversion rate for the first 90 days they tried his techniques.

So if you can’t call a newsletter what it is, how do you get people to sign up? Nicholas advises two tricks.

Have visitors tell you that they want to be “notified by email” when you post more content about a given topic. Notice the trick here? Never is the word “newsletter” used. Says Nicholas, you’ll see a much higher conversion of visitors to subscribers than if you have visitors say, “Please sign me up for your email newsletter…”

Does that mean you’ll have to create newsletters on every topic covered by your site? No, but they do have to offer value and follow through on that promise to tell people what’s been posted on the site.

Have visitors register for access to free “special reports.” A special report, says Nicholas, “may be nothing more than 10 or 15 tips published on some topic that are now combined with an introduction, a summary and a cover. Now it’s a guidebook.” This material becomes downloadable content that can be “swapped” for email addresses.

The reports — he advises creating several — can be posted to a “marketplace” page, similar to a bookstore, where visitors can quickly sign up to download one or more. That obligates them to receive the newsletter too — a requirement laid out in text on both the sign-up page and the opt-in confirmation link sent to new subscribers.

Report offerings can also be served up contextually on specific landing pages to match the content on that page. On his own site, which covers 30 to 40 topics, Nicholas presents a small floating box that appears one time suggesting a related report for each topic with an email field and a button that says, “Yes, I want this report.”

Mequoda also offers a traditional email newsletter sign-up on the home page, but Nicholas says the bulk of visitors will probably enter the site through specific topical pages, and those are the ones these techniques are meant to capture an email address from.

Are these too sneaky for you to try? What works for getting your visitors to sign up for your newsletters?

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