5 Ways to Get People to Sign Up for Your Email List
- Thu, December 04 2008
- Filed under: Fundraising essentials
Courtesy of Emma, our wonderful new email partner here at Network for Good, these tips:
As with most things, the art of enticing new subscribers depends a lot on the kinds of emails you send and the kind of people you’re trying to attract. Realize that by offering tons of enticements to recruit subscribers, you’re likely to get more addresses but wind up with members who may be a bit fickle. Conversely, by understating the value of your emails, or not promoting the signup link enough, your list will likely be made up of very loyal readers, you just won’t have lots of them.
We call this the Inverse Loyalty Curve. Actually we just made the whole ‘Inverse Loyalty Curve’ thing up, but if we were to give it a name, Inverse Loyalty Curve would be it, and before you know it people would be blogging about ‘Inverse Loyalty Curve this’ and ‘Inverse Loyalty Curve that.’ Pretty soon there would be entire books and seminars devoted to it. But back to the matter at hand.
So you want to entice people to join your list? Here are five quick tips:
Why should someone sign up? Tell them. Ask yourself why someone should sign up to get your emails. Is it because they’ll get tips that can help them eat healthier or access to articles before they’re published? And then make your case clearly to prospective subscribers. Don’t just ask them to sign up for your emails; instead, ask them to sign up for your emails to get exclusive, email-only insider information (or whatever the reward might be).
Ask when they’re most likely to say yes. In life, timing is everything.* So make sure you ask people to join your list when they’re most likely to say yes: after they’ve just made a donation, just filled out a survey for you or when they’ve just read the most fascinating article on your website. So be sure to incorporate your ‘join now’ link and teaser into the parts of your website where people are most likely to jump at the chance. We call these open-minded moments.
Make it super easy. The people who love you will be perfectly content to fill out three screens of information and take a short survey to join your list. The people who like you may not. So keep your signup process short and sweet. Minimize the clicks, and ask only for the information you truly need (if you’re not planning on using people’s birthdate information later, don’t trouble people for it). And by all means don’t mislead people into thinking the process is short and sweet only to hit them with a 20-minute routine. (You’ve seen signups that ask only for your email address followed by a ‘join’ button - but instead of joining you’re greeted by 20 more fields and a citizenship test.) Make signing up a pleasant, fast experience, and you’ll lose fewer people along the way.
Offer something in return. It’s possible the content of your emails is reward enough. But you might also consider offering people a bit of instant gratification for joining. Remember that you can customize the thank-you screen that greets new subscribers. Get creative and make the thank-you screen itself a printable VIP ticket to your next event, or include a link to premium content (say, a download for 10 Ways to Manage Your Diabetes, if your organization is concerned with diabetes).
Above all, keep it simple. MarketingSherpa (a great resource, if you don’t already know them) published the results of a lengthy experiment conducted by the Motley Fool in which a financial content service tested all sorts of signup elements - short teaser text versus a longer list of subscriber benefits, calling it ‘membership’ rather than simply joining a list, offering lots of content choices rather than just one, and so on - to see how it affected their new-subscriber numbers. In the end, Motley Fool found that keeping things simple worked best.
Shameless plug by me as COO of Network for Good: If you don’t have an email campaign tool, we offer EmailNow powered by Emma at a great rate at Network for Good.
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Comments
Very good post, I agree with what you have put here. Another important part of list building is attrition rate. It’s different for every market but with a little testing you can figure our what the right email frequency is in order to keep the unsubscribe rate as low as possible.
TEST TEST TEST
You got a really useful blog I have been here reading for about an hour. I am a newbee and your success is very much an inspiration for me. The first page doesn’t need to be just a dream anymore.Very interesting comments. I had some experiences getting some frecuencies fro china i guess but i never keep up with my search. Good suggestions though!
Thanks for providing the extensive knowledge this post will really help me.
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We have been having a lot of trouble getting people to sign up, so we will definately be trying your ideas here. Thank you!
I am trying to develop a list myself, will let you know how it goes!
People are more likely to opt in if you give them a useful incentive. For example, you can offer special services or discounts to customers who sign up for your email updates. It’s even more effective when you make offers available exclusively through your email marketing. You can then be more confident that recipients will check for the latest email.
I love running contests to get my email list bigger. It gives them incentive and costs very little depending on the prize.
Are you familiar with the concept of progressive profile building? The principle is to start with asking the user some very basic information an email and a name perhaps say to join a mailing list. From there as they interact with you, say to download a whitepaper you ask them a bit more information, i.e their job title and company. By doing this you accomplish two goals, 1) people are more likely to give you more information as they begin to trust you, and 2) it also becomes a strong way to prequalify your prospects. Buy knowing that you have a full profile, you can be assured that they have had multiple touch points with you and are a much better qualified lead.
Great blog!Ran acrossed it just doing a search on how to get people to sign up. Thank you for the great advice! I look forward to spending more time here!
Five wonderful ways that are given you for get people to sign up for my email list. I think the people who love me will be perfectly content to fill out three screens of information and take a short survey to join my list. Thanks!