WordPress – Can you use it for building your mailing list?
WordPress, or rather it’s plugins, make it very easy for you to build your mailing list through your blog. As every internet marketer knows, building your mailing list is one of the most important, if not the most important task to focus on for online success.
There are a few figures that you will need to work out before you start tho. The first is your conversion rate. That is the total number of visitors to your blog over a period of time, by the number who actually sign up to your mailing list during that time.
Visitors/subscribers=Conversion Rate
For example, you know that over a period of 28 days you get 1,000 visitors to your website and from this figure, 50 actually sign up to your mailing list. This means that you need to send 20 visitors to your site for just 1 new subscriber.
Let’s say you have a one time offer that sells for $10. During the time period above, 5 subscribers actually purchase your one time offer. So your income for this period is $50. With this new information you can work out that out of 50 new subscribers, only 5 buy your offer that’s 1 in 10. Therefore to get 1 one time offer sale you need to send 200 visitors, that’s 20 visitors for 1 subscriber x 10 subscribers for 1 sale.
These figures don’t seem very impressive, and to increase your income you can either increase the number of visitors to your site, which will take quite a bit of effort. Or, you could increase the value of your one time offer, or make it more appealing to increase these conversions, which may or may not work. Or, you could increase your conversions and get more people to sign up to your mailing list, this option actually takes the least amount of effort for greater returns.
Hopefully by now you can see how important it is to have a strategy to capture the optimum amount of opt-ins to build your mailing list.
What also needs to be mentioned is that the intial income from a subscriber is just the start. Once you build trust with your list you can recommend affiliate products and earn a commission from each sale, you can promote your own products and services and your income from your mailing list can give you an extremely healthy income online for years to come.
Now, let’s get back to how this guide is going to help you grow your mailing list with WordPress.
First of all these techniques will work with almost every mailing list software available, including Aweber, GetResponse, MailChimp, Constant Contact etc.
If you don’t have mailing list software then you need to get one – quickly, you can sign up for an account with:
Aweber – $1 for the first month and $19 thereafter up to 500 subscribers.
GetResponse – Free to get started for up to 250 subscribers and 500 emails per month then $18/month for up to 1,000 subscribers.
MailChimp – Free to get started up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month. This is a pretty basic package without the features of the other 3 but fine for those on a very limited budget.
Constant Contact – Free for 60 days up to 100 contacts then $15 thereafter for up to 500 contacts.
There are a number of ways you can grow your mailing list on WordPress and this guide will take you through several of the best ways, as well as which plugins you can use. You will still need to test which strategy or combination of strategies, gives you the best conversion figures to make sure you are getting the most amount of opt-ins possible.
Firstly, capturing your visitors email addresses is very important as there is no guarantee that after they leave your site, that they will ever return. Take the approach that if you visitor leaves, you won’t see them again so you must do everything you can to capture that email address. You need to give the impression that you are someone trustworthy enough for them to want to leave their email address as well as knowledgable about your niche so that they will want to receive more information from you.
Create an opt-in offer that appeals to your niche market. Solve a problem that your niche regularly suffers from, teach them something they didn’t know that will help them get better results or offer a top 10 list of resources for your niche. You can easily test different offers to see which one brings in the most opt-ins.
You want to stand out from the crowd so make sure that you are offering something that is unique, or at least appears unique to your visitors.
The ultimate aim you are striving for is to build a mailing list system that will help you achieve as many opt-ins as possible. To do this you need to be testing each step of the way, until your system is at it’s optimum level.
It is important to note that the increased results that you will experience will differ between niches. If you find that doing one method is better than another, then stick with it. The only way you are going to find out which method or mixture of methods that will work for your website is to test the methods and measure the results.
The worst thing you could do, after not having any type of opt-in on your site, is to have too many opt-ins that annoy your visitors and they leave, never to return and the reason they are leaving is because of your opt-in strategy. Use these strategies responsibly!
Your Name
Widget Opt-in Box
The most common way to build your mailing list is by using a text widget and copying and pasting the opt-in form code that you get from your autoresponder company into it. This method is both simple to use, but less effective than the other methods you are going to learn about later on, as your visitor has to go make an active decision to go and find the opt-in form on your site. However, if this is the method that you currently use then you are doing much better than many of the websites on the internet, who don’t have anything.
There are a few things that you can do to make this method more effective. Firstly, don’t just have space for your visitor to enter their name and email under the heading “join our mailing list” or “sign up to our newsletter” which is extremely plain and boring!
Make sure that it is clear that you have an opt-in offer to entice them to leave their name and email details with an ecover or image to show what is on offer. Let your visitors know why they should sign up and what’s in it for them. Make a big deal of the benefits of your free offer.
Also, make sure that your opt-in box stands out among everything else on the page. If your theme allows, put the opt-in box in a header widget so that it appears on every page as well as having a prominant place on your website so that visitors can easily notice it. This will increase your opt-ins much more than having a plain opt-in just in your sidebar widget.
For this method to work, and it should really be used as a back-up method, rather than the only method you use. Think carefully about the offer that you are making your visitors and make sure that it is something they really want. The opt-in offer can be the difference between someone signing up and leaving your site empty handed.
So, not only do you have to grab your visitors attention for them to sign up to your mailing list, you need to make your offer so tempting that they will actually read, listen or view it immediately so that they think WOW and relate that you are someone to listen to who knows their stuff. By having this impact they are more likely to watch out for, and ultimately read your emails, which is one of the hardest hurdles in email marketing to achieve.
Although email marketing is a numbers game, it’s always a good idea to stack the odds in your favor so that your conversion rates are as high as possible by doing everything you can to make them so. This process starts by providing valuable information to your subscribers and treating them like royalty, but first you need to get them to sign up!
Using a Pop-Up Entry/Exit Plugin
This method of building your mailing list certainly increases your opt-ins as, just like the method suggests, it pop-ups in the middle of the visitors screen so they can’t ignore it. It enticing them to leave their name and email, or just email, depending on which information you require from them.
The reason this strategy is so effective is that it blurs out your entire site and displays the pop-up with your enticing opt-in offer in the middle of the visitors screen so that they only options they have is to either fill in their email address or close the window.
If you visitor lands on your website when searching for specific information and they are then faced with the information that they require, then chances are very high that they will leave their email address in order to get that information. This is why your opt-in offer is so important to get right.
There are several WordPress pop-up plugins available but it’s important to choose one that will work with your goals and not against you. Many of the pop-up plugins don’t give you any control over when they pop-up nor how often and this can be just an annoyance for your visitor.
One of the best popup plugins is definitely Popup Domination. With Popup Domination you can easily set up entry and exit pop-ups, as well as being able to use it on an unlimited number of your own WordPress sites, one of the bonuses that comes with your purchase is that you also get access to the stand alone version, which you can put on html and mini-sites which are used purely to build your mailing list.
A pop-up like this works best if you allow a little time between your visitor landing on your website before it pops up so that your visitor can get a feel for your site.
Within the settings you can also stipulate which pages and posts that you want your pop-up to appear, so that it’s only appearing on relevant pages. Also you can set your pop-up to appear after your visitor has viewed so many pages.
Another strategy you can use with this plugin is that of the exit popup. This works the same as the entry pop-up but at the other end of the visitors visit to your site. It’s a good way to catch visitors as they are leaving, especially as they will possibly never return, making sure that you capture their email details so that you can keep in contact with them in the future.
If you don’t already use a pop-up on your WordPress sites then it’s one of the best ways to grow your mailing list and ultimately your online profits too. It can pay for itself in no time.
Using a Footer Opt-in
Another way of using a pop-up that perhaps isn’t as intrusive as the light box version, is the footer popup. You’ve probably seen it in action on a number of websites as it’s conversion rates are pretty impressive.
There are a few ways to add a footer pop-up to your WordPress site. If you use Aweber or GetResponse there are free WordPress plugins you can use. Go to Plugins > Add New Plugin > Search and search for “slideup” and you will see both the plugins available. These are very basic plugins but good to get started if you have a limited budget.
However, a better solution is to use Ultimate Footer Ad. Although it’s not a WordPress plugin and it involves a bit more to install it than a plugin, once it’s installed it’s very easy to set up on your WordPress site. All it entails is adding some code to your theme’s footer.php file.
Ultimate Footer Ad comes with clear instructional videos to show you how to not only install it but implement it in a variety of ways. For this to work, you need to have to upload the entire package to your hosting account and set up a database for it. The whole process from start to finish takes about 10 minutes.
The advantage of using this type of footer ad is that you can not only choose between having it as an opt-in footer, which works with most autoresponder softwares, but also as an advert for your own products or affiliate products. If you don’t want it to appear on every page your visitor lands on, you can choose how often they get to see it appear. The software even has a built-in split testing option so you can see which ad is performing the best.
The footer ad is fully customizable so that you can make it look like part of your website. The license allows you to install it on an unlimited amount of your sites, both WordPress and other platforms, which is great if you are using multiple sites to grow your mailing list.
Using a Squeeze Page
Having a squeeze page that focuses entirely on getting those who land on it to sign up to your mailing list is a must for anyone serious about building their mailing list.
There are two types of squeeze page that you can create, a text squeeze page or a video one. Often it is difficult to create a pure squeeze page from WordPress themes as headers and sidebars are still visible and therefore distracting for the visitor. The whole idea of having a squeeze page is that it keeps the visitor focused on the action at hand, giving them only two options, sign up for your opt-in offer or leave the page.
The majority of the time, the visitor will come by your squeeze page through your off site promotions, such as article marketing, video marketing, classified ads, social media or ad swaps and are often pre-sold or just need a little nudge on what you have to offer.
When you have a resource box or are creating a link back to your site when doing these types of promotions, instead of putting a link to your home page, enter a link to your squeeze page. Doing this can help to see how effective these types of marketing are by the number of sign-ups you get.
If you have different products and services that you are promoting, you can always set up separate squeeze pages to cater for this. This way you can also segment your list and focus your email messages to particular subscriber wants and needs that your products and services can provide.
As has been pointed out previously, it is very difficult with most themes to create a squeeze page without a header, menu and sidebar. This is where a plugin called WP Squeeze Page comes in.
WP Squeeze Page gives you the option of setting up a squeeze page within your existing theme. It means that instead of having to install another installation of WordPress in order to use a theme that caters for squeeze pages to be used, one can be created just by adding a new page and selecting your chosen template under Page Attributes > Templates.
Another bonus of this plugin is that it integrates with Aweber, GetResponse and MailChimp. Instead of having to copy and paste code over, you just enter your autoresponder username and list name and that’s your opt-in box completely set up. For users of other mailing list software, just copy and paste your opt-in box code into the space provided and it’s done!
With this plugin you can set up any number of squeeze pages for your website as well as install it on an unlimited number of your own sites. It’s definitely a must-have plugin for internet marketers!
However, you may wish to focus an entire site on building your list, or creating a complete sales funnel and the best option to do this is by using a freelancer like me >> BlingCovers.com
A great advantage for using a professional is that it really is a full stop solution for creating your own squeeze and sales pages. A freelancer will get the specs from you and will go so far as uploading the final version of your site on your server so all you have to do is marketing and not focusing on design, coding, programming and all that stuff that’s only keeping you from making money.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many ways in which WordPress plugins can help you build your mailing list faster and more efficiently. Often it’s not the case that the only way to get more subscribers is to generate more traffic. It does help, but first of all you need to make sure that the way you are capturing your visitors email address is as efficient as possible.
Choose one strategy to implement first, that is either a pop-up or footer pop-up, as these will make the quickest improvements to your conversion rate using your existing traffic.
Then move on to creating squeeze pages and adding these details to your off-site marketing to track their effectiveness.
Now that you are building your mailing list effectively you need to treat your list like gold dust, but that’s an entirely different discussion!
