Building an email list is a critical task for essentially every business and website. When you have a strong email list you can connect with your audience in a direct, targeted way, you can increase your traffic, and you can boost loyalty. Emails give you the opportunity to create a conversation and foster returning site visitors.
Once you have names on your list, you can add customized images for email, create special promotions and gain a new way to collect data by looking at your campaigns and how they perform.
If you use WordPress, the following are some of the things to know and keep in mind whether you’re starting from scratch with your email list, or you want to add to an existing list.
List Benefits
It’s critical to understand the benefits that come with list building. First, you own your list, and it can’t be taken, and you also have the authority to be sending emails to people.
They’re going to inherently see you as more credible because they opted into your list. It also makes it incredibly easy to target your marketing and content this way, because of the ways you can segment your list.
Plugins
One of the many benefits of WordPress are the many plugins available (often free) that are designed specifically to help people perform tasks related to list building.
The toughest part is choosing a plugin from the excellent options.
SumoMe tends to be one of the most popular of these plugins, and it’s widely used. It’s free and features options like the Heat Map feature, a built-in social sharing tool, and built-in analytics.
Using the SumoMe list builder allows you to create a custom lightbox to get subscriptions, it makes it easy to share content, and the Welcome Mat is a feature that provides a full-screen call-to-action to site visitors.
Advanced Opt-In Plugins
While many of the WordPress list-building plugins are free, there are premium options as well, if you want more advanced features and functionality.
An example is the Bloom Plugin, which is from Elegant Themes. Bloom works by adding opt-in forms to your website, and there are a variety of different formatting options for these including pop-ups and fly-ins.
Once you’ve created and set-up your opt-ins you can see how they’re performing and get an overview of how quickly you’re growing your list.
Landing Pages
Finally, in addition to opt-in plugins that display pop-ups on your site, consider a landing page plugin as well.
Thrive Landing Pages is one of the best because it simplifies how you make and use landing pages. You can also use it to create not just sales pages but also opt-in form pages and course pages, among others.
The templates look great, they’re quick and easy to use, and you can create an effective sales funnel pretty quickly. The templates are also inherently designed to feel cohesive, and they’re already themed. You could code your own landing page from scratch, but why go through the trouble when Thrive makes it so simple?
