Wouldn’t it be great if you could double or even triple your WordPress mailing list?
Building a massive list is an essential step to run a successful online business. Some of the benefits of a massive email list are
- It attracts consistent traffic: Most of your first-time website visitors will never return to your site. If you could entice those first-time visitors to get into your list, you can build a long term relationship with them and encourage them to return to your website more often.
- Generate more revenue: By properly nurturing your leads, you can generate more sales and online revenue.
Growing a WordPress mailing list is nowhere near an easy task, but with the right tactics, it is totally possible to transform your website into a lead generating machine.
If you’re tired of testing different strategies to grow your WordPress mailing list, take a look at this post—you’ll find some cool ways to grow your list, which you might not have tested yet on your website.
Plugins to skyrocket your WordPress mailing list
In this post, I’ll feature various plugins that let you grow your WordPress mailing list especially opt-in form builder plugins such as Bloom by ElegantThemes and Thrive Leads by ThriveThemes.
Both Bloom and Thrive Leads let you create beautiful opt-in forms geared towards increasing the sign up rate. They also allow you to pick from various display types and designs. Instead of reviewing both plugins, I’ll show you how to double your WordPress mailing list by leveraging some essential features of these plugins.
Many of these tricks have been used and suggested even by the content marketing man himself, Neil Patel.
1. Create a complimentary Content upgrade
When your visitors are browsing on your website, they’re more interested in looking for solutions to their pertinent questions than subscribing to your sidebar opt-in form.
Let’s face it—the problem with most of the sidebar opt-in forms is that they simply offer some generic products as opt-in bribes that general population of your website visitors is not interested in. This is one of the main reasons why your sidebar opt-in forms are not very effective in converting your visitors into subscribers.
But what if you could offer exactly the same resource as an opt-in bribe that your visitors are looking for when they are on your site?
Of course, offering a targeted resource is a surefire method to doubling your WordPress mailing list.
The Content upgrade technique is such an innovative lead magnet that it offers exactly what your visitors are interested in as an opt-in bribe. It is usually placed in the content area of your WordPress site as a highlighted text with a hypertext link. See the screenshot for an example.
Once someone clicks on the hypertext link, it opens up a pop up form, which entices them to subscribe to the list.
If you’re looking for opt-in bribe ideas for content upgrade, all you need to do is to convert your blog post into a PDF ebook and entice your subscribers to download it for future offline reference.
The best thing about content upgrade is that not only will it increases the visibility of your opt-in form because it is placed inside the content area, but also double your WordPress mailing list because it offers targeted resource to your leads as an opt-in bribe.
How you can go about Creating content upgrade
Thrive Leads plugin is a fully featured premium WordPress plugin that allows you to create any sort of opt-in forms to skyrocket your conversion rate. Aside from other cool features it offers like A/B testing and advanced targeting, it also allows you to easily setup a clickable popover like content upgrade.
All you need to do is to pick a pre-loaded popover template, customize the highlighted text according to your preference and start growing your WordPress mailing list.
2. Create audience specific Landing pages
An audience specific landing page allows you to narrow down the attention of your visitors into the opt-in form you placed in it. Building a landing page is an essential strategy if you’re promoting your WordPress mailing list using different marketing channels such as….
- Guest blogging: If you just published a guest post on a popular blog, create a landing page specifically to welcome its visitors and encourage them to subscribe to your WordPress mailing list.
- Advertising: When you’re spending advertising budget to grow your list, make sure you create a landing page, so you don’t lose your potential leads.
- Social media marketing: If you’re promoting your WordPress mailing list on social media, you’ll need to direct potential leads to your landing page instead of your homepage.
If you’re looking for a complete guide that walks you through setting up a high-conversion landing page, I recommend you to read this post: WordPress Landing Pages—The Ultimate Guide to Creating Your Own Landing Pages
3. Get more emails through Content gating
Content gating is another innovative approach to growing your WordPress mailing list exponentially. All you need to do is to create premium content on your website and make it accessible only to your WordPress mailing list subscribers.
MyCopyBlogger is a perfect example of growing a WordPress mailing list by creating a membership website. They created a content library by repurposing their existing content. Users can access it only if they enter their email address.
Content gating with membership site
If you’d like to create a free paywall similar to that of MyCopyBlogger by creating a premium content library, follow the below steps.
Step 1: Build a landing page
Build a WordPress landing page and direct your potential leads to that page. Entice them to subscribe to your WordPress mailing list. Allow access to your membership site only for those subscribers.
Step 2: Create a membership site
Use a free plugin like Membership 2 to transform your WordPress site into a membership site. Repurpose your existing content and make it accessible only to your WordPress mailing list subscribers.
Simple content gating
That being said, you don’t necessarily need to create a membership site for content gating.
With content lock feature of Thrive Leads plugin, you can lock any of your long blog posts inside an opt-in. So users can access it only if they enter their email address.
Bloom also offers the same content locking feature that acts as a paywall between your free resource and your visitors.
4. Popups – still a great way to increase your WordPress mailing list
Undoubtedly, when it comes to conversion, no opt-in forms can produce the same results as popup forms. Even if you hate popups because of its intrusive nature, you can’t deny the fact that popups are effective in turning your visitors into subscribers.
Some of the common variations of popup forms are:
- Entry popup: Appears as soon as a visitor lands on your website.
- Exit popup: It appears when a visitor tries to leave your website
- Click popup: It appears when a visitor clicks on a designated link or button.
- Time based popup: It appears when a visitor spends a specified amount of time on your web page.
Both Bloom and Thrive Leads are able to generate all sorts of VERY specific popups, to help you really boost your converstion ratios.
Recommended reading:The Best WordPress Popup Plugin to Build Email List (2017) – a ConvertPlug review
5. Grab attention with a Floating bar
While popups can bring in more subscribers to your list, the problem is that displaying popups on mobile devices can negatively impact your organic traffic starting from January 2017.
For that reason, if you’re looking to add non-intrusive opt-in forms to your website especially for your mobile visitors, you might want to try floating bar opt-in forms.
Floating bar stays at the top of your website and remains sticky even when you scroll down your page. This is one of the best ways to increase the visibility of your opt-in forms without annoying them.
Thrive Leads allows you to create a floating bar form on your website. They name this feature as ‘Sticky’ Ribbon.
6. Host a giveaway to skyrocket your WordPress Mailing List
Hosting a giveaway can be a great way to skyrocket your WordPress mailing list. All you need to ask your potential leads is to sign up to your list for participating in the contest. If done correctly, hosting a giveaway is proven to grow your WordPress mailing list by 3418%!
With that said, if you’re looking to attract qualified leads, make sure you offer the right prizes that appeal to the audience of your website. Or else you could end up with a massive list of unqualified leads.
If you’re looking for a free plugin to grow your WordPress mailing list by hosting a giveaway, I suggest you use ContestFriend.
It offers almost every feature you’ll need to grow your list by conducting a giveaway. It is highly customizable and can be easily integrated with MailChimp, AWeber, CampaignMonitor and GetResponse.
7. Use sign up button on Facebook
Did you know you can place a call-to-action button on your Facebook Page without any extra cost?
You can use this CTA button to grow your WordPress mailing list. In fact, keep in mind that currently, the CTA button feature is not rolled out to every Facebook Page.
If CTA button is enabled on your Facebook Page, you’ll find +Add a Button option on your Page’s cover photo. See the screenshot below.
After clicking the +Add a Button option, choose your call-to-action and enter the URL of your landing page in which you grow your WordPress mailing list.
8. Get some Paid ads as your budget permits
Money is in the list- we all have heard it lots of times.
Needless to say, your WordPress mailing list can be one of your biggest online assets. So why can’t you spend a few bucks on advertising in order to grow your WordPress mailing list?
The best thing about growing your WordPress mailing list by advertising is that it helps you to drive qualified leads to your landing page and speeds up your growth. If you’re looking for a PPC platform, you may either use AdWords or Facebook platform to grow your WordPress mailing list.
9. Include a prominent header
Website visitors spend 80% of their time looking at the information above-the-fold. So the easiest way to get the attention of your website visitors is placing an opt-in form above-the-fold of your WordPress website.
All you need to do is to place your opt-in forms just after these lines in the template file where you’d like to add an opt-in form (that is, index.php, single.php, pages.php)
For a detailed look, make sure you refer to this article that briefly explains how to insert promo content above-the-fold on WordPress.
If you want to find more suggestions like these, Jon Morrow has quite a few great suggestions on Smart Blogger.
Which one is your favorite tactic to grow WordPress mailing list? Share your thoughts with us by dropping a line below. If you’re serious about WordPress mailing list building though, you really need to help yourself to Bloom or Thrive Leads. You can easily get email optin rates of up to 20% !
