How To Get More Email Subscribers On Your WordPress Site

No matter what type of website you’re running, building an email list creates an evergreen asset. It will keep working no matter what Google decides to do with your rankings or how viral your content goes on social media.

Building an email list is not easy. WordPress is not set up to help you grow a list from day one.

The Benefits Of Building An Email List For Your WordPress Site

With social media, your content is always limited by how much reach the social network decides to give you. And with recent changes to Facebook and Twitter, that reach continues to be less and less.

Similarly, SEO traffic depends on staying in Google’s good graces, which isn’t always the easiest thing to do.

With email, though, you get to reach out directly to customers. While a lot of people certainly do have busy inboxes, you know that your emails are going to get the same visibility as anyone else.

If you treat your list well, your unsubscribe rate should be very low, which means that you’ll always be able to reach out to those people when you want to promote new content or a new product.

You’ll Need A Service To Store Your List

Before you can start benefiting from your email list, you need a place to store all of those subscribers and, eventually, send emails to your subscribers.

That’s where an email marketing service comes in. Most will let you get started for free and won’t charge a penny until your list exceeds a certain size or you start sending a certain number of emails.

How To Encourage More Signups To Your Email List

Once you have an email marketing service in place to store your subscribers. The next step is to actually convince people to sign up for your list.

Here are a few strategies that you can use to grow your email list more effectively.

Experiment With Where And When You Display Your Opt-In Forms

Your opt-in forms are the forms that let visitors actually subscribe to your email list.

The number of people that subscribe to your email list versus the number of people that see your opt-in form(s) is called your conversion rate.

For example, there’s a reason that so many sites display an email opt-in form as a popup. While it certainly can be annoying as an end-user, it also usually converts better. Putting a form in your site’s sidebar that visitors may or may not ever see.

If you’re using SendinBlue, it can help you create forms that display anywhere in your content (using a shortcode) or in any widget area (using a dedicated widget):

If you’d prefer to get more creative with your form types, some popup plugins, like Popups. Let you include shortcodes in your popup (which would let you embed the SendinBlue form that way).

Otherwise, you can also find lots of other list building plugins that let you connect to the most popular email marketing services, including SendinBlue.

Use A Lead Magnet Or Content Upgrade

Everyone loves free stuff. And because you’re reading a WordPress blog, it’s a pretty good bet that learning how to better secure your WordPress site is something that interests you.

In fact, you’ve probably seen this strategy – offering a freebie in exchange for signup – on plenty of other sites.

This type of offer is called a lead magnet or a content upgrade.

Basically, you dangle the offer by the signup form, then you deliver it automatically to new signups as part of an autoresponder.

Here’s an example:

So what makes for a good lead magnet or content upgrade?

Let’s cover the difference between a lead magnet and a content upgrade. While the two are closely connected terms, a lead magnet is one overall incentive while a content upgrade is built for a specific piece of content.

So for a lead magnet, you want it to be something that’s relevant to your entire audience, no matter which post they’re reading.

And for a content upgrade, you want it to be relevant to the specific post at hand. Some examples of what you could use a:

PDF version of the post
Checklist for how to implement something in the post
Special offer for the service in a post (e.g. partner with the service to offer a trial or coupon)

If you’re short on resources, creating one good lead magnet that you can offer to visitors is going to offer the best bang for your buck.

Start Getting More WordPress Email Subscribers Today!

By using the right tool, experimenting with your opt-in forms, and smartly using lead magnets and/or content upgrades, you can start growing your WordPress email subscribers today.

Once you start getting some email subscribers, you’ll want to learn how to segment your lists to boost your open rates and market more effectively.