In our popular blog post, 9 Tips That Get More People to Subscribe to Your Email, we offered quick tips and tricks to increase email subscriptions. Here, we’ve rounded up a few more ideas on how to get people to subscribe (and in some cases, stay subscribed) to your email.
1. Got Social Proof? Use It!
Social media serves up powerful ways to reinvent one of the best psychological phenomena in the history of marketing: the bandwagon effect. In fact, today’s social-focused consumers may be more peer-influenced than ever. When’s the last time you made a purchase without reading reviews? Social proof is the modern-day bandwagon for content-hungry B2B marketers.
Just think: if you know that thousands of people are signed up for a particular newsletter or blog, then you’d think it MUST be pretty good, right? Plus, who wants to miss out on tips that their competitors are getting? Keep in mind, you don’t have to have huge numbers (like HubSpot’s example below) to harness the power of social proof.
2. Let ‘em call the shots on frequency.
Flooding inboxes is a surefire way to send unsubs skyrocketing. In fact, many customers cite this as the top reason for unsubscribing. One way to prevent this is to let subscribers choose their frequency. According to one survey, 53 percent of consumers reported getting too many emails from retailers, while only 44 percent said they get the right amount. Give your customers a choice, stick to your promise – and above all, be sure that every email delivers value, no matter how much they tell you they want to hear from you.
3. Unsubscribe doesn’t always mean goodbye.
What happens when your subscribers hit that fateful “unsubscribe” link? In order to preserve your valuable subscribers, don’t part ways with them the moment they click. After all, it could have been a misclick or a decision made too hastily – so take a second to remind them of the value they’ll be missing out on. Or, try giving subscribers an option to adjust the frequency of the emails they receive, or the chance to receive more tailored content. If it fits your brand, don’t be shy about adding some humor or emotion to your message, too. J.Crew Factory does a great job of this on its Unsubscribe page below. Compare that to the rather feeble “Are you sure?” message from Pier I Imports. Which one would re-tip the scales favorably back in your direction?
4. Employ a mobile-first mentality.
Up to 55 percent of email is opened on a mobile device, according to 2016 Litmus “Email Analytics.” That means today’s marketers must optimize every aspect of their emails accordingly. Your email sign-up is no exception. Asking users to type an email address into a small form field is cumbersome on a mobile device and prone to errors – so try to find ways to fool-proof the process.
Many marketers offer social sign-ins via Facebook as an error-free alternative. (Bonus: you get first and last names this way, too, to better personalize.) Checkboxes also make it easier (depending on the user’s log-in state). Other marketers, like Upworthy, resurrected a slightly old-school method that’s a bit more mobile-friendly: the “one-click” subscription that opens a users’ email app and instructs them to simply “tap send” to subscribe.
5. Turn your social followers into email subscribers.
According to a MarketingSherpa survey, 75% of social media users said that email is still the best way for brands to communicate with them. Additionally, your Facebook posts will only be seen by your followers 2% of the time, while emails reach them 90% of the time. Bottom line? Don’t trade in your efforts to grow your subscriber list for soliciting likes.
Instead, find ways to strengthen your social followers by turning them into email subscribers as well. There are dozens of ways to do this: from building exclusive subscriber communities, to promoting gated content (that you must opt-in to access) like webinars, offers, white papers, etc., to integrating sign-up forms directly on your Facebook page, like MailChimp does below.
And don’t forget the most basic method of all: just ask!
For some more specific, actionable ways to turn your social followers into email subscribers, read these ideas.
