The simplest and easiest tools and tips are sometimes also the ones that are most ignored or easily forgotten. Encouraging your target market to opt into your email subscribe form is key to lead generation for marketing teams. However, some marketers ignore or forget about the simple ways to increase those opt-ins. Let's take a look at 5 obvious ways marketers can do just that…
1. Simplify Your Email Opt-In
However, if you want a better and more efficient email opt-in box, set up a form that allows you to also retrieve their full name (perhaps location and company name as well) and demonstrate what they're signing up for. What’s the value (see below for tips on providing value)? This not only allows you to collect more information for lead generation purposes but also ensures subscribers are truly interested in what you have to offer.
In addition, make your opt-in box easy to find. Make it clearly stand out on a sidebar -- typically on the upper fold of a web page -- so visitors' eyes navigate toward it easily.
2. Provide Value for Email Opt-Ins
It is important for your target market to clearly understand what they will get out of subscribing to your emails. Give your audience a clear description of what the value proposition is. For example, will your emails offer:
- Tips and tools on how to run their business more efficiently,
- Product updates from your company.
- Special offers via email? Your audience will want to know “why” they should subscribe before they decide to clutter their inbox with even more emails.
3. Make Your Opt-In More Compelling With Offers
So above we talked about the importance of value and how to add value to your email subscription options. But how can your email subscription offer be even more compelling? Here are five simple, creative, and effective offers to include in your emails to make them more compelling:
- Free webinars
- Free ebooks
- Free Whitepapers
- Special discounts just for email subscribers
- Early bird product offers
It is highly probable that your marketing team is already generating this content for your campaigns and offering it to your target market, but why not also use it to demonstrate the value of being an email subscriber? Use your compelling ebooks as a way to increase your leads and strengthen your nurturing in that lead generation process.
4. Provide “Send-To-a-Friend” Options
Another simple way to increase your email subscribers is to allow current subscribers who are already brand loyalists to make your email easy to “share/send to a friend.” For example, in your email, you may have included a helpful article about industry tips and tricks, and the subscriber might think it would be a great article to email, tweet, or share with a friend. Then that friend may also subscribe. So how do you make that transaction simple for your email subscribers? Include share buttons for social media as well as a simple “share/email” to a friend option button or link. It’s a quick and easy way for your current prospects/customers to spread the word about your brand and help you gain more potential customers and email subscribers./
5. Test Different Subscribe Options
It’s important to test different offers in order to see which ones work best for your target market. Perhaps have a couple in rotation and do some A/B testing in order to see which ones generate more leads during a month’s testing. Then your marketing team can determine which type of opt-ins to focus on: whether it be webinar offers, ebooks, product offers, or all of the above. Test, test, and test away! You should also ask and poll your current email subscribers about what they would like to see more of in your emails as well as what they like most/least.
Although these 5 tips are simple and fairly easy to implement, they do take time and effort. Make an action plan of when your marketing team will plan, act, and test each of the steps you are hoping to implement. My best tip is to make sure you take the time to do it right so your prospects realize you care about their subscription, what you offer them, and that you value not just converting them into customers but also retaining them as brand loyalists.
For more tips in 2022, check out what email marketers need to know in 2022.
Are you taking advantage of these tips to improve your business' email marketing?
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About the author
Pamela Vaughan
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pamelavaughan/
Pamela is a Principal Marketing Manager, Website CRO & Copywriting at HubSpot. She is best known for introducing the concept of historical optimization, which increased organic search traffic and leads for HubSpot's blog by more than 200%.
