It’s no secret that email marketing is one of the most powerful tools in an e-commerce company’s marketing arsenal.
With list segmentation and other devices, you can easily reach your customers at every stage of the marketing funnel and the purchase process, deliver vital information to build trust and brand recognition and even remain relevant to your customers after you’ve closed the sale.
However, none of that can happen if those potential customers don’t opt-in to receive emails from you, and getting them to do that can be challenging.
There’s good news – we’ve got a few simple, useful tips to help increase your opt-in rate and build the success of your WordPress-based business.
Table of Contents
Create Personas
Your opt-in list building efforts will be driven by content. However, you cannot use the same content to push everyone into the fold.
You must understand that while you might offer the same products or services to everyone, not all of your potential customers have the same pain points and you can tweak your message.
To increase your opt-in rate, you need to understand the various reasons that your customers come to you.
That can be done by creating personas – drill down into your audience, identify the types of customers you have, what their needs are, how your products or services benefit those specific individuals and then create content based on your findings.
Personas represent segments of your audience – Soccer Mom Tina, or Backyard Landscaper Bob, for instance. Each persona allows you to create content that will resonate with that audience segment, improving your overall results, and driving more opt-ins.
Create Great Content
Again, all email list building efforts are driven by content. Without content, you have no way to get your potential customers to your website to opt-in to receiving emails from you. However, subpar content can be worse than no content. If you’re producing low-quality content, you may be driving your audience away and into the arms of your competition.
Quality content offers value, delivers information, educates, entertains, or enlightens your audience. If your blog posts, social media posts, videos, articles, reports, and other content are not doing that, then you’re failing in the content creation game.
Create great content, deliver it to your audience, and they will reward you by opting in to your list in more significant numbers.
Create Compelling Call To Actions
Ok, so great content is the key to getting your audience familiar with your brand and building trust with them. However, without a call to action (CTA), they may not realize what you want them to do (opt-in). Each piece of content you create should have a call to action that communicates what you want the reader or viewer to do, and how to they can do it.
For instance, “Click here to sign up now!” or “Visit our website to sign up for valuable coupons!” are both examples of calls to action. In your content, both of those should be hyperlinked to specific landing pages that deliver more information and build on the premise you put forth in the material.
Calls to action should be clear, direct, and not spammy. Don’t be afraid to tell your readers/viewers what you want them to do. The content should be sufficient to allay any fears that your website might be dangerous or harmful – establishing your validity and expertise is one of the jobs of great content. With that done, all that should be left is to make the ask.
Create Strong Landing Pages
As we mentioned in the tip just above, you need to have your audience click through to a specific landing page. Don’t lead them to your main website homepage – that eliminates the ability to conduct A/B testing and to determine where your traffic is coming from.
You should have one landing page per campaign per platform. So, if you’re running two campaigns on Facebook and two on Twitter, each with different content and calls to action, you will need four different landing pages. Check out some recommendations on great Social Media platforms.
The content of those landing pages is a critical concern if you want to increase the opt-in rate for your email list. Understand that a landing page should have a single purpose. In this case, closing the deal, you began with the original piece of content.
When the reader or viewer clicks through, they have two things they can do on this page – sign up or leave. By creating good landing pages, complete with compelling copy and a proper closing, you can increase your opt-in rate.
Create and Use Lead Magnets
As a final note, make sure that you’re using the right lead magnets. A lead magnet is nothing more than something you create to incite curiosity and convince your viewers or readers to part with their name and email address.
Examples of lead magnets include things like free reports, free eBooks, coupons, one-time deals, and the like. Almost anything can be a lead magnet, so long as it is of value to your audience, builds your brand, and helps convince them to opt-in to receive whatever it is.
With the tips we’ve covered above, you can begin to increase your opt-in rate and build your WordPress website’s success. However, there are plenty of other tools that you can use, as well. Pop-ups can be useful tools, so long as they’re used correctly (and sparingly).
You also need to ensure that you have the right email service provider so that you can easily store names and email addresses while segmenting your audience for more targeted communications.
In the end, email marketing can be a tremendous tool for business growth, and getting your audience to opt-in for your communications is simpler than you might think.
