How Do You Gain More Newsletter Signups?
Why would a site not put their newsletter signup on any of their usual site pages, but instead, on a separate hidden page? Here are some best practices.
Video Transcript
David: Your second question was about email newsletter signups. Do you recall the question, or do you want me to read it?
Onawa: I don’t recall 100%.
David: Okay, you said, “Is there a reason someone might not put their newsletter signup on any of their usual site pages, home contact, or anywhere else, but on a separate hidden page? I noticed this for someone who sends out newsletters regularly.” Okay, cool. Yeah, there may be reasons. So, for instance, if I’m running a paid search campaign, I often have a different paid search landing page than my organic search. Or maybe I would be doing that for a social media campaign. Right? Because with paid search or social media, I can get away with a lot of duplicate content that I don’t want Google to see. So, I might make efforts to make sure Google does not index the paid search page. So, I wouldn’t add it to the menu. I would hide it. I might even take it out of the sitemap because I really want it to only go into paid. The only reason someone would find it is if they clicked on a paid ad, or they clicked on an ad from some magazine, or whatever. So, there is a legitimate use for that. But if I had a newsletter signup, I would want it on as many pages as I possibly could.
Onawa: I would think. It just surprised me that it was on none because normally, you just throw it on anywhere: the footer, the contact page, whatever. Just sign up for our newsletter. It’s easy. It’s automatic.
David: Well, in some cases, you don’t want to distract from the main call to action. And the main call-to-action is obviously, give me your business, not sign up for the waiting list, basically. I like this analogy: some people are ready to date us but not ready to marry us. And especially those with a long buying cycle, like industrial equipment, you don’t say, I’m going to drop 50 grand today on a new machine, right? You have a very long buying cycle that involves a whole lot of people making decisions and figuring out budgets and financing and all that. So, you want a real easy call-to-action for the newsletter form because someone will come and be like, “Oh, great, they do the WYSIWYG thing I need them to do. That’s awesome. But I need to talk to my boss about it. But I’ll sign up for the newsletter in the meantime.” If it were an immediate sale, a low-cost item, $100 or less, then I wouldn’t distract. I would have the call-to-action there, and I would ask you to sign up for my newsletter later. Right? Because I would want you to buy that thing. I don’t want you to have alternatives and stuff and to think about it. So, there is a legitimate reason. It might be a huge opportunity for the client, right? Especially if they have a long buying cycle, to say, we’re going to do this a little bit better. I have a client and they have a very long buying cycle because they provide services on very niche industrial machinery and stuff like that. So, what I did was not only add the signup for a newsletter on the sidebar of the blog, so every blog page now has it, but I also changed the background to red. So, you can’t miss it, because I want people to know that they can get the value of that. I don’t want to be subtle. I know that they’re not ready to buy now, but if they’ve come to a blog post, they’re looking for information, and that’s a great way to get someone who needs some more information, such as a newsletter would provide.
