When leveraged correctly, email allows readers to access the content they care about most without a need for searching or scanning. Additionally, email is one of the few owned platforms that you can leverage to engage all subscribers at any time, about anything, without any additional spend. This establishes a higher baseline for non-paid traffic to your site, providing more stability for your business.
Increasing Opportunities for Signup
The first step in leveraging this audience is to ensure your site is set up to build that audience for you. During the accelerator, we observed that offering multiple areas for users to sign up for newsletters is the most effective strategy. In the case of Oil City News, the only place that readers could sign up for their newsletter was below the content, above the footer. We recommended that they add a newsletter signup area as a drop-down from the header of the website, so that it would always be in view. After two months, their subscriber numbers increased, with 46% of users utilizing the new signup area in the header.
Testing the Right CTA
Utilizing an A/B testing tool, like Google Optimize, can help you make data-driven decisions around the verbiage on your newsletter signup call-to-action and subscribe button. With a simple change in color and placement, VT Digger was able to increase click-throughs on their in-content CTAs by 34% in the first two months after the A/B test.
Be sure to check out Google’s guide on creating an A/B test with Google Optimize, as well as their developer guide for implementation.
Capitalizing on Current Events
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in early March 2020, VT Digger set up a coronavirus-specific email to keep their community informed. The purpose of this email was to provide updates on the spread and local governmental response to the pandemic. Utilizing a new pop-up call-to-action, VT Digger received 912% more email subscriptions in the first month after launching this newsletter than they did in the previous month, substantially growing their email list for the future. This resulted in a 178% increase in sessions from email month over month.
