Best Practices for Email List Subscriptions

The power is in the list.

The email list to be exact. No matter what the new shiny object is in marketing: social media, mobile marketing, video marketing, email marketing is still the most powerful marketing tool out there.

And it's likely to be that way for a long time.

But the trick is to get subscribers to your email list.

First you must decide what type of email service you'll provide

Today's software gives you so many possibilities for building an email database. Many email services, such as Doppler, provide templates for easily designing attractive email newsletters, and also provide auto-responder capabilities.
But what will you send people?

• Offer an email E-course. Offer email courses delivered over time using an auto responder. These are great free ‘courses’ packed with valuable information people want to learn. Copyblogger.com offers their course Internet Marketing for Smart People, Sonia Simone offers Content Class, and Naomi Dunford offers Free Marketing Courses.

• Offer a daily email. Send an email every day to your database. This should be one email article, preferably a short article. And keep it simple: free of distracting graphics and links to other stuff. Internet bad boy Ben Settle sends a short pithy email every day to his subscriber list.

• Feed your blog to a newsletter. There are several services that allow you to automatically feed your blog content to into your email newsletter. The great part about this is it allows you to create content once and use it for several different purposes.

• Traditional email newsletter. A weekly, monthly or quarterly email newsletter is a great way to keep your content in front of your subscribers. The beauty of this method is it allows you to pack several articles into one email. Most email marketing services let you also include additional content, such as calls-to-action and event invitations in a sidebar space of your newsletter.

Landing Page Best Practices for Email Opt-In

The ideal landing page for driving subscriptions to your opt-in list is the one we described in our previous blog post about Landing Pages for Content Marketing.

However, there are a very extra elements you should consider as well:

• Offer something of value in exchange for subscribing. You should consider offering an eBook, special report, or white paper as an incentive for prospects to subscribe to your email newsletter. Mention this as on your landing page as one of the benefits of subscribing.

• Keep the form short. You're not selling your prospects anything at this point, so you're not requesting a credit card number. You don't need all their information. Just ask for a first name and email address, otherwise you risk driving your prospects away and losing a potential subscriber.

• Consider using video. As we mentioned in our earlier post about video marketing, video is a great way to drive conversions. Lander lets you embed videos, so there’s really no excuse for you not to include video on your landing page.

• Test your landing page. You can improve the performance of your landing page by doing an A/B split test on two different versions of your page. Try different graphic elements, different headlines, and different types of opt-in forms. Again, Lander has a built-in A/B split test tool, so use it to your advantage.

Conclusion

The email list is the online marketer’s holy grail. A well-designed landing page is a key part to building subscribers to your email list. Are you making email marketing a key part of your marketing strategy? We hope so!