Many online merchants experience website traffic and sales problems. Email marketing and many other marketing strategies are the ways to overcome traffic and sales problems. 

For implementing email marketing, you should have a huge list of email audiences. Reaching out to customers to actively sell is vital, running ads to sell on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram where customers gather for social networking is vital, getting bounced or unhappy customers back via personalized follow-up emails is vital too. Basically, without catching their contact information, you will lose visitors who enter your site for the first time and leave.

Growing email list imperative to the long-term success of an online business. Below are some creative ways to double your email list month over month. Nothing complicated, nothing too costly, these are just successful strategies many online businesses use to grow their email lists.

Ways to turn site visitors into email subscribers

Here are some effective ways that you can use to get your website visitors to join your email list. The best part is, you won’t even have to hire any experts. You can implement these strategies on your website all by yourself.

1. Sign-up smart bar in homepage

This is the mostly used way in ecommerce yet it is the easiest way to. Stick Signup option in heading bar to collect emails from new visitors. The color and text font in the heading bar should be well designed so it looks like a natural part of your website.

What drives whether customers will sign up via the heading bar is the text copy. Make sure your copy delivers a clear, compelling message with values attractive enough to make customers want to sign up and subscribe.

2. Discount coupon pop-ups

The most effective way to turn website visitors into email subscribers is to offer them a discount coupon pop-up when they first visit your store. You can trigger a beautiful welcome coupon pop-up that offers an exclusive discount coupon if they subscribe.

Also, you can offer free shipping if they enter their email address. Instead of static form, pop-ups are better at catching and appearing right in the front of a web-page; it captures visitors’ attention. Plus, static forms cannot be turned off, pop-ups give customers a choice to turn them off if they don’t want to be disrupted while exploring the site. 

Make sure your coupon pop-ups are responsive on all mobile devices as well as on desktops since more and more eCommerce traffic is coming from mobile.

3. Ask for email in checkout step

Keeping the checkout page simple and letting customers checkout as guests without creating an account increases your conversion rate. But still you can collect emails on the checkout page, by just adding a field for their email address.

This can be an optional field. Whereas to make it work more for you, add incentive for customers. Such as: receiving an e-receipt, faster shipping, free gift or discount code.

4. Run exit intent pop-ups

They work well to convert visitors into subscribers. However, exit-intent popups are actually much more effective at generating more subscribers because they only appear right before the visitor leaves your site.

Many online shoppers abandon their order from the cart page and never come back. Which means you are losing sales from 68% of potential customers on cart pages. Therefore, If you already have their emails, you can send cart-recovery follow-up messages to convince them to come back.

Exit intent pop-ups are a good way to opt for. When customers are about to leave the site, a pop-up will be triggered to prevent customers from exiting by offering a special deal attractive enough to make customers stay and finish their order.

Even if customers do not finish their purchase, they may subscribe to your list or follow you on social media, which means you capture their contact info and can recover their abandoned cart later via email or social marketing.

5. Offer credit points in loyalty programs for email subscriptions or account sign-ups

If you are focusing on growing your email list, consider giving away lots of points to encourage your customers to submit their email or create an account with your store.

This is another great idea to collect email leads and even motivate purchases at the same time is loyalty point-based programs.

As a kind of reward to motivate customers to take an action, you give away points according to which actions they take. Submitting emails or creating an account are both easy and quick actions to earn points on the loyalty program.

6. Live-chat box: collect emails when agent is not online

The emails can be collected by live chat box. When an agent is not online, you can ask the customer for their email to respond to their query on their email once the agent is available.

7. Offer valuable content such as free eBooks/tutorials

If you’re running an online store that sells kitchen gadgets, why not offer a free eBook of recipes in exchange for their email? Before sending make sure you understand what your potential customers need, and provide real value in the free eBooks or tutorials.

Whether you write the eBooks/tutorials yourself, outsource it to a freelancer, or purchase them from anywhere it’s an up-front investment that can be used forever to convert interested visitors into email subscribers for your store.

8. Referral campaign

Referral campaign multiples the website traffic. You just have to  design a referral campaign, in which customers can refer your products/services/websites to their friends in order to get rewards.

Each referrer will have a unique link to share with friends. Once a referral clicks on the link and enters their email to participate, you’ve successfully collected an email lead. But you have to make sure that you design a campaign attractive enough for people to refer their friends to it.

9. Conduct a survey to collect emails from responders 

Another way to get customer’s email addresses is to conduct a survey. A survey can be about products, user experience on your site, pricing, customer support, and so on.

For conducting surveys on websites, Hotjar is a great tool. Before or after the survey you can ask for the email to send them new updates or thank you gift.

Keep in mind that lengthy surveys will discourage customers from responding  hence your survey should only be 2-5 questions long.

10. Set up email signup tab on Facebook page

If you’re running a big Facebook fan page with either huge or growing numbers of followers, capture them on your list through Facebook itself. The powerful Call-To-Action button on Facebook pages allows you to set up an Email Signup button right next to the Like button. 

Also, Constant Contact, Aweber, and many other popular email services have integrated with Facebook email sign-up to help business owners build their lists overnight with Facebook pages. If you have a Facebook page for your business, try this method right away.

11. Embed sign-up forms inside blog posts

As more and more visitors choose to read your blog posts on mobile vs. desktop, you’ll need to come up with a strategy to make sure your email capture form is visible. One strategy is to include the sign-up form in your blog posts, usually right after it, before the comment section.

Inline opt-in forms are great opportunities to offer content upgrades. It’s a type of lead magnet that lets you attract subscribers by offering an additional piece of content at the end of a blog post. Checklists, guides, and PDF versions of blog posts are some of the popular content upgrades you can use to increase email signups.

Wrap up

One thing to keep in mind when growing an email list is that it’s a process that takes time. You can’t expect to build an email list of thousands of subscribers overnight. But if you ignore your email list, your business will really suffer.

Once you implement the strategies that are described above, you can get to work and start generating more traffic to your website. The more visitors you have coming to your website the higher chance you’ll have at converting more subscribers.