Increasing Daily Email Subscribers by 500%
Over the last couple of months I’ve been experimenting with a few ideas to improve my social traffic and garner more email subscribers. In this post I’m going to share some of what I’ve been doing, which techniques have been successful and which not so. All these tests were done on CG.
I updated the theme recently and at the end of each post I added the following menu bar:
This included 2 new features, Email to a friend and a social Share.
Email to a friend
This option lets readers email specific posts and pages to their friends, hopefully enticing them to the site. I used the plugin Wp-Email for this, the ongoing results are pretty nice for the small amount of work and screen real estate involved.
We are now averaging around 30 emails a day not a vast amount but some will become regular readers and will certainly add up over time. Originally we only displayed the link on individual post pages, we now display the footer links on the index and category pages which accounts for the increase around the day 61 mark.
Social Share (
)
We use the Add This service to give our readers an easy way to share posts on their favourite social network. Results from this have been disappointing with daily highs of 7 uses but again it doesn’t take up much space so will be staying until I think of a better use for the space
Increasing Email Subscribers
One of my ambitions for the year is to create an email list of 10K+ subscribers, a goal of which I am way way off target from at the moment. The following graph shows how many new subscribers we are gaining on a daily basis:
There are two points on the graph where you can see you can see an increase on average new subscribers, these are caused by the following:
- {1} - Added an email subscribe form near the top of the home page
- {2} - This is a something I hadn’t seen before but makes sense. Visitors that scroll down to the end of the home or category pages are interested in the site, therefore more chance of becoming a subscriber if they see an option, so we display the following at the end of the home page and all category pages, it also displayed at the top (and bottom) of all subsequent pages (i.e. page 2 and after).
Previous we were gaining under 5 new subscribers per day, now we average over 20. If we’d done this from day one we’d be nearer on target for 10K subscribers by the end of the year, as we didn’t we’ll need to think of other ways to improve it (ideas very very welcome).
The next experimental case study I want to share resulted in an extra 20K+ visitors in a couple of days, I’ll leave that for my next post, if interested please subscribe to Self Made Minds by Email or our RSS feed.
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Do you mean to you are averaging 20 subscribers /day on CG? Because my blog is very new compared to CG and currently iam at 10 new subscribers/day and was looking for a estimation if thats a good amount of increase in subscribers.
Amit Bhawani’s last blog post..External hard disk drive
Yeah, 20 new email subscribers per day. For my experience gaining 10 new per day for a new blog is pretty good. Next step is to start running contests only for subscribers and see if that helps increase it,
What will you do with the list as it grows? Will you promote further affiliate products? What campaign management software will you use, or will you just blast out from your domain?
To start with I email from the domain and use it to promote various affiliate deals. Will also offer discount codes to subscribers (mainly affiliates nut also others that I find).
What size of an opt-in email list do you find is required before you can see decent profits on affiliate products? And do you include other content as well?
Doing it with email is new to me Justin so I’ll write more about it as I experiment. At the moment the email list is from Feedburner so it sends out a daily digest of all CG posts. When I come across a good offer (or nearer Christmas) I’ll send out some additional emails with specials.
Cool. I’ve done a lot of email marketing in my past role, but nothing with affiliate products (yet). I’ve blogged about everything I learned, maybe you can pick up a tip or two: http://blog.convurgency.com/category/email-marketing/
Justin Cook’s last blog post..What to do when you’re dropped from Google’s index
Thanks Justin, I’ll check your tips out.
You cannot send a newsletter directly unless you make the same post at CG because feedburner works that way, dont you think you should have newsletter management setup with monthly mail containing best posts of the month, new gadget releases, coupons of the month, random newsletter winner of the month with a prize(again sponsored)
That way you can control your subscribers more efficiently i guess!
Amit Bhawani’s last blog post..External hard disk drive
Good idea AMit, the plan is to export the emails addresses from Feedburner as a CSV and then email them separately, I will also be looking at a newsletter management system, one of the problems I have with them is a lot will require people to re-register which is a pain.
Some options to get re-registration @
Get started with one of the basic system like http://www.phplist.com
Get started with Aweber.com for a better management service
Subscribe to the monthly newsletter system and win a surprise gift
Offering free gadget blogs service to members who know about blogging like http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/blogs/membersname which would increase overally the traffic on the website. showing up recent forum topics on the homepage to increase membership. oops Off-Topic
Amit Bhawani’s last blog post..External hard disk drive
Al, if you’re planning on building a list of 10K subscribers don’t you think that it would be wise to change to a real emailing service like i.e. Aweber? I’ve tried discount solutions as a start up option earlier and every single time I’ve regretted it. Most real email services won’t left you copy/paste the emails due to their double opt in policy.
Mikael
Mikael’s last blog post..Knowing Matching Types When Doing Keyword Research
Nice detailed post, thanks for sharing. I havn’t tried email subs, your post gives me a few ideas on how to go about it. I think Mikaels comment about using serices like Aweber is a good point, large volumes of emails can cause all sorts of problems. For example how will you avoid your mails and domain getting wrongly flagged as spam?
Great post Al,
Only problem with the addthis Plugin is that it has to go through their database. Unfortunately it seems to be down today.
ATT
att’s last blog post..Helpful Tips in Preparing for the British Citizenship Test
I am constantly amazed how you keep tweaking and tweaking in such little ways but having it all pay off in major results. Inspiring as usual!
Some interesting things here Al, I’ve not noticed a great deal of benefit since adding the Add-This option to my individual posts - however it takes up less real-estate than the Sociable plugin I used to run, so I’m happy leaving it there for now - I occasionally use it if no-one else!
When I start focussing on email subscribers, I’ll like others have said will look at using Aweber as I’ve heard good things from people I know who use it.
I might try out that ‘Email to a friend’ option, even if it gets used once a day on my site, it’ll be a nice bonus!
Zath’s last blog post..Perpetual Gamer: Free Fantasy Football
So am I
Congratulations — to have 20 emails per day sent is pretty good for a tech gadgets blog.
I would have thought your readers would bookmark the items using Delicious, not resort to such a traditional approach as email.
Anita Campbell’s last blog post..The Google Data Mine and Your Business
but I think 500% daily is too much and impossible, isn’t it?