Email has continually proven its value as a marketing strategy. However, in order to get full use out of the approach, you need to get people to sign up for your email list in the first place. That’s why we asked 12 Young Entrepreneur Council members the following question:
“What is your preferred method for encouraging your audience to subscribe to your newsletter or join your email list? Why does this approach work so well?”
How to Get People to Sign Up for Your Email List
Here’s how they approach this challenge:
1. Offer Something in Return
“To encourage an audience to subscribe to a newsletter or email list, it’s very useful to offer something in return. It can be a small discount, an ebook, a PDF or being able to join an informative webinar. Today, having your audience’s information willingly provided by them is one of the most valuable assets that you can have in your business.” ~ Alfredo Atanacio, Uassist.ME
2. Gain Their Trust
“To convince visitors to join my email list, they need to trust the brand first. I use my website’s content, such as its blog, to convince readers that they most definitely want to opt into my list to get more information on topics they’re already reading about. Because my blog offers them so much value, they feel encouraged to become a subscriber.” ~ Stephanie Wells, Formidable Forms
3. Deliver Value First
“If you want to get something, you must also give something of yourself. This can be knowledge and value, or some material good or discount as a reward. You are the one who decides, but make sure you give something back and don’t become the typical spammer who will only end up unsubscribing your customers from your list.” ~ Kevin Leyes, Team Leyes
4. Personalize Your Outreach
“We use personalization marketing to reach out to consumers who land on our website. Once someone browses one of our blog posts, we trigger a pop-up that asks if they would like to see more posts from us featuring (topic). The consumer can click additional content options and personalize their experience with us.” ~ Chris Christoff, MonsterInsights
5. Run a Promotion or Discount
“We occasionally run promotions where we encourage new users to subscribe to our email lists and become customers for 50 percent off their purchase. We’ve found that this trick helps us drastically improve our sales, traffic and engagement. Everyone likes a deal, and 50 percent off is a great coupon that could sway the opinion of consumers who are on the fence.” ~ John Turner, SeedProd LLC
6. Create Lead Magnets and Content Upgrades
“To build an email list of 100,000-plus, we offer lead magnets on our longer blog posts. It’s essentially an opt-in that provides more detail about a specific blog post. We offer them in different formats — text and video.” ~ Kristin Kimberly Marquet, Marquet Media, LLC
7. Use Strategically Placed CTAs
“Just because someone’s on your website doesn’t mean they know where to go next or what to do. You need to make that clear to them from the start. A good way to do this is by incorporating calls-to-action, or CTAs, into your website copy. You can direct users to a landing page that goes more in-depth about your newsletter so they’re eager to subscribe.” ~ Jared Atchison, WPForms
8. ‘Sell’ Your Free Lead Magnet
“Offering a free gift such as an ebook, or guide to entice people to sign-up is a great start when encouraging people to subscribe. However, make sure to sell your freebie to people. List out three benefits and at least one testimonial from people who have received the guide. This conveys trust and gets people further excited to sign-up to your newsletter.” ~ Matt Diggity, Diggity Marketing
9. Gamify the Experience
“Gamifying your opt-in tool can compel people to subscribe to your email list. Use a discount wheel pop-up and offer coupon codes, a free ebook or some other reward. Your audience will be willing to drop their email when they know they’re getting something of value.” ~ Blair Williams, MemberPress
10. Run Surveys and Quizzes
“An engaging way to grow an email list is through an informative quiz that generates results. Not only are you providing entertainment through the lead taking a quiz, but they are also learning something about themselves. Leverage this dual entertainment and educational modality to gain their contact information and preferences for future updates or sales promotions.” ~ Matthew Podolsky, Florida Law Advisers, P.A.
11. Design and Offer a Free Course
“Traditional lead magnets such as ebooks and newsletters are a dime-a-dozen nowadays and don’t convert that well. We’ve seen amazing results with creating free email based courses, delivered via daily newsletters. These are perceived as much more valuable than an e-book, create more engagement, but take the same amount of effort to produce and promote.” ~ Karl Kangur, Above House
12. Go Niche
“Create niche content for the niche audience. Being very specific in who you’re providing content for and giving them content that you’ve thoughtfully curated specifically for them is an easy sell. The Skim is a good example of this. Elevator is another good example. Your newsletter should exist to solve a problem for a very specific audience, not to merely exist.” ~ Kerry Guard, MKG Marketing
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