3 Best Practices for Turning Website Visitors into Email Subscribers

Asking for your visitor’s email address is a delicate process. It requires reaching the right person at the right time with the right message. Unfortunately, a lot of website publishers and online businesses don’t take this approach, which makes for wasted efforts and lost opportunities. This is where website personalization comes into play.

AddThis offers a suite of data-driven marketing tools that can help you avoid this mistake, and we want to make sure you’re using them to the best of your ability, especially as it relates to your email marketing. So, we put together a list of three best practices to help you better convert your website visitors into email subscribers.

1. Give first-time visitors the special treatment they deserve.

While you can use AddThis Custom Messages to target first-time visitors with a call to sign up for your email list, you can also use them to offer discounts on their first purchase or to point them to a page where they can get a free download (you can tailor this offer based on what your site offers). This way you’re providing value before asking them to subscribe. After you hook them, you can then target them with your email sign up when they return. This way you’re being respectful of where your visitors are in terms of their relationship with you and messaging appropriately. BONUS: You can also show your message when users display exit intent.

2. Pay attention to their interests and where they’re coming from.

I don’t know about you, but I’m a lot more likely to sign up for an email list if what they’re offering to send me is relevant to what I’m interested in following or learning about (or better yet – if I know they’ll send me future deals). What’s one way to personalize your messaging for different audiences? Paying attention to where they’re coming to your site from, such as social source (we list over 300) or a specific referring domain. This way, you can speak to visitors differently based on what drove them to your site.

You can also target visitors based on their interests. We recently spoke with Minneapolis Running about their use of Custom Messages, and they gave a great example of how they targeted visitors with family interests to promote an article of theirs about running with a baby jogger. Delivering relevant content to your visitors is a great way to increase the likelihood of them becoming an email subscriber.

3. Be aware of how many calls-to-action you’re using.

AddThis offers lots of different tools for website owners and marketers. We love them all – and we want you and your visitors to as well. One way to help make this happen is to be aware of how many calls-to-action you’re using on your site at the same time.

We design our tools to make your user’s experience more personal, which provides value for both the visitor and the site owner, but there are best practices to follow. When setting up different tools and Custom Messages on your website, we suggest you check them out yourself to see what kind of experience you’ve created. Be sure to try it on different devices (our tools allow you to target mobile, tablet, and desktop). Once activated, track how your Custom Messages are performing and adjust your strategy accordingly.

With these three tips in mind, you should be well on your way to growing your email list! Take it from us, website personalization gets results.