Episode 001: Six Ways to Grow Your Email List Using Your Website's Traffic

 

Episode Summary: 

Your website is the source of your hottest leads so you need to collect as many email addresses as you can from visitors. In this episode, Julie walks you through small changes you can make to your existing website to give visitors multiple, well placed opportunities to sign up for your email marketing list.

 

Episode Links:

https://www.shopify.com/  https://www.volusion.com/v2  https://www.bigcommerce.com/ https://magento.com/ https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/  https://savvybusinessmethod.com/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okg https://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod 

 

Episode Transcript:

Announcer
Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well, you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Business Method with your host Julie Feickert.

Julie Feickert
Hello, and welcome to the first official episode of The Savvy Business Method Podcast where we talk about how to plan, start, and grow your business online. I'm Julie Feickert, and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family. Our topic today is six ways to get more email signups on your website.

Now, if you've been around eCommerce for a while, you've probably heard that it's really important to do email marketing. You may have even set up an email list and maybe collected some emails, but how one earth do you get from the three people on your email list, because you know it's you, your mom, and your best friend in the beginning, right? We all have to start our list somewhere. How do you get from those three people to a list of 10,000 subscribers, 50,000, 100,000, half a million?

When we build an email list, we are looking for sustainable and significant revenue stream for our businesses, and so unfortunately, you do need those bigger numbers. Now, no question, there are many ways to collect email addresses and to build your list, but I want to talk today about the method that tends to be most effective for the least amount of cost, and that is collecting as many email addresses as possibilities from visitors to your website.

Your website visitors are already on your website. They are familiar with your brand. They've seen your products, your information. They're going to be far easier to convince to part with their email addresses than random people on the Internet. Let's talk through how we optimize our websites and make small changes so that we can convince as many of our visitors as possible to give us their email address and start really building our email list.

Now, the first method I want to talk about today is by far the most effective, and that is to have a popup that pops up when people enter your website, generally about two to five seconds after a visitor lands on your website. Of course, I'm sure you're very familiar with these. In the last few years, sites big and small have employed this technology, and they employ it because it's incredibly effective.

Six years ago or so when I first put a popup on my website, I just felt like a terrible person. Here I was interrupting my visitors' experience. They had to stop and figure out whether to give me their email address. Popups were fairly popular at that point, but they still weren't everywhere like they are now. I really fought this idea. I had a few people who I really trusted say, "No. Nope, Julie, seriously, you have to do this," and I did, and you know what, I grew my email list drastically through having that popup.

Popups are great because you can really test and figure out what works best for your website visitors. You can use different graphics, different wording, you can even have different offers. You could offer, say, a booklet of recipes, or you can offer a 10% off coupon or free shipping or something like that, and you can just keep testing and figure out what is the most effective way of convincing people to hand you their email address.

Now, along those same lines, I'd also encourage you to put an exit intent popup on your website. This is very similar. It's generally a box or a page overlay that comes up, but this one is going to be triggered when it looks like someone is getting ready to leave your website. Generally, that is when their mouse cursor goes up over the URL bar or up into that top part of your site. That's how the system triggers as, "Oh, this person's about to leave. Let's show them the popup."

Exit intent popups are really useful for a couple of things. One, of course, they're giving us another opportunity to collect an email address, which is the goal. We want as many email addresses as possible. The other nice thing about an exit intent popup is it can sometimes be another opportunity to help convince someone to purchase something, because as much as we want their email address, we'll get that if they buy something too. Buying something is always our top priority.

With an exit intent popup, we might want to tailor our offers a little bit and say maybe free shipping or 10% off or something that could help a customer say, "Oh, wait. I was going to leave, but you know what, I think I'm going to stick around. I think I'm going to actually buy that thing." That would be the ideal outcome, right? We want to do that.

Now, both these exit and entry popups might sound a little bit intimidating if you're not fairly tech-savvy, so let's just talk about this for a few minutes.

You're really fortunate because the technology that's available now for website owners is so much easier to use than it was 5 or 10 years ago. Odds are good that the ecommerce software that underlies your website, so this would be Shopify, Volusion, BigCommerce, Magento, whatever you're using to run your website, generally speaking, there is probably some popup functionality built into your software.

Now, whether it will be exactly what you want is a different matter entirely, but you probably have the built-in ability to do this. If you don't, or it's really not the level of functionality you need, then there are generally apps and plugins. This is a very popular marketing method, so there are actually a ton of options. You want to make sure you pick a system that does both entry and exit popups for sure.

Other things that are really nice if you can find one are systems that allow you to do A/B testing, which is split testing, so that's where you create two separate popups, and you change one thing. Maybe you change the picture or you change what you're offering them. Then you run them both randomly to people. Everybody sees one random option, and then you can see which one performs better. That's a great feature if you could find a popup system that's affordable that allows you to do that.

Another feature to look for when you're shopping for a popup system is if you can do any sort of strategic targeting. For example, can you put a different popup up for someone who's on a certain category page versus another category page? Let me give you a practical example of how this works, and I have personally see this work amazingly well for one of my businesses.

Let's say you're running a camera equipment website, and you want to give people who are looking at buying camera bodies a booklet on comparing different types of cameras for different projects. You could set your system up to show them a popup that offers them that specific ebook in exchange for their email address if they're sitting on a product page that has to do with camera bodies. Then you could have a completely different offer for people who are visiting pages for camera accessories like tripods. Maybe you could offer them a handout that goes through the six pieces of equipment every beginning photographer needs, something like that.

This can be incredibly effective because you're meeting people where they're at. Instead of giving them some random that you're hoping appeals to most people, you're giving them an offer that appeals to people in their much more specific circumstance. It is great option if you can do that with your popup system.

Another way I see this used really effectively is to change the offers on the exit intent popups based on whether or not someone has something in their cart and even the value of their shopping cart. If they have something in their cart, you might want to offer them free shipping. If they have something, maybe they have hundreds of dollars in their cart, you may want to offer them free shipping plus 10% off, maybe a little bit better incentive. Again, if you have an ability to test and split-test your offers, you could potentially really dial in what works for different groups of people.

You've probably caught on to the fact that I love popups. I think they are one of the most effective ways to build an email list using people who are already visiting my websites, so why wouldn't we just use popups? Well, I mean, there's some practical realities. Not everybody is ready to give you their email address the exact time that a popup appears. When they see that first popup come when they're on the site, maybe they really want to look around a bit. Maybe they want to make sure you're legitimate and that your products are what they're looking for before they give you their email address.

There's another reason. There's that little evil thing called popup blocker, and a lot of people are running popup-blocking software these days. We need to be thinking about what are ways that we can capture email addresses from people who are possibly running some sort of popup-blocking software.

Now, let's go through a couple of other ways that you would need to optimize your website so you can collect as many email addresses as possible, and none of these ways that I'm about to go through are going to collect as many as the popups. I mean, they're probably always going to be your best performers, but it is well worth your time to put at least some of these other options in place so that your customers have every possible opportunity to give you their email address.

Let's look at a floating opt-in. Now, a floating opt-in is generally a shape or a bar sitting at the bottom of the screen. That's very common on mobile websites. This has some sort of offer on it: sign up for our newsletter, free ebook, get recipes, something like that, and it just sits in the same place on the website, even if someone is scrolling.

Like on one of my ecommerce sites, I have a floating box that sits up on the upper right-hand corner, and even when you scroll through the site, it's always there, and it just says free ebook. If you click on it, you go to a landing page where you can enter your email address for the free ebook. Generally speaking, these floating opt-ins, in my experience, are like my number three most popular way to collect email addresses from visitors, and that's really just because it appears on every page and it's always there. But there's a couple of other options too.

One is to add a static opt-in box to your content pages. When I'm talking about content pages, I am talking about pages that are there to support your product. Back to the camera example. If you have a camera equipment website, you might have a page that compares different types of cameras or different types of tripods, and it could be really useful on the side of the page to put some sort of static box that just sits there and collects email addresses.

Now, if you're running a website that has more of a blog-style template, this can be really easy because you can just use one of the spaces that's normally dedicated through pushing through ads. You could just use one of those square boxes and put your collection information in there. Just having that on every content page is just yet another reinforcement of this idea of, "Hey, join our community, get this offer," whatever it is you're offering your customers so they can sign up for your email address.

Also, in terms of your content pages, and this is the fifth way to make a minor change to your website, I would encourage you to put calls to action one every content page. This can be some messaging around "if you like our information," or "if you like our recipes, get more by signing up," and you can put that information in the middle of an article or at the end of the article, or both. If it's a long article, you could probably get away with putting it two or three times.

Again, you're just reinforcing that idea of joining your community of getting more information from you. When people are reading your content pages, especially if they're getting half, three-quarters, all the way through that content, odds are good that they see your content just being valuable, so this can be a great time in that moment to really collect that email address.

Number six on the ways that we can make small changes to our website so we can collect more email addresses is to link in the header or the footer of your website, or both. This could just be a link that says, "Sign up for our newsletter," or, "Get 10% off," or, "Free shipping," or, "Free ebook," or whatever your offer is. You could put it up in your header near your account information in your shopping cart, or you can stick it down in your footer near the About Me page and the link to your frequently asked questions, those sorts of things.

That's six different ways that you can make small changes to your website. None of these are very difficult. Most of you will be able to accomplish these on your own over the next few days. These can make a big difference in the number of email addresses that you're able to collect.

Now, when I'm talking to entrepreneurs in person, and I'm telling them that they need to do these six things on their website so they can collect more email addresses from visitors, I generally hear the same couple of objections over and over again. Let's talk about them briefly.

The biggest objection I hear is that you're going to annoy your customers or seem really pushy. This is an objection that tends to keep people from doing any of these things, especially the popups because they feel more intrusive.

Let's first step back and really think logically about this. None of these six things that we've talked about today is an uncommon thing to see on a large ecommerce website. This is simply good marketing practices. I'm willing to bet that most of your customers visit other ecommerce websites, and probably big ones, on a regular basis, and so none of these things are out of the ordinary or considered to be black hat tricks. This is all out there in the open, commonly used.

But if these ideas are still giving you heartburn, never fear. You have an option. Hopefully, you have something like Google Analytics installed on your website. It's a system that helps you see the statistics of your visitors' behavior when they're on your website, and what you can do is you can put one or two of these things in place at a time, and then look at your numbers. Watch your numbers for a few days. You want to look and see, are your visitors leaving your website more quickly, are they still visiting the same number of pages per website, are they bouncing at a higher rate, and when we talk about bouncing, we're talking about people who visit our website, land on that one page, and then leave the website without going to any other pages.

If those numbers are not changing, then you're probably not annoying any of your customers, or enough of your customers, I should say, to a point where this is going to be a problem for you. No joke. You're probably going to hear from one or two of them. Some people really hate marketing in all forms, but you want to look at the broader numbers. We never want to make decisions based on the complaints of one or two customers. We want to step back, look at the broader numbers. Is the behavior of most customers on my site changing? If it's not, that's great. Am I collecting more email addresses? If I am, great. Then it sounds like you're doing something that is working well for your website.

All right, so one more thing before you run out and start making changes to your website. It is really important to stay up to date on any legal changes that happen concerning how we as website owners collect and use email addresses. Now, you may be aware that there was just a major change in the legal situation in the European Union when it comes to email marketing, and odds are good. There's probably going to be some changes in other parts of the world, including the United States in the foreseeable future. This is just something you really need to be aware of and keep up to date on. It's always nice to have a small business attorney handy to to ask questions so that you can make sure that you are staying well within the bounds of the law.

But beyond that, I would really encourage you to use this opportunity to treat other people's information the same way that you would want your information treated. That means that when we send email, we want to be sending email only to people who knowingly signed up for our email list, who knew what they were signing up for, and we are sending them the information that they expected to receive. If you do that, it goes a long way.

Thanks for listening. I am hopeful that you're all going to run out and start making changes to your website and collecting more email addresses today. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to hit that little subscribe button so you can be notified with each new episode, and if you are excited about what you learned today, I would really appreciate kind reviews and five-star ratings. I promise I will read every single review, and those ratings and reviews really do help other people find this podcast.

If you have ideas for topics for future episodes, or you just want to get to know me better, visit me at savvybusinessmethod.com or on my Facebook page or YouTube channel. I would love to hear from you. Until next time.

Announcer
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review and subscribe, and for more great content and to stay up to date, visit savvybusinessmethod.com and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.

 

Episode 001: Six Ways to Grow Your Email List Using Your Website's Traffic