Your Website as a Tool to Grow Your Mailing List
Typically, marketing is responsible for two things:
- Getting sales from the existing customer database, and
- Growing the potential customer database.
Are you using your website to the best of it's ability to capture and grow your database? If you monitor Google Analytics, you'll see the % of new visitors to your site - that is a large group of potential new customers to add to your mailing list.
Furthermore, these new visitors that come to your site via search or SEO are high-quality potential customer. Search-engine optimization (SEO - bringing people to your site who are searching in search engines like Google) is the digital marketing channel with the biggest impact on lead generation for both B2B and B2C companies, according to the August 2012 survey results from Webmarketing123.
59% of B2B marketers said SEO has the biggest impact on their lead generation goals, with social media (21%) and pay-per-click (PPC – 20%) trailing distantly. Their B2C counterparts also ranked SEO (49%) first for impact on lead generation, followed by PPC (26%) and social media (25%).
So, are you doing everything you can to capture them? Here are some ideas:
Use the Homepage
Gone are the brochure-website days of the 1990's where a home page was a static picture of your logo, winery, or product. Such "billboards" require someone to click a top navigation to get to any information. Assuming a large percentage of visitors are new to you, why not have your sign-up right on your home page? Or, on a universal side-bar?
Offer Redundant Options
A 2012 study by Adsense indicated we all process information differently. 47% of web surfers polled indicated they always clicked on text, 18% said they always clicked on graphics, and 35% of us click on either/both depending on the page layout and information.
The implication? Have a linking graphic picture asking for newsletter sign up, then have a text link next to it. (And, you can have it in your navigation as well.)
Strike When the Iron is Hot
The shopping cart is an ideal place to continue to the dialog with customers. Providing them opportunities to sign up to different mailing lists not only gives you segmentation opportunities to improve your communication, but shows you care about their interests.
Don't interrupt them when they are completing the transaction, but after the transaction, ask they their preference. In the Vin65 system, this is an option, that when turned on, will provide customers the option during confirmation after check-out to sign up for your mailling lists.
There are many other ways to capture visitors to your site to add to your mailing list. What are your favorites?