Growing your business requires exposure: email lists, useful feedback and regular customers. You need people talk about and share your website – giving you more opportunities to make sales. 

“Your email list is the most essential asset you can invest your time in to make your new online business grow. For upcoming brands, dedicate yourself to getting out there, otherwise other brands with similar ideas to you will outshine you. But remember, only about a third of consumers actually open branded emails, so you need a way to keep your engagement rate high,” says Shane Groner, SEO writer from DraftBeyond and Last Minute Writing. Right now, you have a lot of ideas but if you don’t have a good following these will all go to waste!

It is likely that you’ll need at least a few of these tips in combination to find what works for you. Experiment and give your website time to grow. Follow these tips with a pinch of patience and you will start to see results.

Free giveaways

This tip is all about incentive! People are much more likely to sign up if they get something after. This could be a short eBook, discount or pdf for example. This is an opportunity to engage with your consumers and show them your trustworthiness.

Making a compelling offer requires understanding what your customer wants. Test a few different offers and see which one performs the best to narrow in on your best strategy. 

Exit intent popups 

These work by reminding customers to subscribe when they try to click back, close the window or divert to another page via their bookmarks. Therefore, it keeps visitors on your site for longer. Use eye-catching messages, such as offering exclusive offers. 

“Recent marketing polls amongst a range of online trade platforms have shown exit intent popups to be a technology that can increase a subscriber count from five to seven per cent. The statistics show that the promise of a next-purchase discount with an exit intent popup can up the effect from five to seven, to ten to twelve per cent.” says Dorothy Milton, marketing blogger from Writinity and Research Papers UK.

Call-to-action button

Ensure you have a subscribe button on the top of every page of your website. Make it colourful and bold, so wherever they land, the subscribe button will catch their eye.

Contest on social media

Utilize social media to create contests that are accessible through your site and require subscription to enter. This will increase your site’s online reputation, influence on social media and will improve your brand image. 

Make it easy to enter an email address

Asking for subscriber’s first name makes personalization easier later, but just asking for an email address makes it much quicker for them. Whether speed or being closer to your subscribers is more important is up to you. 

Encourage subscribers to share your newsletters and updates

This is great if you are using emotive or relevant material that will provoke a strong reaction. You need to make sure you have a way for new people to sign up. Also ensure they don’t click unsubscribe, as they’ll be unsubscribing the original recipient rather than themselves. 

Thank you page for new subscribers

This is a nice touch to surprise subscribers with. On the thank you page you could have a special one-time discount, immediately turning new subscribers into buyers. This makes them think you have surprises for them later on, too. You can also create a referral campaign that offers other discounts to people who get others to subscribe. A great idea here is to have a rolling discount, such as having a one-time 20% off discount for every person they get to subscribe. Ensure the option to share your site on social media is always available. 

Make the most of email previews

Making the first sentence of your email eye-catching is very important. With an email-open rate of just around a third, being in that third is something you need to do. You can also use Twitter-like acronyms and emojis to give a less formal feel to your emails, increasing engagement.