7 Tips on How to Turn Website Visitors Into Newsletter Recipients – and Into Customers in the Long Run
How do you convince those "walk-in customers" to subscribe to your newsletter?
Imagine, you’re the owner of a small shop. It’s always well-frequented, but: not all customers come back, and only very few of them make a purchase. Online shop operators, who want to turn their website visitors into customers, often experience the same. Good news: a newsletter can be the key to make customers stay. Read on to find out how to turn your shop visitors into email recipients (and into customers in the long term).
You may now ask: „Why send a newsletter? I want my visitors to buy right away!“ Well, that would be the ideal case. Still, it’s helpful to stick in the minds – or mailboxes – of your visitors and customers. First-time customers in particular need some time to build up trust in an online shop. Newsletters offer a good opportunity to stay close to prospective customers and still give them the chance to take their time to getting to know you and your offer step by step.
Besides, a newsletter often leads to more traffic on your site – which remains high if you send regular mails. With your newsletter and associated accesses to your website you also influence your Google ranking in a positive way.
So, the advantages of email marketing are all clear – but how do you convince those “walk-in customers” to subscribe to your newsletter?
7 Tips on How to Turn Visitors Into Email Recipients
- Make your signup form more visible: Some website operators hide their signup forms for some inexplicable reasons and only a Google search leads prospects to a subscription form. But ideally, your visitors should stumble over your email signup form right away! At best, it can be found directly on your page without scrolling, for example as a separate menu item in your navigation, or as a pop-up. It’s best to let the pop-up appear right after the user has spent some seconds looking at your page. It’s also not unusual to place a brief signup form in the footer.
- Use the shopping cart: It also makes sense to suggest a newsletter subscription when customers complete their shopping cart process. You already have your visitors where you want them to be – in the long run, a newsletter can lead to one-time buyers becoming loyal regulars. Due to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it’s essential that a newsletter subscription in the checkout process is absolutely voluntary. Checked boxes or mandatory fields for name or date of birth are not permitted. But if you put forward the right arguments, your customers will be happy to subscribe to your newsletter at the checkout. Which brings us to our next tip:
- Clearly communicate the benefits: Why should visitors subscribe to your newsletter? Briefly summarize the benefits of your newsletter in your signup form, to convince prospects to receive your emails. That can be, among others:• A discount after the subscription
• Exclusive offers for subscribers
• Birthday wishes and discounts
• Be the first to view new products
• Free downloadsThe clearer and “tidier” your signup form and the promise of benefits to your customers looks, the more likely it is that you will quickly register lots of new signups.
- Less is more: Speaking of tidied-up. According to GDPR, you’re only allowed to ask for the email address as a mandatory field in your signup form. All other details must be given voluntarily. See this as an advantage! The less website visitors have to fill out the more likely they are to subscribe to your newsletter. However, if you intend to send personalized offers, for example on your customer’s birthday, you can add optional fields to enter that kind of data. In this case, it is important that you indicate in the form or in the privacy policy what the requested data will be used for.
- Publish positive customer feedback: Quotes from satisfied customers on the signup page for your newsletter evoke trust. The “Social Proof” appeals to the urge of every person to follow the large group – a simple psychological trick. If other customers talk about their great experiences with your online business in public, others will be happy to join the group. Use this effect to make your newsletter attractive to prospective customers and to boost your sales! Go to this post to find out how to use the „bestseller“ effect for your business.
- Cover all channels: If you want to attract not only website visitors but also “window-shoppers”, present your signup form on all channels your company is active on. For example, use Facebook posts or Instagram stories to draw attention to your newsletter. If you advertise offline and place print ads or even television ads, you can also reference to your newsletter there. These channels offer the clear advantage that you can address a large group – if the reference to the newsletter is then also connected to an advantage for new recipients (“Get yourself a 5 € discount today!”), they’ll come all by themselves.
- Use SEA and social media ads: If you want to actively promote your newsletter, you can also advertise with search engine ads and advertising insertions on social media platforms, similar to point 6. In contrast to classic print ads, you can better control which target group your ad is shown to. For example, if you run an online shop for shoes, you can specify “shoes” as the interest of your potential newsletter recipients, as well as set many other parameters to target the people most likely to be interested in your emails.
Upshot
Email Marketing still is an extremely successful communication channel that promises success even when you’re acting on a low budget. Especially online retailers should go for newsletter marketing to increase their sales. Newsletters don’t only lead to higher traffic in your shop, but also to a better customer retention and skyrocketing sales in the long run. The more present retailers place their newsletter signup form, the more website visitors will become aware of it and the more people will subscribe to their emails – and thus in the long run achieve higher sales in their online shop!
