In this article, we’re going to look at how you can start building an email marketing list for a fresh WordPress website — but before that, let’s quickly establish why you should be doing this. You probably have some understanding already, but there’s no harm in recapping, and it’s important to remember the end goal of gathering email contacts.
Here’s the main point: email marketing is an incredibly-powerful tool with superb ROI when used well. And since you can’t carry out email marketing without email addresses (specifically relevant email addresses that were willingly provided), it’s clear why you need a list.
Furthermore, you’re likely to be making an effort to promote your website in general — writing blog posts and using social media to drive traffic in your direction — so why not take the opportunity to capture some highly-relevant email addresses? It would be a waste not to, particularly if you’re using WordPress for something high-value like ecommerce.
With that established, let’s move on to the main goal of this article: setting out some core tips for building an email marketing list through a WordPress site.
To get people to the point of being able to sign up to your email newsletter, you first need to get them to your site — and that’s the biggest challenge for a new website. Creating a compelling reason for a visitor to subscribe won’t help if you don’t have any visitors. So how do you go about creating the necessary opportunities? Here are some straightforward suggestions:
You can also concentrate on technical SEO, run PPC campaigns, or make visitor retention your goal to bring in referral traffic. Regardless of how you approach the problem, the key element is earning traffic. If your current tactics aren’t doing that, then change them.
The principle that drives email marketing lists is that of reciprocity. When you offer someone significant value, you earn the right to ask for something in return — and if it isn’t worth too much to them (and it isn’t inconvenient to provide), then they’ll likely give it to you.
Before you can reasonably ask for an email address, then, you need to provide some meaningful value to justify the subscription. So what can you provide through your newsletter? Well, here’s a shortlist of just some of the things you can offer that might be worth signing up:
Now, you don’t have to offer any of these things. You could simply stick to writing high-quality content and make it so good that readers will want to sign up to your email newsletter simply to reward you for that brilliance — but that’s far easier said than done.
Even if you bring in a lot of traffic and offer something great to compel a subscription, you still need to achieve two more things: get the phrasing right, and get the process right. The phrasing is essential because it can make or break your offer. Consider the difference between “Great resources! Just your email address needed! Enter it here!” and “Sign up today for exclusive free guides, tutorials, and articles”. The first sounds desperate — the second sounds confident.
As for the process of getting the address (along with whichever other details you want to collect), you need to optimize your forms. They should be simple and straightforward, because even the slightest issue with clarity can cause problems. Here are some viable mailing list plugins for you to consider adding to your new site — once you’ve chosen a plugin, you can start creating your forms simply and easily.
Wrapping up, building an email marketing list for a new WordPress site is tricky, but not impossible. You need to bring in relevant traffic, offer enough value to justify asking for an email address, and combine strong phrasing with a solid form system to get results.