There is a great discussion on the LinkedIn Art Business forum about getting people to sign up for your email newsletter. One of the artists asked about what kind of incentives he should use to encourage people to sign up for his list.
A good, useful incentive is a great way to encourage folks who may be reluctant to get yet more email to sign up for your list. A great incentive must be something that your prospects and customers find useful and would be willing to part with their email address for. The incentive for my mailing list for this blog an MP3 audio download called “10 Steps to Getting More Traffic to Your Art Website“. The incentive for my jewelry website is exclusive jewelry articles and entry into a monthly giveaway drawing.
BUT, sometimes the problem may not be your incentive. After taking a look at the questioner’s sign up form, I realized that part of the problem may be that visitors just aren’t seeing the sign up form itself. There’s three big ways that you may be making your email list sign up form “invisible” on your website:
- burying the form on a single web page of your website
- burying the form on the bottom of your web page
- not making your sign up form stand out
In order for people to sign up for your mailing list, they need to actually find the form. Some people create a “Newsletter” page on their website and they put that form only on that single page. This means that visitors have to think about clicking on that link in order to sign up for your newsletter. What’s more effective is to have your sign up form on every page of your website or blog, so no matter where your visitor is on your web page, they have a reminder to sign up for your newsletter.
You also want to place that sign up form close to the top of your web page instead of the bottom. People’s attention spans tend to get shorter the further down the go on your web page. And some visitors may never make it to the bottom of your web page. So you want to make sure that one of the first things that people see when they land on every page of your web site is your mailing list.
Another thing that will help increase the visibility of your sign up form is to add design elements like graphics, colors, and larger fonts to make your form stand out. Compare this plain form:
With this dressed up form:
Which one are you more likely to see and respond to? If you have the design skills you can dress up your form like this, but most email list services have sign up templates that can make dressing up your sign up form easy. Aweber is the service I use for my list and they have hundreds of different form templates and you can easily use their form designer to create your own.
So if you’re not getting the email subscribers that you think that you should be getting, take a look at how you’re displaying your forms and see if you can make them more visible.
If you want more information on how to either start or manage an email list and newsletter for your own art business, you can get a free copy of my ebook, “How to Plan and Start a Great Email Newsletter“. You’ll learn how to plan your newsletter, which services to use, and how to get subscribers. You can get your copy for free here.
{ 0 comments }
