Search Engine Optimisation BlackDog

Being able to contact your potential customers is a privilege rather than a right. Getting their permission to contact them isn’t always easy, you need to make it attractive or incentivise their signup action. Here are just a few ideas that I’ve used with some of my past clients that will perhaps help you to increase your signup rate to your newsletter.

Increase your newsletter subscriber count

Increasing your Newsletter signup rate

1. Make it easy, and painless, require the minimum information, a name & a email is the max details you need. If you can get away with just an email address, then do.
2. Offer something in return for ‘access to their inbox‘. Maybe you can offer a discount on their next purchase if they sign up, maybe there’s a e-book or other content they can get access too. By giving something in return people will place some value in the signing up. For example, you might give a prize every month to a subscriber, this might swing a person who previously didn’t want to sign up, into signing up.
3. Solve a problem, if your site sells black widgets for example, let your call to action be along the lines that you will send them news from the world of black widgets, and not just a listing of products you sell. And make it clear that it just won’t be a sales pitch in every email.
4. Following on from the previous point, everything doesn’t need to be a sales pitch, maybe make it fun, mysterious, exciting and say that with them being on the list their lives will be enriched by your content.
5. Plug it after they’ve bought from you. Either directly in a shopping cart, or a conversation on the phone. Ask if you can add them after they’ve bought or signed up. Catching them when they’ve had a positive experience will increase your sign up rate.
6. Personalise it, if you’re a the type of business that targets 2 distinct types of customers, say retail and customers, then offer a segmented newsletter for each segment. There maybe news you can send to both, but if over 25% of your emails are not for them, they probably won’t hang around after you’ve done the hard work to sign them up.
7. Have fun. Marketing to email customers is a little different, you are much more front and centre for these customers when you contact them. If the tone of your sign-up copy is quite serious or dry then people may elect not to have your serious email cluttering up their inbox. Keep things as light as possible.

Update :  one extra tip comes from NewsLetter.ie on twitter, where they talk about adding a signup on Facebook for your newsletter.  details about their implementation can be seen here and a live example on IrishWeatherApp

Good tips by email marketing consultant @paulsavage blackdog.ie/blog/7-newslet…+we suggest adding a signup form to your Facebook page

— Newsletter.co (@NEWSLETTERdotIE) June 29, 2012

The question “How do you know if your website has been hit by a penalty ?” has been asked of me quite often, and even more so in the past few months with the Google Panda and Google Penguin updates. Google has been handing out penalties, or is refining their algorithms constantly, it’s just that in the more recent times more and more sites seem to be effect by them. We even wrote about one case we looked at back in 2009. And even back in 2007 there was the roll outs that tackled paid links, see wolf-howl.com. So these aren’t anything new per se.

Example of a penalty

Basically what happens, is that your website will notice a significant drop in traffic, see the example around the end of May of this year. Note that I am only looking at the Organic Search Traffic graph, I’ve excluded the statistics for type-in, PPC, referral traffic as sometimes these can hide or blur the effect.

Over night the search traffic dropped dramatically, and this can be confirmed by clicking on individual keywords in your Google Analytics Reports, and seeing that the number of visitors coming for the top keywords had completely fallen off. These changes happened at once for more than a few keywords. Rankings for these keywords were averaging between position #2 and #7, and after this date they dropped off to the 2nd or 3rd pages of results.

Reasons for Google could penalise your site

There could be multiple reasons for your penalty, and it can be a bit of a tricky tasks to identify them. If you’ve done anything shady like buying links, buying Google plus votes or Facebook likes then it’s likely that Google has noticed this. The best start is go back to basics and check everything, from issues in your Google Webmaster Console to reading Google’s starter guide Search Engine Optimisation.

And even once everything is looked at it could be possible that your competitors in the market have just blown you out of the water. Generally if this is the case the drops are more gradual, unless you are heavily depending on one keyword to deliver you a high percentage of your traffic.

SEO takes time

It’s not always the case that you can fix a penalty in such a quick manner, as in the example above, here’s one we are currently looking at.

Thanks

A big thanks goes to my clients for allowing me to share these graphs, you guys rock !