In this guide, we will talk about creating an email list to compliment your blog. I am assuming you have some knowledge about this medium of connecting with your audience. I’ll simplify this guide by breaking it into 5 important points.
- Why Creating an Email List is Important.
- Choosing the Email Service.
- Choosing the Subscription Popup Plugin
- Choosing the type of Content for Subscribers
- How to Optimize Your Subscription Rate
1. Why is Creating an Email List Important?
To tell you the importance of creating an email list, I’ll give you an example.
If you have a list of 1000 emails, and all of them want to get rid of Dandruff! You can recommend a particular shampoo which you think is going to help them.
The shampoo costs $20. At least 50% people from your email list will be more than happy to buy the products, resulting in 500 sales, which means $10000 from the sales.
If you are getting a commission of 10% (its the minimum I have taken), Then you just made $1000 by recommending only one product and sending one email.
Imagine if that shampoo your own product, you will get all of the $10000.
Now, even if you are not selling anything or have found a product you want to be an affiliated with. Nothing is stopping you from building your list right now. You can always use it later.
Your current goal should be to start creating an email list ASAP.
Now that you are convinced that building an email list is very important, let’s move on to the next point, which is,
2. Choose the Suitable Email Service.
To start building an email list, you need a reliable service that lets you collect email address on your blog, manage them and send emails to tons of people at once. And let me tell you that is quite a hard work if you decide to do it on your own.
[note]Note: Be smart in choosing the service you want to use, even though you can switch the services anytime, it’s quite a pain to do so. [/note]
Fortunately, there are services that make it easy in return of a small, monthly fees. We will list out the best options we have.
- Aweber
- Mailchimp
- iContact
Aweber
Aweber is one of the most used email marketing services out there, they charge a flat $19/month and let you do it all the things I mentioned above.
If your blog is already getting a lot of visitors, you should use this service. Here is how you can get started with Aweber by just $1 for the first month.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is another best email marketing tool that is being used my many top brands to manage their newsletters. This is also our choice of service for handling our own newsletter of Asiogroup.
This email service is simple and straightforward to use, you can start using it for free till you search 2000 Subscribers, which is a great thing for starters who don’t have a budget to invest in such service initially.
This post will help you get started with MailChimp
iContact
iContact is somewhat in the same league with similar features as Aweber and the simplicity of Mailchimp. The service charges are $10/month to get started, I am listing it to give you a third alternative.
So, these are the three services you can choose from to get an email service. I would recommend you to think about the long term and choose the service you think will benefit you in the long run.
Let’s move on to the next point where to choose the subscription popup plugin to collect the email address of users.
3. Choose the Subscription Popup Plugin
Even though you can simply copy paste the subscription form codes into your blog from your chosen email service, Subscription popup plugins will help you collect email address on your blogs efficiently.
[note]Note: Make sure you don’t skip this step and invest in this type of plugin, it will increase your subscription rate up to 300%. [/note]
I am going to list out the best subscription popup plugins that have the ability of split testing, checking stats and triggering popups on a certain type of actions to increase the conversion rates.
- WP Subscribe Pro
- Ninja Popups
- Popup Domination
WP Subscribe Pro
It is a very clean and lightweight plugin that lets you put beautiful subscription boxes and popups on your blog to capture emails of readers. Check out the review of WP Subscribe Pro.
Ninja Popups
Ninja Popups work like magic, unlike WP Subscribe Pro, it offers more features, templates and multiple popups (Entry Popups, Exit Popups).
If is quite useful if you are looking to build different email lists for the different type of users. You can check the review of Ninja Popups.
Popup Domination
Popup Domination was the first plugin I used on one of my blogs and was amazed by the results. The plugin offers many advanced features like split testing where you can set two or three different type of popups and see which one performs better, to get maximum conversions. Check out this list of best Subscription popup plugins.
4. Choose the type of Content for Subscribers
At this point, let me remind you the main reason you are building a list, that is, monetizing it, with either promoting your or affiliated products.
[shadow][note]Note: Apart from sending exciting deals and offers and links to your blog posts, you should also give them valuable content exclusive to them. [/note][/shadow]
But you can not leave the subscribers alone until you figure out your monetization model.
Give them something valuable on a daily basis so that they remember you. Here are few ideas you can stick with.
Offer Free Report.
People love free stuff, they will not hesitate to give you their email address if you ask for their email address to give them the free report. This free report should be related to your blog’s topic.
As people are coming to your blog for the same topic it will also increase your future sales or affiliate conversions if you do it right.
Offers a Free Course
Just like a free report, you can offer a free email course. Again, this could be managed by AWeber or MailChimp. The email service lets you broadcast follow up emails.
Divide your course into 10 parts of the email, and make them follow up emails so that people who subscribe will be able to get these emails from 1 to 10.
During this course, you can recommend any product which you think will be helpful to subscribers
Offer Blog Updates in Email
You can also offer your blog’s content in Email so that people never have worried about missing any posts on your blog. If your readers are really worried about missing any quality posts, they will definitely sign up.
Until now, we have covered everything from them Importance of Email List to Choosing Email Service and Subscription Popup Plugins to Keeping the email list alive by offering them something on a daily basis.
Let’s talk about the fifth point, that is,
5. How to Optimize Your Subscription Rate
Even though most of the aspects of building an email list have already been covered in this guide. This point will help you optimize (or say increase) the subscription rate of your email list.
Do not skip the 3rd point and invest money one of the mentioned Subscription plugins, this alone will increase your subscription rate to almost 300% to 500%.
Giveaway a very valuable gift to your readers in return of their email, this will entice them to subscribe. It works for every kind of blogs, food, fashion, photography, you name it.
Don’t miss on these 5 things I shared on this blog. This is not everything you can do, but the most obvious one you must do to get great results.
This is it from my side, I hope you have learned a thing or two from this guide about building an email list.
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