Hello,
I'm Mervi Eskelinen!
An artist, nerd and sorcerer, dedicated to make world softer and better for everyone, and to get you to make more art. Make art, change the world!
How to gain and keep email subscribers
The most popular advice for growing your email list is to offer your new subscribers some sort of a free gift. However if gifts are all your subscribers are after they aren't likely to be so much interested about your email content. I'm not talking here against gifts for subscribers, but I think there's a better way to lure people to your email list and make sure they will be interested in what you write to them. This way you will get steadily more people on your list and more of them will be opening, reading and engaging your emails.
It's not magic I'm talking about. It only requires a couple of little things. You'll need to create a little plan about what you want to do with your emails and what you want to accomplish. And come up with a short and precise offer.
The planning part is figuring out what sort of content you want to send your email subscribers and how often. I really recommend doing as I do and writing them something special once a week. It's something they cannot read on my blog or anywhere else. I have approached this idea with treating my email list as my pen pals. I know that sounds strange. It just means I write them each week a little post which includes something personal and something they hopefully can relate. My emails are notes about life, web design, business and such, all in this "what I thought today" kind of manner. I also promote my blog posts, other stuff on this site of mine and my Etsy shop, but the main point is in writing those letters to my pen pals. Additionally I have a little section on the email where I give branding and or web design tips. Basically my plan is to give my email subscribers something special and exclusive, personal and useful. I don't only tell them about what I've blogged, though it's a small part of these emails too.
The outcome is a huge portion of my list members open the emails, many of them click the links and some of them even respond to me by writing me back (to which I always respond as well). Very rarely anyone unsubscribes, and the unsubscribers are usually the ones who haven't been very active with the emails in the first place. By the way keeping too long breaks between emails is a sure way to get the subscribers leave your list or even report the latest email as spam. They'll forget they did subscribe in the first place and why they did that.
The second part is the offer. The offer is the way to get all those people to subscribe. It's where you tell what the subscriber will get, what sort of emails they will receive and how often. Make this offer very short, because most web users have very short attention span when it comes to reading things like this. Mine says currently: "Get exclusive branding and web tips, stories and notes once a week." Yours of course depends on what you are planning to serve your list and how often you will do it.
With making a plan of what your emails will give to your subscribers and sticking to that plan your list will be more active and engage much more often. They will keep on reading your emails and they will remain subscribed to your list. In order to gain more such subscribers you will need to simply and clearly voice out what your plan is and what your subscribers will get.
As a bonus tip I suggest making your email subscription form simple yet nice looking. Too much design on it will be distracting, but you will want to make it stand out from your sidebar or below your blog posts. Also if you want more clicks from your emails, make the email itself simple. Read more information about getting more clicks with simpler emails.
Below this post you can now subscribe to my list. I will send you emails once a week with thoughts and notes about life, business, social media, marketing and things like that, plus you will get short branding and web design tips. It's also a good way to stay informed of what is going on with this blog.
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