Add a newsletter sign-up

If you don’t already have a newsletter sign-up on your website, add it today. Add it to your blog as well. Be sure to make it prominent and add it to as many pages as you can. Let your newsletter sign-up be a prominent call-to-action and make it stand out. This is a great way to grow your email list, especially if your site/blog gets a lot of traffic.

It is a good idea to explain some brief details about the newsletter as well. Details such as frequency, topics etc. so people know what they are getting themselves into. If you say what the email frequency will be, make sure you stick to it.

Integrate social media

This is a two part process. First you can add social sharing icons/links in your newsletter so that your subscribers can share your content with their social media contacts. For example, if someone enjoys one of your articles, they could share it on Facebook. Now your content has spread beyond your subscriber reach and into their Facebook network. This exposes your content and brand to new audiences and can help you pick-up some additional subscribers.

The next part is to add your newsletter sign-up to some of your social media profiles such as Facebook, LinkedIn and possibly Twitter (if you use auto DM’s). This adds another outlet of exposure to help increase subscribers.

Give something away

Good old fashioned bribes always work. Give people an incentive to subscribe. This could be anything from a free white paper or e-book, free trial, t-shirt etc.

Offer a good reason to subscribe

A couple other popular tricks is to offer special discounts and incentives to your newsletter subscribers. Subscribe to my newsletter and save 10% type thing. Or, maybe you are going to provide exclusive content in your newsletter. People always want to know “what’s in it for me,” so be sure to let them know WHY they should subscribe.

Conferences and events

Conferences, trade shows and events are great ways to build your subscriber list. As you network and collect business cards, ask if they would be interested in subscribing to your newsletter. Be sure you ask permission. Have a newsletter sign-up form at your booth to make it easy.

Social media is huge now, but that doesn’t mean email marketing is dead. Email marketing is necessary and works well with social media and other marketing initiatives. Email campaigns are a cost-effective way of attracting quality return visitors to your site. It’s important that you tag your email campaigns with campaign tags and link tracking systems so you can track how well your emails perform. This enables you optimize your efforts and track your conversion rate and return on investment.

Most all email service providers (ESP’s) give users great data on open, click rates etc. All this is good info that can provide you with a good understanding of how well you email marketing campaigns are doing. However, even though these stats are great, they don’t tell you the whole story. They don’t tell you what the user does after they click your link.

Put a system in place

Unless you use RhinoSEO (shameless plug, I know), your ESP won’t provide you stats after the user clicks the link. Many however will help you put a system in place to help track this data. The important thing to do is to set-up a system so you can tag your links to make it easier to see user behavior from your emails.

Track past the click

There are several ways to add a simple tracking system to the links in you emails. You can use link trackers from Google or even keep it simple by using something like bit.ly. Either way, tag your links so you can easily determine which links are coming from your email campaigns.

Tracking past the click will help you see how your users behave after they click the links in your email. This can shed insight such as how relevant your links are to the content in the email and even what people are interested in once they hit your site. If your email content is about “widget a” but users going 3 pages deep on your site and spending 5 minutes on pages about “widget b,” then you know that your customers are more interested in “widget b.” Now you can adjust your content to reflect what your customers are actually interested in, which can help increase your conversion rate.

Look, analyze and tweak

Now, don’t just set all this stuff up, USE IT! Make it a habit to go back after your campaign to look at your open and click through rates as well as the user behavior on your landing pages/website. This data can give you a sneak peak into what your customers/prospects are thinking so you can tweak your campaigns and increase conversion rates.