Publish the blogs regularly helps improve your site traffic, boosts SEO value, produces leads, obtains backlinks, and increases your internal link opportunities. Blogging keeps your website visitors returning to your site and gives them a reason to hang around your pages for a prolonged time.
What’s more? Blogs are very shareable. Meanwhile, it’s an excellent way to grow your exposure on other channels.
The list goes on and on. I can take a chair to talk to you about the benefits of blogging. That’s why I bring out several blogs regularly and have done so for a long period.
For those who already own an active blog, that’s good news. You’re already doing well.
Now, it’s time to improve your blog and take it to the next level. You could use this part of your site as a lead generation tool. A great way to perform that is by creating an email list.
To get email marketing services, A One Sol is the company.
Website type makes no difference; this strategy applies to all sites. Some of you could own an e-commerce website, including a blog as a supplemental page. Others might own a site that’s purely dedicated to blogging. The rest of you maybe fall somewhere in between.
Irrespective of your unique situation, you should use your blog to obtain email subscribers. Here’s why.
Email marketing produces a massive ROI(return on investment). Meanwhile, studies reveal that marketers bring to fruition a $44 return for every $1 they invest in email campaigns. That’s an a4,400 percent return!
The people on your email subscriber list will pay more than your other customers.
And, seemingly every person in the world uses email. Well, at least everyone who is visiting your blog pages.
According to Statista, as far as active email accounts are concerned, there will be roughly 5.6 billion by the end of 2019. In the United States, 91% of all people who uses the internet have at least one email account.
It’s worth noting that 99 percent of people with an email account get a load of their messages regularly. On the other hand, 73 percent of Millennials say that they want to email as a better communication method with businesses.
Simply put, email marketing works great.
But before you can benefit from these campaigns, you must build your list. That’s what fired me with enthusiasm to jot down this great guide. I’ll put you through your paces to convert your blog into an opt-in email machine.
Choose an email marketing service.
Before you can lay up the emails, you must be signed up for an email marketing service.
Neither you’ll be sending out individual messages nor bulk emails manually – it’s too crazy to talk. Nonetheless, email software simplifies it for you to lay in, manage, and contact your subscribers.
What’s more? It would help if you got hold of valuable insight into the effectiveness of your campaigns. While email marketing services will let you know things like:
- Open rates
- Bounce rates
- Spam rates
- CTR
- Unsubscribes
If you already have email marketing software, you can only fight shy of this part if, indeed, you desire to switch providers. Here are some of the best top email marketing options on the market at this moment to pick out:
- Constant Contact
- MailChimp
- Active Campaign
- Get Response
- A Weber
But there is only one email marketing company to consider to get email marketing services: A One Sol.
Pricing usually depends upon the number of subscribers you have on your list. The higher the list, the greater the price. Please don’t dwell on it; this is an awesome thing. You wish to own a massive email list. As I said earlier, with all of that, you could bank on a high ROI from your email marketing campaigns.
Meanwhile, it’s based on your personal preference to decide on your email software. Before deciding, consider a free trial to test the navigation, user experience, and aspects.
But for the most part, the options I wrote down above will never let you go awry if you single out one of them.
Create an opt-in form
You’ve signed up for an email marketing service; you must develop an opt-in form on your site.
You should certainly have an exclusive landing page for email sign-ups on your site. However, you’ll also need to design the sign-up forms on other website pages, such as the blog main page and every published blog page.
Though, you can build these forms via your email software. Also, the instructions and wording will differ based on which service you’re using. But it needs to be so simple and easy to find.
To embed on your site, you have to generate a shortcode. You’d generate some of these, as we’ll put our heads together in more detail shortly.
Look at a primary example from Search Engine Land of what the final version of these opt-in forms will take shape on your blog.
So, this screenshot is of the homepage.
It’s so easy and simple. As you see, on the right side of the screen, there’s an option for users to sign up for their newsletter.
It’s good that only an email address is required to sign up. Meanwhile, short opt-in maximizes the possibility that more people would sign up.
If your forms take the first name, last name, middle name, email address, phone number, zip code, favorite color, and mother’s maiden name, it feels like you’re too close to ask for the person’s social security number. That’s overkill.
Consider it. What you need is just their email address.
Although other pieces of information make it unchallenging for you to personalize the customer experience, you can dwell on the future by wanting them to create a user profile or account. At this moment, zero in on getting them to subscribe.
Meanwhile, Search Engine Land applies this strategy to all of its blogs.
Here’s how it appears when you click on an individual blog post.
Before the title, they give another chance to decide via a basic form. Did you catch sight of form? It’s different from the first form but similar.
They didn’t fade away here, either. However, visiting the posts will see another opt-in form at the bottom of each blog post.
Read also: How to get more conversions from AdWords using remarketing
Putting these opt-in forms everywhere on the blog boosts folks’ chances to sign up.
Pay heed to what all of these forms have in common. None of them is out of place.
Site visitors can still navigate without having to cope with any pop-up windows, sliders, or anything else that may screw up their experience.
As you have already read above, you’ll need to create a number of your opt-in form, so it’s easy for you to track. After a bit, you’ll run the test to know which achieved great. But I’ll be telling you more in detail later on.
Add an incentive
Why should someone sign up to receive emails from you?
It’s a good question. Indeed, you need their email address to monetize them; however, what are they receiving in return?
The people would sign up when you give them a reason to do.
Consider how many emails you receive daily. If it’s anything like me, you’re receiving 50-100. On the other hand, an average office employee gets 121 emails on day-to-day!
It is necessary to think more than two or three times to be ready to subscribe to every opt-in form. However, when you include an incentive, it may dramatically increase your chances.
Take a look at an excellent example from the Conversion XL blog.
If you want a simple sign-up form, look at the example above.
But this one is pitching the site visitor from a quite different perspective. Instead of saying, “get weekly updates after subscribing,” or something more along those lines, they are presenting a free e book.
As you may notice, the book is all about mastering conversion optimization. To obtain the free e book, everyone has to give their email address. Look at the box below saying the user who signs up will also receive updates through email.
There are many ways for you to use this great strategy on your blog page.
Get our marketing automation services.
An example would be there, let’s suppose you work on an ecommerce website. You could put a discount code to join an email list on your blog posts. Render a dollar amount discount on the user’s next purchase.
What you need to do is something that goes beyond “sign up.” Be competent in creating the complete value proposition and include it in your opt-in forms.
Use a sticky bar
If it’s imperfect to design an opt-in form in the sidebar or within the content itself, or at the bottom of the page, like an example we saw above, you can, every time, employ a sticky bar as an alternative.
The sticky bar will stick at the top of the page as the visitor scrolls down or up your blog.
This is a noticeable and prominent way to heap up email addresses with your blog. Take a look at an example of how HubSpot employs this strategy excellently.
The “subscribe” button is coded at the top of every blog post.
While people will be going through the blog, this will, each time, be in view. Clicking on this button will show you the following options:
Subscribing via email is the top option.
When someone clicks on this, they’ll be offered an opt-in form similar to the one we looked at earlier.
Bear in mind these added steps might produce less than subscribers as another method can do. However, with this said, site users who experience this procedure must be more qualified leads. You know they’re serious about getting emails if they accomplish the extra steps.
This type of sticky bar is just another thing to consider.
Generate a visual CTA
Rather than a traditional opt-in form, you can go to the next level while trying something more inviting to attract attention to your email list.
A custom visual image, including a CTA, should play a role in this scenario. You can place this at the top or bottom of your blog posts.
Here’s how it appears on the IMPACT blog.
Note how this seems different from the other examples we’ve seen.
The entire visual is customized to get subscribers. What it adds is a photo, value proposition, and CTA button. IMPACT is dangling a carrot in front of the readers to sign up by power in numbers.
Psychologically, if 80,000+ peeps perform something, it will be great, right? That’s the great idea behind this strategy.
I like too how the picture displays the newsletter on a mobile device. Because it’s so related to the audience, this comes with a story of someone who can obtain updates to their phone, which is appropriate.
Read also: How to craft meta tags for SEO and CTR.
Since mobile devices check out 61 percent of all emails, this makes sense. Most importantly, this is a creative way to catch the attention of an email list on a blog post.
Run A/B tests
Every element of the email opt-in forms on your blog needs to be tested.
- Size
- Color
- Position
- Wording
- Font
Begin with only one idea, and then move on to the other. The idea behind A/B testing is that anything could always be boosted. You may consider your ideal opt-in strategy, but that’s only sometimes the case.
Some of you may be bowled over to know how a minor change can amazingly improve your sign-up conversion rates.
Let me take a moment to reevaluate what we chewed over earlier regarding making multiple opt-in forms. This makes it straightforward for you to experiment with different elements and variations.
Those who make up their mind to take an approach like Search Engine Land and put forms in different areas throughout the blog, you can understand completely which one is doing the highest. In the end, you might plan that one of them could be eliminated.
Next, you can go on with A/B testing the framed form to ensure it converts at the highest possible rate.
Conclusion
If you’re not getting the most out of your blog, you must start using it as a tool for creating an email list.
Choosing email marketing helps you take the first step to execute this tactic. Next, you’ll employ that software to design an opt-in form on your blog.
From here, it’s just a matter of understanding how you’re about to offer that form to your site visitors. Three ways to drive conversions are adding an incentive, using a sticky bar, or creating visual CT.
