Your newsletter sign-ups are not drawing enough subscribers and you want to improve your sign-up conversion rate? In this blog post, you’ll learn easy and affordable ways to improve your newsletter forms, so you can drive more sales to your business.
We’ll also give you some quick tips for sending newsletters that convert, and increase your email marketing revenue. Let’s get to it!
Draw attention to your form and keep it simple
Enticing people to sign up for your newsletter is a challenge. Don’t make it even harder by keeping your form a secret. If users can’t find your newsletter sign-up form, or you make it hard for them to subscribe, you can’t be wondering why your opt-ins are so low.
You want to make sure your visitors find your signup form and you show your form across your site, on every page. If you place your form in prominent places on your website, you can be sure you’ll get more sign-ups from your visitors. Here are some of the best places where you can place your form:
- in your sidebar
- at the end of your blog posts
- at the end of your About page
- as a pop-up on one or more pages
- as a hello bar across your website
- in the footer
You have a variety of options to choose from the types of forms you want to use. There is an inline form, floating bar, floating box, full-page newsletter signup, or a modal pop-up. No one can tell you what type of form works the best. You’ll need to do some tests. However, it is proven that even though modal pop-ups might be annoying, they are one of the most effective ones. If you want to learn how to create a pop-up signup form with Ninja Forms, here is a quick blog post,
Another pretty much obvious rule is to not ask for too much information on your form. It might discourage people to sign up. Rather than adding too many fields to get all the information in one form, keep your focus on getting the email address.
Do:
Don’t:
How do you make people sign up for your form?
Ask yourself a question: Why should my visitors want to subscribe to my newsletter? If you don’t know the answer, you know you are doing it wrong.
By simply putting a simple sign-up form on your website and hoping people will sign up won’t usually work. You want to offer value right away to your subscribers through a lead magnet. Something great that you give for free in exchange for their email address. And if your incentive can be tailored, even better.
Make sure you also set the proper tone for your newsletter as well as the theme that fits your brand. You should give yourself questions such as Who is your audience? What does your audience want from your newsletter? Is it the latest news, the company’s upcoming events, or promotions only?
Identifying your potential customers will help you tailor your newsletter tremendously leading to higher revenue.
So how do you get more people to sign up for your newsletter? Here are some ideas that can offer value to subscribers:
- A generous discount on their first purchase
- A free eBook download that helps them solve a problem or achieve a goal
- A downloadable guide to doing something new
- A video explaining how you solved a problem that the customer might have
Did you know you can tailor your incentives with Ninja Forms actions? After your subscribers submit the form, you can send them to a different page with a coupon code or a thank you page. You can also include a link to a free eBook using our Success message. All these features are part of our free core!
Additionally, if you want to segment your offer based on the user’s selection on the form, you can use the Conditional Logic add-on and take your form to the next level. The choice is yours!
Increase revenue by segmentation
The more you can make your newsletter relevant for your users, the more successful your email campaigns will be. It has been proven segmented campaigns get more opens and more clicks than non-segmented campaigns.
No one wants to read emails that are canned and impersonal. For this reason, you need to have a segmentation strategy. Whether you choose to segment your users by demographics, past purchases, email engagement, website behavior, position in your sales funnel, or other strategies, make sure you take time to do it properly. This step increases the effectiveness of the newsletter significantly, leaving you rewarded with users who will likely convert into customers.
Want to display different content to different contacts in your email campaign? ActiveCampaign lets you do that. You can insert a different offer depending on what stage of the customer lifecycle your contact is in or display a different product image. The great news is we have a direct integration with ActiveCampaign.
Additionally, with our Mailchimp add-on, you can connect to your Mailchimp account and send users to interest groups based on their interests and preferences. Groups are a great way to build audience segments for sending to targeted audiences. And targeted campaigns tend to reach more promising audiences.
Don’t forget to personalize your newsletter. It will create an emotional bond with your company. Addressing each recipient personally sounds definitely better than just Hey Friend!
Once your subscribers become customers, having a good CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system helps you organize and centralize customer information so you can nurture your relationships even more and segment your customers even further based on the stage of the sales cycle they are in. Ninja Forms offers a variety of CRM integrations so feel free to explore all of them here!
Creating an email newsletter that converts
Now that you have your form in place, and collecting the email addresses, you want to invest your time into creating an email newsletter people actually read. It might not be such an easy task, since billions of emails are sent every day, but you can use some advice below to help you improve the effectiveness of your email campaigns resulting in higher conversions.
Keep your email list healthy
There is a natural decay of email marketing lists every year. The contacts expire over time which might affect your list performance and email deliverability, so you want to make sure you are keeping only the active subscribers who are engaging with your campaigns. People who are engaging with your newsletter tend to be better customers.
A great way of keeping only engaged contacts is to send regular re-engagement campaigns and see if your subscribers are still interested in receiving your content. Another option is to trim your list frequently at least twice a year by setting up an automation where you can unsubscribe contacts after certain inactivity. By doing this, you are making sure you have a fresh list to maintain good deliverability rates.
Define your focus
If you want to succeed in your newsletter, preparation is the key. Determine your focus for each newsletter you want to send to your subscribers. Each of your campaigns should have a clear and straightforward call to action (CTA).
Focus only on one goal at a time in your email, as having too many buttons and too much information might confuse your readers. Always ask yourself a question: What is the purpose of this newsletter? Is it to drive a lot of traffic to your site, take a specific action such as making a purchase or checking the latest blog post, or is it simply to educate them?
Balance your content between being educational and promotional
Don’t be that person to send emails pushing the same people to buy your stuff. The content is meant to drive leads but to be effective, you should abstain from over self-promotion.
Your brand should find the right balance between educating and selling in your email. Your contacts won’t be always inclined to make a purchase and might get annoyed by receiving promotional emails only.
On the other hand, people who expect to get some discounts will be disappointed if they won’t receive any, and might eventually unsubscribe. In general, the rule is the education content should always outweigh the promotional as it delivers something of real value that always benefits your contact.
Frequency of newsletters
With so many emails coming to our inboxes each day, sending a newsletter that comes too often can feel burdensome. On the other hand, if you rarely send an email to your subscribers, you are risking being forgotten or marked as spam.
So how often should you send out an email? Truthfully, it depends on what you have to say to your subscribers. Don’t send out the email just for the sake of it and avoid overloading your subscriber’s inbox.
Keep in mind, whatever frequency you decide to go with, keep sending your emails regularly. If you haven’t sent an email for a while to your users, do a little warm-up. Send the campaign first to users who opened the campaigns the most, and start sending slowly like once a month. Then start increasing the frequency and see what it does to your open rates!
Subject line
The one line that determines all! Every successful email starts with a subject line that is catchy and hard to ignore. But let’s be honest. It is not an easy task to draft that perfect subject line and it takes time to master it. In general, there are some rules to follow:
- Keep it short and attractive.
- Don’t use spammy words or symbols, and avoid using RE
- Be transparent and not misleading.
- Personalize your subject line as much as possible.
- Use active voice and power words to capture the attention
- Make it benefit-driven
- Run subject lines split test
In addition to the subject line, there is a preheader, also called Johnson Box, or preview text. You don’t want to ignore the preheader, and you don’t want to repeat the same text as it is in the subject line.
Instead, you want to reveal extra information about the campaign, providing a quick summary of the content. You can also include emojis if it fits your brand, to help your email get more attention.
In the end, knowing what works the best for your audience is the key. Once you arouse curiosity and interest in your users, the first step on the way to action and thus to conversion is taken.
The art of perfect timing
Your subject line is attractive, your offer is hard to beat, you have a clean email list, and you’ve done everything right as far as email deliverability is concerned. But, there is a problem. Your open rates are low. What it can be?
Nowadays, hundreds of emails are being delivered to our inboxes every day. If you don’t get the timing right, what could be once a successful campaign will end up unseen or opened too late.
The solution is testing. In general, your newsletter should be sent depending on the industry and your target group. But there is no perfect silver lining that 100% works so keep testing which delivery time works the best for your company and check your open rates and click rates regularly. Doing this will help you make sure your successful campaign will convert your users to make a purchase.
Metrics you want to track on your newsletter
To know how your newsletter is performing and if your campaigns are driving results, you need to review and measure your data regularly. There are a variety of newsletter metrics you should take into consideration: open rate, clickthrough rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, delivery rate, conversion rate, spam complaints, and list growth. But there is a metric that many email marketers tend to skip: Click-To-Open-Rate or CTOR.
What is CTOR and why do you want to measure it? While clickthrough rate includes everyone on your email list or all the emails that were delivered, the click-to-open rate is a metric that reflects how users who opened your email engaged with your content.
Knowing your CTOR really paints a picture of how your content is performing helping you make adjustments to your future campaigns that will be more valuable and engaging for your users.
Click-to-open-rate can be calculated by dividing unique clicks/unique opens x 100. What is a good CTOR? Of course, it depends on your industry but a good CTOR should be around 20-30%.
Learn more about newsletter sign-ups
In today’s blog post, you learned quick ways how to increase your sales with newsletter sign up. We also shared some quick tips on sending newsletters to your customers.
If you want more tips on building and optimizing your newsletter, check our deep-dive guide to proven ways to get more newsletter sign-ups or how to optimize your Ninja Forms lead generation forms for maximum conversions. You can also read our blog post to learn how to build a simple WordPress newsletter sign-up form!
