Email List Building Techniques

Persuading stubborn visitors to signup and receive your newsletter can be a hair-pulling experience. Thankfully these proven strategies will not only boost your subscription rates, they’ll allow you to keep whats left of your hair!

The most effective method of increasing your optin rate is offering a free incentive. Offering a gift to your visitors can often lure them onto your list much more easily than a simple invitation to receive your newsletter. By closely anticipating your readers interest you can craft an incentive that’s simply too appealing to pass up. Hard to find information IS valuable, so put a price on your incentive to directly show it’s monetary value.

When visiting other websites you’ve likely seen plain optin forms that are far too short and unappealing to encourage a reaction of any kind. Don’t follow this example if you want to see results. Instead, make your optin form design colorful, appealing, and persuasive. Readers are much more likely to signup for your newsletter if they actually notice the optin form and it’s offering something they are interested in receiving, instead of it blending into your page layout where it goes unnoticed.

Make you form short and sweet. The more information you ask of your visitors the less subscribers you’ll get. At the very least you need to collect your visitors email address, I personally recommend getting their first name as well, here’s why. When you send your newsletter you can use your autoresponder to automatically address each subscriber by name. Doing this will most certainly increase the open rate of your email messages.

Provide quality content on your webpage. Using the highest quality content on your website will indirectly increase the value of your newsletter content. Likewise, if your content is crap, your reader will also form a negative opinion of your newsletter.

Be straightforward with your intentions. Make it known the frequency of your newsletter mailings, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly. There are a lot of spammers that will actually sell subscribers information. Letting your readers know you will not sink to that level can also boost your subscription rate.

Test your way to better optin rates. Split testing the location, color and, size of your form will help you design the most effective form possible. If you are unfamiliar with the effects of colors have on your readers reaction, you should find a short article on color theory. Effective form design can create a dramatic increase in your subscriptions, so always split test your forms!

That’s it, follow these simple techniques to keep your hair intact and maximize your subscription rate!