How to Create a Newsletter Your Customers Want to Sign Up For

Have your newsletter signups stagnated? Creating a newsletter that customers can’t wait to open and want to sign up for is no easy task. Let’s face it, there are thousands upon thousands of newsletters available for consumers. Making yours stand out and more attractive than all those other options requires a hard look at what you’re doing right and what needs changing.

Email is 40 times more powerful for landing a new client than Facebook or Twitter. Before you can take advantage of the success of email marketing, though, you must get those who visit your site to sign up for your newsletter or mailing list in the first place. Here are six tips to achieve higher conversions on your mailing list:

1. Show Your Personality

The main thing that makes your site unique from all the other sites out there is your voice or personality. The founders likely have a story and the newsletter matches that tone and story perfectly. If you want to attract your target audience, you must highlight your personality. You don’t have to be humorous if you’re talking about serious matters, of course. Your personality is your own. It might be serious-minded or it might be fun and playful. The key is presenting it consistently, including in the call to action (CTA) for your newsletter.

Fizzle serves as a community and coaching resource for small business owners and startups. Their approach is quick tips and fun advice that helps you grow as a business owner. Their subscription page for their newsletter highlights the personality of fizzle with a lighthearted approach. Even though the tone is casual and light, they also point out that they offer information you’ll want.

2. Make it Mobile Friendly

Make sure your newsletter is mobile friendly and let site visitors know it is. About 41 percent of emails are opened via mobile devices. This is a topic that people care about. It’s quite frustrating to open a newsletter you want to read only to discover it appears skewed on your small screen and is all but unreadable. Twenty-three percent of those people reopen the email later either on their mobile again or on another device.

3. Limit Form Fields

Reducing the number of fields site visitors must fill out increases conversions. In one case study, a company increased their conversion rate by 120 percent simply by reducing their form fields from 11 to 4.

Each personal information type you ask for reduces your conversion rates. Asking for a telephone number creates a 5 percent reduction in conversions. Asking for a street address drops it another 4 percent. Keep it as simple as possible and only request the information you simply must have.

Brothers Aluminum does a great job of creating a simple form that keeps many of the form fields optional. The only required field is email. Even the name is optional. However, the only thing Brothers Aluminum asks for to sign you up is email, first name and last name (with the name fields ones you can leave blank if desired). Keeping the form this simple encourages users to sign up.

4. Share Your Privacy Policy

State up front what you do with the information users share. Everyone is sick of spam, so people might be reluctant to share their email address with you if they’re worried you’ll share it with third parties. With the new GDPR rules, you need to have a clear privacy policy in place anyway. Go ahead and share it in a few short words.

For example, you might simply state in small, italicized letters under the description of the newsletter “we never share your information with others.” Alternately, you could include a link to your actual privacy policy so it is easy for the consumer to find.

5. Offer an Incentive

Offering users an incentive to sign up increases conversions. About 70 percent of subscribers open emails looking for a discount or coupon. Because so many seek out special deals, if you offer a coupon or discount, it encourages more signups.

J. Crew offers a pop up as soon as you land on their page and offer an extra 15 percent off if you sign up right then. They also mention that you’ll be the first to know about flash sales and other specials. For those looking for a good deal, this is a strong incentive to sign up for their mailing list.

6. Create a Strong Call to Action (CTA)

The words you use to drive your site visitors to action have an impact on the conversion rates for your newsletter. Using the word “submit” is descriptive but lacks power. People have seen the word so often that they tend to skim over it. Forms with the word “submit” had three percent less conversion than words such as “go” or “download.” However, you can get even more specific than that, pulling in the action and creating a first-person command.

The words you choose matter. Think about what would make your target audience most likely to click on the submit button and use words that reflect your user persona. Then, try different combinations, split test them and go with the one that converts highest.

Increase Your Subscribers

Using the tactics above allows you to get more conversions and increase your subscribers over time. Just make sure that the offers and wording is targeted to the audience you have in mind. 10,000 new subscribers won’t help your business’ bottom line if they aren’t part of your target audience and aren’t really interested in what you have to offer.