15 Easy Ways to Get More Email Subscribers
Want to get more email subscribers but have no idea how the heck to achieve that? You’re in luck, in this article I’m going to show you exactly how to do that.
You’ve probably read this a thousand times by now: “The money is in the list”.
Either from me, or from other quacks… I mean online marketers. And guess what?
It’s freaking true.
Building an email list has so many benefits that it’s crazy. I’m not going to list them all here so go read:
In short, the benefits are: You get to have your own audience and traffic source with the click of a button and you increase your revenue tremendously.
But if you don’t learn how to get more email subscribers, then you won’t really get to enjoy some of these awesome benefits.
So how do we get more email subscribers?
It’s simple: You hustle your ass off.
Yea, you wanted an easy fix didn’t you?
Well, tough luck buddy, you’re not going to get that from me. I’m going, to be honest with you and tell you upfront, that building an email list to a decent amount of subscribers (10k+) takes time.
Sure, you can get there quicker if you have a large following or receive millions of hits on your website. But most of you aren’t there just yet.
So what should you do?
EVERYTHING
Literally, you should try and implement as many of these methods that I’m about to share with you below to try and get more email subscribers to your list.
How to Grow Your Email List Fast:
1. Give something of high value
Gone are the days where you could simply entice your website visitors to enter their email addresses in order to receive a measly eBook report.
Nah, that shit is long gone. You have to actually put in the work if you want to grow your email list with people that actually care about what you say.
In this day and age many people are kinda reluctant to give away their email address. So you have to make sure that you offer them something that awesome and valuable that they feel almost forced to giveaway their info.
Think legit case studies, downloadable content (landing pages, digital marketing tools, etc), extra tips, and all kind of resources. Something that you’ve put a lot of work into.
Even though you’re giving away things for free (in exchange of their email address), you want to create products as if you would price and sell them.
That’s the kind of quality products that people giveaway their emails for.
2. Use a pop-up
Yes, the annoying popup when used correctly is probably one of the fastest and easiest ways of growing your email list and gaining more subscribers.
You can use a timed popup, for example, 5 seconds after the user has entered your website.
The alternative is to use an exit-intent popup where you would ask for your visitor’s email address when they are just about to leave your site.
Whatever way you decide to implement your email form popup, one thing is for sure: it freaking works.
Most decent email marketing services should have popup forms available to be easily implemented. If not, then either switch your email service or use a third-party tool or plugin.
3. Use fewer form fields
Do you really need to gather your subscriber’s name and other silly information such as their phone number or country?
Here’s the truth: If you want to grow your email list fast, you should only ask for the email address. That’s it. You don’t need their name and other bullshit.
You also don’t need to use double opt-in. You will get more email subscribers if you use a single opt-in form.
Many email marketing services such as Mailchimp have switched from a default double opt-in to single opt-in.
Why? Well, as Mailchimp found out: only 39% of people that signed up to an email list would confirm their subscription.
This means that 61% of contacts were lost simply because visitors forgot to also check their email and confirm that they want to be a part of your newsletter.
That’s a pretty big chunk of subscribers to lose simply because you ask for a confirmation email.
I use a single opt-in on all my blogs and websites. Sure I get some bots from time to time and some hard bounces, but you know what? It’s worth it.
If you sanitize your email list (remove bot or misspelled emails or hard bounces) and maintain it properly, you won’t have any issues.
4. Create a viral giveaway
You can use clever marketing apps such as Gleam.io to create viral giveaways and get more email leads and contacts.
The idea is simple. You create something of value, and you put it behind a piece of script that asks people to share that page with others on their social media, in order to get access to the free resource.
As more and more people would come to the special page, they will all start sharing it on their social pages, creating a snowball effect, helping your email marketing to go viral.
5. Don’t complicate things
Keep your email form simple and easily accessible. Meaning that it should be always visible on your website. For example in your sidebar, or as a slide-in, or fixed position.
Don’t hide it in the footer or use it only on your home page.
Use an email form at the end of every article, sometimes add it in between the content as well to give users a chance to get content upgrades for free (more on this below).
You also want to make sure that your email form is responsive and easily accessible from all devices especially mobile.
We are in a mobile-first age, so your website and email forms must act like it.
6. Ask your followers to subscribe
What good is it if you have 100k followers on Instagram if there is no easy way to effectively market to them? The solution is simple: Create a landing page for social media followers to easily subscribe to your email list.
Not only will you get more email subscribers but you will also make it even easier for your followers to stay up to date with your content.
Especially if you like to create longer content that’s not usually within the limits of social media.
Don’t be shy to ask your social media followers to subscribe to your email list. They are following you for a reason. They like the shit that you do or post.
So go ahead and put a link to your email squeeze page in your bio (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc).
Once in a while you can also create a post asking them directly to do just that.
7. Create an email landing page
Also known as an email squeeze page. Basically, a page dedicated entirely to promoting your newsletter or email list in exchange for a user’s email address.
There are many tools and software that you can use to create high-converting email landing pages these days.
A good email landing page usually focuses as much as possible on the benefits and the value that your email list / newsletter would provide to users.
So try and list as many good things about your newsletter as possible, preferably in a bullet point, right next to the email opt-in form.
Don’t forget to add links to your newsletter page in your main menu (top navigation) and footer menu (bottom navigation). As well as inside your articles and sidebar.
You can also create multiple email landing pages if you want to segment your lists based on your users’ interests and traffic sources.
For example, you can create an email squeeze page to get more subscribers from your Twitter profile.
You can add clever words in the title such as: “Hey there Twitter user, check this special newsletter just for you” to further increase your conversion rate, by customizing the page specific to your user’s interest.
8. Implement content locking
Why give away all your best content for free on your blog when you can turn some of those guides into gated content pages?
Just ask your readers to enter their email addresses if they want to get access and read the content for free.
Yes, it’s that simple, and yes it will annoy visitors. But if you want to take a more guerilla marketing approach and to get more email subscribers, then this is how you do it.
9. Use a fullscreen welcome mat
Ok, these are also slightly annoying, but then again, so are the majority of the methods on this list. Besides, they are not that bad compared to popups.
Plus, they might not even be annoying to regular folks, it just we marketers got fed with them, from seeing them on pretty much any blog or website in the industry (digital marketing).
For other people and niches, it might not even be something that out of place. So consider using a welcome mat.
You can easily create an opt-in welcome mat with many email marketing services but if your favorite autoresponder software doesn’t have this feature, consider using something like Sumo mat.
10. Get more traffic
I know this one is not really an overnight trick that you can implement. But it’s still probably one of the most important aspects of email list building.
You can implement all the tactics on this page all day long.
The truth is that without any eyeballs to read and check out your email squeeze page and forms, you won’t be getting any email subscribers.
So try and increase the amount of traffic your blog or website gets.
Related:
11. Use paid ads
The thing is though, getting free traffic to your website takes time. SEO is hard work, you need to do proper keyword research and write blog posts that have a decent amount of words in them.
When you don’t have the time to do that, you can try your hand at buying some cheap website traffic.
You can still get clicks for as low as $0.01 from top countries like the US and UK even to this day.
And no, not from shady sites with bot traffic, but from some of the best ad networks around such as PropellerAds, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, Yahoo Gemini.
You don’t have do spend a fortune either. You can just create a budget for example of $5 a day, especially on platforms such as Facebook and advertise your email landing page.
To this day I’m still building my email lists with paid traffic on various niches:
Yeah, I spend money on it, but for every $1 spent on email marketing, on average we get back $42.
How crazy is that? That’s an insane ROI by the way, and I can attest to that, at least in some niches it’s very close to the truth.
12. Split test everything
You must do A/B split testing on your email squeeze page (landing page), and your email forms. This ensures that you get the most amount of subscribers from all the visits that your website is receiving.
You should always be on the hunt and optimize your newsletter page and forms as much as possible with the end goal of having a high opt-in rate.
How high should your opt-in rate be? As high as Snoop Dogg when he’s in the studio recording.
Meaning: Very high. You should aim for at least a 30% conversion rate on your email squeeze page.
I’ve personally had squeeze pages in certain niches reach even 70% to 75% opt-in rate. Granted that’s not possible in every industry, and you need to be a wizard at copywriting, but it can happen.
If you don’t want to invest in fancy A/B split testing software consider using Google Optimize.
Make sure that you allow your experiments or tests to run for a couple of days before you decide which is the better version.
Don’t just stop the tests after a day or two.
13. Implement some FOMO with Social Proof
Do you know all the little popup notifications that you see in the corner of a website informing you that “person X from location Y has just bought or signed up for something“?
Well, that’s called the FOMO effect (fear of missing out), and evil marketers (sorry) have kinda abused these for a while now. Sure it’s not as bad on the web as it is in online multiplayer games, but yeah, some people dislike these with a passion.
Doesn’t that makes you want to pull up your credit card… or in this case, your email address and join too? You want to be part of the group basically and not left out, that’s an oversimplification, but hey… who has time for that right now.
The point is, FOMO and social proof gets the job done. And if you want to get more email subscribers, at the end of the day you gotta do what you gotta do.
So go ahead and FOMO your website visitors a bit, and see if you notice any changes in your email list subscribers count.
14. Leverage your free posts
You don’t have to go and fully lock your content behind an email opt-in. Even though I’ve detailed this method above, some might think it’s a bit too much.
So the next best thing is to use your already created articles and insert opt-in forms that giveaway something of high value that is related to that content for free in exchange for an email address.
For example in my Dating CPA Case Study, I have created a unique email opt-in form just for that post and giving the readers a chance to download my high CTR landing page that I have used in exchange for their email.
Guess what? It works really really well.
Why?
Because people are already interested in that topic, they have searched for it on Google, they are reading the article.
Getting an upgrade or add-on for free that’s highly related to what they have looked for? Of course, they’re going to sign up.
This is one of the best ways to get more email subscribers while also nurturing a lovely audience that values your content and is always interested in hearing and reading more of your stuff.
15. WordPress Comment Redirect
This will only work if you have started a blog on WordPress, but essentially you want to redirect your users every time they comment. Redirect them to where though? What a silly question. To your newsletter landing page. Makes sense right?
Usually what happens is that some visitors arrive on your blog from some other website or from Google, they read your stuff, they decide to comment on it, and then that’s it.
Their comment is being held in moderation and the user is just staring at the screen now doing nothing else. Do you know what they’re going to do next? Leave the website.
Why not instead redirect them immediately after they comment to your email landing page and try to squeeze an email out of them?
You can do that easily by using a WordPress plugin like Yoast Comment Hacks. Simply install it, activate it, and then from the plugin’s settings page go to Comment redirect and copy/paste the link to your email sign-up page.
This is an awesome way of getting more email subscribers without annoying your visitors. Try it out, it works great.
Bonus: Use a decent email service
Finally, you want to use a great email marketing service.
Sure, not everyone will have an extra $10 a month or so to spend on a great email marketing software but consider this, you don’t want to go with a cheap one or a free one either.
Take Mailchimp for example. It has a free plan, and then an upgraded plan. But did you know that even on the paid plan, you can’t advertise affiliate offers?
Yep, it’s against their rules apparently, even if you do everything legit and don’t promote affiliate marketing scams. They will shut down your account.
Read my Mailchimp alternatives post to see what to use instead.
How to get more email subscribers: Conclusion
As you can see there are quite a few ways and methods to grow your email list. I’ve personally used them all and yeah some are annoying but they get the job done.
I know the sliding email form that I use on this blog is a bit too in your face. But it works for me.
And that’s also the moral of this article: Use whatever works best for you and your blog. Some niches and websites and audiences react differently to all these methods.
Just remember to A/B test everything, and give your tests enough time in order to make an informed decision on what is working and what doesn’t.
Alright then, until next time:
Stay hustlin’
Stephen
i would like to subscribe to your newsletter
Hi Mathew,
There is a black bar that’s “sticky” at the bottom of the screen and when clicked on it redirects you to my newsletter page where you can sign up. Does the black bar not show up? Legit curious as that might be sorta bad for me haha 🙂
Cheers,
Stephen
Syndication of all content to all following and online presences has been our best to for boosting the amount of subscribers we’re able to generate. Every single post, Video, article, you name it… Regardless of platform. Is shared across all of our other platforms. You have some great stuff in this article as well that highlights some amazing ways to boost lead generation quite a lot.
(Where you go into split testing is my favorite. Above all else, split testing (if done accurately) is one of the fastest ways to increase conversion rate / opt in rates / etc)
Love your stuff! As always.
Thanks for reading Johnathan, glad you like my stuff.
All the best,
Stephen