Collect Email Subscribers

Lightboxes

It’s highly unlikely that your website visitors’ sole objective is to sign up for your newsletter, therefore you need to be proactive and ask them to. One way to do this is to deliver targeted lightboxes to new visitors on your site. However, ensuring that the benefits to subscribers are clearly highlighted is an essential element behind success – e.g ‘sign up to receive the latest products and promotions from our store’.

Don’t Ask For Too Much

The more questions you ask when collecting email addresses, the lower the chances are that customers will complete the process. Providing you capture the essential details at the initial sign up (email address and first name), you can obtain more data at a later date. A preference centre is a perfect way for customers to provide you with more data so that you can tailor your communications to them.

Not Just Your Website

For those with multiple customer touch points such as stores or a call centre, these are a great opportunity to gather large volumes of email addresses. The big challenge here is to make sure you have the correct process in place to gain this information. Make sure your staff explain what the data will be used for. You should have implement a double opt-in so when the subscriber gets back to their inbox they confirm that they want to be subscribed. That way to will have a timestamped conformation on consent.

Incentives

A new email address is a valuable piece of data. Therefore there is real value in incentivising customers to provide you with their email address, especially since GDPR when everyone is much more vigilant about their data and are more reluctant to just pass it out.

It is essential to make sure that the incentive is tied to your business, for example, in the form of a discount or special promotion. Try avoiding things such as free prize draws as they tend to attract the wrong types of subscribers who were only interested in the potential to win and will have little or no engagement with your brand.

What’s In It For Them?

Moneysavingexpert.com have probably the most popular weekly newsletter around – and they really tell you why you should receive it every week. Visit their site and you won’t miss it. It’s a great, yet extreme example of how you should push the value of your emails to encourage people to sign-up. Yet many of us are still simply asking ‘Sign up for our newsletter’ – who wants to receive that?

Subscriber Bar

It’s likely that you have a number of customers following your business on social media, many of which are not signed up to your email communications. The use of a subscriber bar within your email is a great way to help convert these social followers to email subscribers through a single click in your campaign setup.

Next Steps

For more ideas on how you can boost your subscriber numbers and how to increase engagement contact the Xtremepush team.