If you’re running an online business, you need a way to stay in touch with your customers. Building an email list is one of the cheapest, most effective solution for doing that. This step by step guide will show you how how to build an email list on your WordPress blog.
Email marketing has become the hot topic among webmasters, online business owners, and bloggers. The usage of Email marketing strategy is growing every second of the day. Moreover, a 2014 survey has proven that it offers the highest conversion rate and increased ROI of any marketing medium.
Most of the websites contribute half of their traffic to email marketing and the results are no more isolated. Look around and you’ll see almost every webmaster making use of this channel to drive a large number of visitors to their website. Unlike any other traffic driving strategy, email marketing makes up the profitable and long-term users of a business or brand. However, only a handful of websites is making the most of it.
Read: How Does Email Marketing Help Grow Your E-commerce Business
Wondering what they are doing different that help them gain so many new subscribers? Well, we are going to share every bit of email marketing strategy and what we learned during the journey here in this article.
What is email list?
You probably have heard every expert saying that you should build an email list, but they often forget to tell you what an email list is. Well, an email list consists of emails of your subscribers/users who have subscribed to your newsletter or latest updates. This enables you to stay in touch with your users and convert them from returning visitors to customers.
Why is there a need to build an email list?
According to a survey, email marketing beats social media marketing with a huge percentage. As a matter of fact, emails can fetch you 10 times more clicks than every social media platform.
There are various reasons that indicate the importance of building an email list.
01. Better Targeting:
Email marketing involves creating an email list which can include emails of users of a specific city, state or even a country. This helps you target your audience defined by a geographic region better. As an instance, if you are introducing a new product which is available only to local users, you can build an email list containing emails of local users and reaching out your local subscribers.
02. Authority:
When posting content on social media platforms, you do not own the information. And you can lose all of it in a matter of second by getting your account suspended, which is annoying since you have put a lot of efforts in building and establishing one. However, when it comes to the email list, you get full access and ownership of everything you share with your users and never have to worry about getting your accounts suspended.
03. Guaranteed Reach:
Facebook has recently announced that it is going to minimize the overly promotional page posts, which means you have only 2% chances of reaching organic reach if you have a million likes. However, email is something that never changes except for the interface and navigation. Users check their email accounts every day more carefully than their social media accounts.
What do you need to get started with email marketing?
Well, getting started with email marketing is extremely easy provided you have a reliable email service provider (there are many!). These providers ensure proper delivery of your emails and provide appropriate resources to ensure your emails do not end up in spam or junk mail. Almost every online business uses third-party email service provider.
Recommended provider – MailChimp
Mailchimp: There are many providers available on the market though we use Mailchimp that not only help us create beautiful emails to send them out to our subscribers but also lets us create landing pages, automate your busy work and so much more. If you also want something big from your online marketing, this is the tool you should be using.
I’ve been using Cloudways since January 2016 for this blog. I happily recommend Cloudways to my readers because I am a proud customer.
Great News: Mailchimp offers a Forever Free plan to get your business up and running. Mailchimp’s Forever Free Plan gives you access to most Mailchimp features. With the Forever Free plan, you can keep up to 2,000 subscribers in your account, and send up to 12,000 emails per month. This is a great offer for beginners.
In order to claim Mailchimp Forever Free plan, please sign up using the link below.
Try Mailchimp – Forever Free Plan
How to grow your email list with a WordPress blog?
Nothing beats the ease, flexibility and versatility WordPress has to offer and these are the reasons that make WordPress so popular. And building an email list with WordPress blog is no exception. It is as easy as installing a plugin in WordPress blog. Once you have registered with a trustworthy email service provider, you need to integrate subscription forms into your WordPress site.
Subscription forms allow your users to enter their email addresses to subscribe to your newsletter. Now there are various locations to display this subscription form. Remember, they are extremely important to the success of your email marketing strategy and therefore, should be placed somewhere that encourages users to sign up.
Having an attractive, effective lead magnet will accelerate your email list building like it’s on steroids. A lead magnet is the incentive you make to get visitors’ email addresses.
Getting their email address is a transaction. You want their email, so you have to give something they want in return. Your job is to sell the idea of subscribing to your list, and you need an attractive offer/incentive to do it.
If what you offer is something your visitors want and it seems to be worth going through the bother (typing the email address, confirming email etc), you will get their email address.
The speed of your list building process depends mostly on the lead magnet of your site. Lousy, unattractive lead magnet = very few sign-ups. Attractive lead magnet = thousands of sign-ups.
Optin Feature Boxes:
Optin feature boxes typically sit just below your site’s header and navigation area. Some bloggers just use them on their site’s homepage alone, whereas others use them on a select number of posts or pages or even across the whole blog.
Feature boxes get higher opt-in rates than any other form on your site.
Read: How to Add an Optin Feature Box to Your Site
Sidebar:
A sidebar offers an additional navigating value to your visitors and is a great place to feature a subscription form. You can gently convert your visitors to subscribers by adding an attractive subscribe box. In fact, it has shown that the top of a sidebar leads to 26% increase in the email list.
Lead capture bar:
A sticky lead capture bar is considered to be a high converting place to boasts of your appealing subscription form which can be used to improve your email conversion rate. Lead capture bar shows a noticeable and simple bar that sticks to the top or footer of your website and follows your visitors while scrolling.
Opt-in Popups:
If you have spent any time browsing websites, you would know about Popups. They are annoying and take a fair share of your time. But there’s certainly a reason why they are so popular, they work! They bring the highest email conversion rate.
Blog Post Footer:
Blog post footer is yet another great place to display your subscription form. Footer bar like a lead capture top bar also follows the visitors when they scroll. They have also proven to be great to bring in more subscribers.
If you are planning on adding a subscription form to your website, there are few amazing options for you. You can tailor made your subscription form by writing your own code. You can also use any WordPress email subscription plugin for many popup integrations. Or you can get started with GetResponse and build your subscription forms.
Best WordPress plugin to use
Grow your email list faster with these powerful list building WordPress plugins. The best thing is, you don’t need to be a coder to use them.
Thrive Leads WordPress plugin:
Thrive Leads is one of the most popular email subscription WordPress plugin that lets you create every type of opt-in form to increase your email conversions. The plugin comes with an extensive library of beautifully designed themes that you can choose to build conversion optimized, appealing and attractive subscription forms. Customize the whole design or make few changes, Thrive Leads comes with a drag and drop editor to make editing a lot easier for you.
Additional features:
- Lets you choose from different eye-catching entry animations
- Offer ultra-precise targeting
- Trigger options
- Offer analytics to help you monitor your conversions
- Comes with A/B Testing
- Lets you capture the attention of your visitors when they are about to leave your site
Price: $67 (onetime payment)
How to interact with your subscribers?
Building a beautiful subscription form, and gathering email addresses of your visitor is not enough. You need to stay in touch with them, which is the main reason why you opted for email marketing in the first place. Send them regular updates of your products, services or websites. Try to make it a habit and skyrocket your conversion rates.
Recommended posts for you:
- 12 Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers
- Incredible Ways to Get Your First 1000 Email Subscribers
- How to Engage Your Email Subscribers From the Moment They Sign Up
- How to Build Strong Relationships with Your Customers?
WordPress Custom Plugin Development.
