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When it comes to growing your email list, it’s hard to beat the exposure your website can provide.
Think about it — why do people visit your website?
In most cases, it’s to learn more about you, your business, and the products and services you have to offer.
Many of these people will navigate to your website directly, but others will come through different channels — like a link you’ve shared on social media or through a piece of content they discovered through a search result.
This is the perfect opportunity to catch their attention and encourage them to stay connected with you through email.
But here’s the problem: even if you’re providing a way for people to join your email list from your website, there’s no guarantee they’re going to sign up.
In fact, if you’ve already tried collecting email addresses on your website then you may have noticed that only a small percentage of your website visitors are signing up.
If you want them to take the next step of joining your email list, there are a few common roadblocks you need to address.
Let’s take a look at four of the most common roadblocks and how you can overcome them:
1. They don’t know the opportunity to sign up exists
Even if you’ve created an online sign-up form and added it to your website, there’s no guarantee that people are going to see it.
This is especially true if you’re only including your form on your website homepage or the “Contact Us” page on your site.
Your online sign-up form should be easily accessible on any page on your website. That way, if someone is entering your website through social media or search, and isn’t going directly to your homepage, they’ll still know the opportunity to sign up exists.
2. You haven’t made it easy to sign up
Making it convenient for people to sign up has never been more important, especially considering the number of people visiting your site from a mobile device.
One of the easiest things you can do to make signing up more convenient for your audience is to use an embeddable email sign-up form on your site. Rather than putting a link on your site and requiring a visitor to navigate to a different page, an embeddable sign-up form lets you collect email addresses right from within your website.
Use a tool like Google Analytics to identify the most visited pages on your website. Those are the pages where having an easily accessible sign-up form will be most important.
Learn how to embed a sign-up form on your website, using Constant Contact.
3. They don’t understand the value of signing up
“Join our email list” won’t always be enough to catch a visitor’s attention and inspire them to join your list.
Instead, look for opportunities to highlight the benefits of joining your email list.
What can people expect to receive? How often will they hear from you? What have others liked about the emails you send out?
Use this information to craft a 1-3 sentence elevator pitch for your email list. Here is a great example from Constant Contact customer, The Local Good.
4. They aren’t ready to share their information
Not everyone who visits your website will be interested in joining your email list — and that’s okay.
But for people who are on the fence about signing up, and feel reluctant to share their information, there are steps you can take to encourage them to sign up.
An easy way to do this is to make sure your business’s privacy policy is visible on your site. Let people know that you’ll protect their information and that you take privacy seriously.
Another way to encourage these visitors to sign up is to offer some additional incentive for joining your list. For example, Massachusetts-based restaurant A&B Burger promises new subscribers a coupon for a free burger on their birthday when asking visitors to sign up.
You can also use free training or a downloadable resource. For example, software company, Tallega Software, uses Constant Contact’s Autoresponder tool to create a series of emails with helpful advice for potential clients and links to their company’s blog.
What can I do today?
Constant Contact makes it easy for you to create and customize a sign-up form that you can then embed on your website.
If you’re already a Constant Contact customer, you can find the online sign-up form under Contacts > Sign-up Tools in your account.
Once your form is setup, you can use the embed code to add the form to your website.
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Not a Constant Contact customer? BizzyWeb can help – we are Master Certified by Constant Contact®, Inc., the trusted marketing advisor to more than 600,000 small organizations worldwide. BizzyWeb’s email marketing services are an important element of the Buzz Builders online marketing services, designed to help your company generate leads, optimize your site, promote your products and retain your customers. Get started today with a FREE BUZZ Report to see what you’re doing well, where you have room for improvement and how BizzyWeb can help you create a plan to get REAL results!
