How Do I Get More Newsletter Subscribers??

[tomstark]

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.

[lindastacy]

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.

[tomstark]

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?

[Entreprenette]

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

[Entreprenette]

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

[tomstark]

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?

[lindastacy]

What's a decent subscriber ratio?

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.

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.

[Engage]

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.

[tomstark]

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.

[Engage]

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.

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.