I need some help. I haven't been getting any subscribers to my email newsletter (50 total). What's my problem?? Any help would be appreciated.
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I need some help. I haven't been getting any subscribers to my email newsletter (50 total). What's my problem?? Any help would be appreciated.
50 might be a good number. How long have you been trying and what percentage of your site visitors are subscribing?
A couple of things to try, off the top of my head:
1 - Provide a sample newsletter to look at to assure potential subscribers that they'll get quality content and not just offers to buy things.
2 - Test a different sign up template.
I've been trying for months. I'm getting over 100 visitors daily and the S/D ratio is about .02%. I have been trying split tests, changing the location of the forms, etc. What's a decent subscriber ratio?
Hi Tom,
My subscriber rate is between 25-50% daily, but I'm only getting 20 - 30 visitors a day. Send me your link and I'll have a look and help you with your conversion.
Please send me your strategy for getting 100 visitors a day!
Thanks
Jo
Hi Tom,
Forgive me, I just went through to your link. Your page looks great. My only suggestion to you is that you create a squeeze page which will give you higher conversions.
My blog brings me in very low subscriptions - maybe .02/.03% every day, but my squeeze page as I said converts at between 25% - 50%.
I hope that helps.
Jo
Thanks for the tip, Jo. I do have a squeeze page (needs some desperate work), but how do I get a lot of people to go there?
Good question, but I don't know the answer. I'd be happy with about 20% myself, but more importantly, I'd take fewer, more responsive subscribers.Quote:
Originally Posted by tomstark
I went back to your site today and found your "newsletter" page (I noticed the banner at the top of the page). Either I just didn't see it before, or it wasn't there.
I like that there's more information about the newsletter on that page. That would be a good place to link to a sample newsletter. (Although from reading that page I'm not sure you send a newsletter at regular intervals. Do you?) Also, I'd suggest you try moving the ads to the bottom of the page and make sure the form is "above the fold."
You could link to the newsletter page on your sidebar form (with text something like, "Find out what else you'll get" - okay.. that text is not that clever, but you get the idea)
And finally, consider adding a link to your privacy policy on the form, or at least a statement that you don't share contact information with anyone.
Just be careful not to add too much. Admittedly I have a tendency to over-explain on my site pages and that's not good either. Provide enough to interest someone, but not too much to make them tired of reading.
I think you're definitely on the right track. Keep it up.
First a sidebar. Jo, your screen name is quite entertaining, well done, and welcome to the forum.
Now, back to the original question.
Building a mailing list can be quite challenging, given that the global email system is by any reasonable definition, close to broken. Long story...
Anyway, point being, tinkering around with this and that in our procedures, thinking small, is most likely going to lead to small results. And small results may very well lead to losing hope. Game over. That's the most common fate for most websites.
People get big by thinking big, so let's give that a try.
If you were the American Motocross Champion, winner of the big races, you would have no trouble getting traffic and subscribers.
Ok, so maybe that's not in the cards :) but now we're on the right track. Just for a bit, let's try this...
Let's forget about your site and subscribe forms. Ignore the web marketing experts. Turn off the Internet. Stop looking "out there" somewhere for the answer.
If we want to get somewhere inspiring, let's shift focus to the most powerful part of your online business, which is of course...
You.
What is your relationship with the Motocross experience?
What is your relationship with yourself?
How are you going to edit these relationships so that you are a guy on fire, a man on the move, somebody people in the motocross community want to hear from?
What's holding you back from making an important and interesting contribution to the motocross community that will raise your profile with your peers, and get people talking about you, and coming to you for answers?
Solve this puzzle, and your mailing list worries are over.
As the army would say, be all you can be. But don't treat it like a slogan, take it seriously. Push yourself in to places you didn't think you could go. The good news is that the overwhelming vast majority of people who read things like this will ignore it, so that's an opening if you want it.
Nobody cares that you have one of a million little motocross websites. Sad but true, and true for all of us here.
If we remain focused on webmaster tools and tactics, if we insist on thinking small, we will spend the rest of our careers buried way down in the middle of vast invisible mediocre pack. Everything we try to do will be hard from that position.
Don't ask me the step by step for making this happen, because I haven't figured it out either.
But I assure you, 30 years of self employment speaking here, this is the road you, me, and we should be on if we want lots of subscribers.
Best of luck.
Thanks, Engage, for the very descriptive tips. I have realized this, but it just leads to more and more unanswered questions, lol. Right now I'm just trying to take it one (big) step at a time. At the moment, my goals are to get more traffic, more subscribers, and a decent conversion rate. All of those are very difficult and time consuming.
I hear ya brother. I'm a master at making things more difficult and time consuming myself.Quote:
Originally Posted by tomstark
I'm just trying to say that things like building mailing lists are difficult and time consuming for both of us, for a very specific reason.
As example, take a look at my site. It's nice and all, but it's very generic. There's no unique original compelling idea to make people go...
"Wow, this is neat, I gotta tell my friends about this!"
One of the reasons my site has no such compelling idea behind it is I spend about a thousand hours a day grinding away on all kinds of little detail things. I'm lost in the weeds, exhausting myself on trivia.
Because I have nothing compelling to put on the table everything is hard, and takes a long time, and I get sucked ever farther in to working harder and harder, leaving less and less energy for the breakthrough idea. Just about everybody is in some version of this situation.
But not everybody. A few really do take the time to focus on what matters, the big idea. They don't have problems building mailing lists, because they have something folks want, something folks will talk about.
Anyway, this sermon is really for me, as most of them are. :) Again, best of luck.
There's nothing wrong with fifty subs but I understand your desire to grow. It could be the traffic coming in is not the mailing list type. Have you checked your analytics for entrance and exit pages? That might give you some clues. If you'd like some free tips on how to grow and engage your mailing list, head on over to http://www.emailtipsforyou.com and subscribe. I'll send you one tip a week that can help you move your list in the right direction.
Hi guys,Quote:
Originally Posted by Engage
Thanks for the welcome, it's always nice to meet new people, that's why I enjoy forums so much!
Engage, you have really got me thinking with your post. It's true what Tom says, driving traffic and building a list is very time consuming and hard work, but maybe that's because we're being the bees not the flower?
I heard a great story once about how we're all bizy bees flying from flower to flower looking for nectar, while the clever flower, just produces the nectar and lets the bee come to him.
Now in the world we're in, people are bombarded with marketing messages every day, the question is, how can we stand out from the crowd, how can our flower be so bright that people start coming to us and the way is to do exactly what you said Engage. How can you be the best you possibly can in the niche you're in, what would make you on fire!!!!
I had a list of things to do today, but there all being pushed aside while I research and think about this very question.
Thanks Engage, you could very well have set me on the road to success! Take heed Tom it's golden advice!:)
Bingo, that's it, you get it, and what a great way to express it.Quote:
I heard a great story once about how we're all bizy bees flying from flower to flower looking for nectar, while the clever flower, just produces the nectar and lets the bee come to him.
I thank you for this, as I am obsessed with this topic, but have had extreme difficulty expressing this concept in a way that connects and resonates. Seeing something, and being able to share it, not the same thing. Skilled translations are definitely helpful.
Yes, thousands of other people want to dominate our niche, whatever our niche is. How do we emerge from the depths of an endless ocean of mediocre anonymity, and float to the surface?Quote:
How can you be the best you possibly can in the niche you're in, what would make you on fire!!!!
It's understanding what the job is, and what it is not.
Tools and tactics, 95% of all discussions on all webmaster forums, are not it, no matter what all the experts and group consensus say.
Here's proof. Our readers, the people who have the money we want, do not give a damn about our tools and tactics. It's so simple, once we see it.
What do the "bees" want, what is the nectar that they seek? Why do people enthusiastically swarm by the millions to some sites, while other sites have to struggle for each and every visitor?
Coming up with a good answer to that question, within the context of our own niche, is what the job is.
Most of us are hiding from this job, by filling every hour with tools and tactics.
I only claim to understand the job, not to be able to do the job, or explain the job.
However, in a couple rare instances I have STUMBLED in to experiences that can serve as examples of how this works.
In the 90s, I had the great LUCK to take an interest in email newsletters, a year or two ahead of most people. Before I knew it, with hardly any promotion, I had people like the Golden Gate Bridge, the Metropolitan Museum Of Art, etc etc pounding on my door. Big companies waving big checks under my nose, trying to buy me etc etc.
Because I was the flower with the nectar.
I knew 10% of what I know now about technology and marketing, and was as always, lazy, lazy, lazy about promotion.
But it didn't matter, I had the nectar for that moment, and all the bees came to me.
In another instance we posted some videos we took of baby squirrels online. These days, that would be no big deal. But at that particular moment, it was interesting.
I did literally 10 minutes of promotion on one site.
Within a few days, our traffic rocketed up from dozens to thousands of visitors per day.
Had nothing to do with tools and tactics, and everything to do with having the nectar the bees wanted.
My system is random luck. It's a sucky system, I don't recommend it. :)
Better to turn off your computer, close your net connection, dive in to your own brain, and really understand what nectar you and your audience are looking for.
That's where the real job is, not on the net, in our own brains.
If you can find the nectar, and provide it, be the next Twitter etc, you can hire clueless nerds like me to take care of your tools and tactics.
I would have to say that you could probably offer your readers something besides a newsletter. Nobody really wants a newsletter. As Lynn would say you're just describing the product (newsletter), not the benefits. What do bike lovers want to know about? Do they want to know when the next bike show is, how to buy or fix their ride, how to go faster? If you can fit a tagline that speaks to those benefits in your sign-up box that just might increase your subscriber rate.
Hope that helps!
Thanks Kimmoy. I do have/say what the incentives are for subscribing to the newsletter in the forms in the footer of articles and the pop-up when you first visit the site. Where else would you suggest I make those changes though?
In the header of your site, there's a box that says "Free Motorcross Hideout Newsletter Click Here to Sign Up". I would change that to say, "Click Here to Get Free Motorcross Maintenance Tips" or whatever benefits you're offering.
The free guide you're offering at the bottom of articles is better suited on the header or somewhere on the home page above the fold than what you currently have in my opinion. Test it out and see.
Yeah, that's what I figured. I'll try it out and see how it goes. I already got two more subscribers in the past day or so...
Ok, I changed the banner. Let me know what you think.
I started using the lightbox web form from aweber and now I'm getting about 2 subscribers a day, so I think that's a good start...
Tom was telling me about the Light Box getting 2 subscribers per day before the split testing, so I gave it a try and had 6 subscribers yesterday (more than my last month or two).
With tweaking I bet can get that up way higher too. Has anyone else used the Light Box feature on Aweber?
@tomstark
Do you mind what are your strategies for getting 100 Visitors/day and what page they are directed to (i mean the squeeze page)??
and also can you provide the link for your squeeze page?
would like to see that and if necessary i can help you with my best converting Squeeze page templates..
I mainly use SEO to get my traffic. About 75% of my traffic comes from search engines. Last week I had just over 1000 visits. I first think of an article idea (something I have or know about and can make a review or tip for it), then research keywords for it and add backlinks to it. Yeah, the lightbox seems to be working a lot better. 3 subscribers yesterday, and 3 already today. The lightbox is where I am getting almost all my subscribers now, but I do need to re-do my Squeeze Page.
Yeah, that makes sense. I need to do some split tests and see what works best. Mhm, I will have to get some professional help on the 'squeeze page'. Thanks for the help.