Tips on Increasing Subscribers

As webmasters, in our never-ending quest for more traffic, we often forget the value of the lowly e-mail newsletter. One sure way to increase your hits is to e-mail out a daily or weekly newsletter pointing back to the newest parts of your site, and most larger sites have these. But the subscription rate itself can be hard to change. We'll show you a number of techniques we used on WebRef that increased our daily subscription rate 50% to 100%.

Many of these techniques are just plain common sense, while others are less than obvious. In all cases we'll explain what we did, and provide open-source scripts for those tips that require programming. You are welcome to use them on your site. But what's the bottom line you ask? After making all these changes our daily subscription rate for the weekly newsletter went from 60-70/day to 120-200+/day.

What follows are some techniques you can use to increase your subscription rate, listed in order of effectiveness.

Advertising

Banner Ads

Create a 468x60 pixel table banner ad with both text and html checkboxes to sign up users to your newsletters. Put the ad in rotation at your site or partner sites. Use outrageous colors, and animation where possible.

Multiple Newsletter Ads

Create some 468x60 pixel table banner ads for all your text or html newsletters, where you can sign up to six newsletters at a time. If your company has more than six newsletters you could merge randomly generated newsletter checkboxes into one table ad and merge this text file into your front page, which you can send out automatically as your HTML newsletter (what we do at WebRef).

SWAP Text Ads

By swapping text ads with similar newsletters you can quickly cross promote to a different user base at no cost. We've done this to good effect inside and outside internet.com. You can use both newsletters' subscriber bases to calculate a fair trade (2 for 1 etc.).

Minimize Steps to Subscribe

In all advertising, require the least number of steps to subscribe, preferably using subscribe@yourdomain.com in a mailto: or an easy to use form. Each click loses at least 50% of your readers. So in a text ad, include a live subscribe address right in the ad to minimize the steps required by the user. Example:

+----------------------------------------------------------------+
WebReference.com-The Webmaster's Reference Library FREE NEWSLETTER
 just email <mailto:subscribe@webreference.com/> Your one-stop Web 
  dev resource...9-time Winner PC Mag's Top 100...Daily how-tos on
   JavaScript, DHTML, HTML, Design, 3-D/VRML, E-Commerce, Perl...
+----------------------------------------------------------------+

Signup Strategies

Add a Signup Form On Every Page

Put a signup form/email on every page of your site (very effective!). Start with your highest traffic pages and drill down. Your front page should have two forms, each with two checkboxes. You can use a signup header/footer, or a link back to your signup form from your global nav bar. See our home page and newsletter home page as examples.

Multiple Newsletters

Add all your newsletters as checkboxes in your signup forms (see webref front page for example). Don't limit yourself to one newsletter at a time, as listing both your HTML and text newsletters can potentially double your overall subscription rate. On high traffic pages put the form on both the top and bottom of the page.

subscribe@yourdomain.com

Make it as easy as possible to subscribe to your newsletters. Ask your IT department to set up the following e-mail aliases to allow people to easily subscribe/unsubscribe:

    subscribe@yourdomain.com and subscribe-html@yourdomain.com
    unsubscribe@yourdomain.com and unsubscribe-html@yourdomain.com

These aliases should redirect to the longer subscribe/unsubscribe e-mail addressed used by most list-managment (such as Lyris, Lsoft, Majordomo) software. Example:

    subscribe@webreference.com ->
webreference-update-text-on@list.newslinx.com

Users need only send a blank email to subscribe@yourdomain.com to sign up to your text newsletter.

Affiliate Sites

Through any means possible, get as many sign-up for your newsletter on external sites. One way to do this is to require freelancers to post your signup form on their sites.

Suggest Forms

Add a default subscribe checkbox to your suggest form(s), (example)

Smart Autoreply

In automated email, send the message from your auto-subscribe's e-mail address. By including subscribe@yourdomain.com in the Reply-to field, all the user has to do is reply to the message to sign up to your newsletter. Include a friendly note about your newsletter encouraging them to signup in your info@yourdomain.com auto-responder. Exercise: try sending an email to info@webreference.com.

Tell a Friend

Add a Tell A Friend Form/Script to every page. This allows your users to promote your site for you!

Signup contests

Start a contest to reward subscribers for signing up. You can make the promotion even more viral by rewarding users who sign up other users. You can track entries with subscribe@yourdomin.com and special subject line or using a special form.

Newsletter Content

Give 'em something extra

Write something extra not available on your site (interviews, software/book reviews) to keep it interesting. Ask for a link back from any company you profile.

Length

Keep your overall newsletter length under 15-20K. Anything more will turn users off. Keep your item blurbs to a minimum, 3 sentences max. Keep it short and snappy. The idea is to keep them up to date, and give them enough of a taste to tempt them to come back to your site.

Ad/Content Ratio

Keep the ad to content ratio low, as users will be turned off by too many ads.

We've done all of the items above (except the contest, which is pending) and our text subscription rate has more than doubled from 60-70/day to 120-200+/day. The new HTML/TEXT multiple checkbox forms remain checked by most users, so our new dual (HTML/TEXT) signup forms are nearly doubling our total subscribers (html+text) alone.

- Andrew King
aking at jupitermedia dot com