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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
If you are looking to hire a SEO company, it may be a good idea to your research on who they are before you start working with them. As a general rule, if it’s hard to find the information on them, then they are probably hiding something. Here is a quick look into some comment spam we received from an new company on the Irish SEO scene.
Looking through my comment queue this morning I spotted something that caught my eye, it’s yet another Irish SEO “company” spamming. I use company in quotes because it’s not possible to get any clear information about SEOIreland.net from their website, so I’m not really sure if it’s a super secret organisation or it’s its some 13 year old kid working from his bedroom. There isn’t any information their website as to a RBN or even a name, an address or phone number. Here’s a look at their WHOIS for their domain, which has it’s information set to private.
There are very little reason as to why a legitimate business would hide themselves from being researched. Setting their WHOIS to private raises suspicion for us. Not being able to put a face to the business really doesn’t put our fears at ease.
SEOIreland.net Comment
So here’s the comment we got submitted to us, which got passed Akismet.
As the language of the post seems to be none native English, I was surprised to see that this comment was sent from inside Ireland, with an Irish IP.
For looking at where the comment comes from geographically, we use a free service at MaxMind.com.
Researching your SEO company
If you plan to hire a SEO company, you should do a background check. Find out :
- Who they are
- How many people work for them (ask about outsourced partners)
- What projects have they worked on recently
- Verify these projects and results with their clients
To hire a good SEO consultant you are talking about spending multiple thousands of Euros to work over a longer period of time. A bit of research will save you some heartache in the long run.
Jobberbase [www.jobberbase.com] is a rather powerful jobs board software which we’ve been testing on jobsinireland.org for the last year or so. Overall it has become a rather mature and stable software, offering the ability for companies to post open jobs.
Aside : In fact, if your company doesn’t already have a career portal on your website, this software would be a great way to avoid recruiters. In the business of hiring, recruiters & agents have gotten a bad reputation for either being too expensive or for simply wasting employers time. With jobberbase you could have your HR staff post jobs openings directly on your website, and candidate could apply directly to you. With recuiter fees being in the thousands of Euros for a successful new hire, having your own jobs board could be a real money saver.
Some issues with jobberbase
Although the software is strong, there are a few weaknesses, especially for the SEO side of things. The first problem is that the footer template (located at /_templates/default/footer.tpl) is a global footer. This means that the same footer is used right across the whole website. Generally your homepage is your strongest page on your website and you should use this. We recommend adding a custom footer for the homepage and adding some extra text or perhaps deeper links to your site from here. Also if you are linking to other websites the effective difference between a site-wide link and a homepage link is minimal.
Another, and perhaps less known issue with jobberbase (in versions up to 1.8 at least) is the fact that the error page template returns a HTTP status of 200 (page found), rather than a 404 (page not found) error code. With jobberbase, once a job is removed, the page is no longer listed and if you call the URL of this job you will be redirected to a generic “unavailable page”, but this page is served as a real page (that should be indexed) rather than as an error page. My quick solutions to address these two issues are highlighted below (file references here are made for version 1.8 of jobberbase)
Jobberbase custom homepage footer
Jobberbase proper error page handling
- copy the file /_templates/default/header.tpl to /_templates/default/header-404.tpl
- edit the file /_templates/default/header-404.tpl and add at the top of the file
{php}
header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
{/php}
- edit the file /_templates/default/error.tpl change the first line from
{include file="header.tpl"}
to
{include file="header-404.tpl"}
Advertise your open jobs
And finally if you are an Irish company, and want to find good quality staff for free, then we recommend you submit your jobs to jobs in ireland where you have total control of the applications and best of all it’s completely free ! www.jobsinireland.org
Just read (via Richard) that Wordze are having a nice promotion in July for their Keyword tool software. For less than $5 you can have a month’s subscription to this service. Anyone serious in SEO simply needs to have a keyword tool. In fact I’ve just signed up myself to trail it. Knowing search volumes is necessary to leverage search traffic. With this knowledge you can make sure that your content contains the keywords that people are actually search for.
To get the special introductory price you need to go to Wordze voucher page and sign up from there. Offer ends in about a week…
Btw. I’ve just noticed that the Google Keyword Tool is now providing search volume data. This is something that google has watered down in the past, by only giving a relative indication but now they have actual numbers. I would wonder about the accuracy of the numbers, I do look forward to reading about further investigations and comparisons. Here are the results for searching for “black dogs” in Ireland.
Hi and welcome to BlackDog.ie (woof !) !
Introduction
In the coming weeks I will be fleshing out the website, with details of the web services we offer. So please be patient and check back soon. If you want to contact us, please fill out the online webform here. BlackDog.ie offers a whole host of services, from design to hosting to search engine optimisation.
If you have any questions about getting your company online, or even the benefits of having a company blog, please get in touch. Having a presence online is important, but that is not where things stop. A simple webpage may not be enough. While it is important to have a website, once you have one in place you need to start to ask some more questions & here are some examples.
- Is it possible to find your site easily ?
- If someone google’s your company name will your website be the first link shown ?
- What are the services that your competitors are offering online?
- Is the information on your site easily navigated and is it up to date ?
- Have you checked your website for silly mistakes, like broken links or spelling mistakes ?
These points are just some of the things we cover when we are taking care of your website. Let us worry whether you have enough relevant incoming links. Let us take care of your website, so that you can spend more time on taking care of your customers.
Consulting
Our consulting services offer a detail plan of action to improve your company’s website. We will put together a free proposal about what steps are necessary to bring your website to the next level. By gaining more visitors and giving these people the right information your sales & customer satisfaction levels will improve. You can get a free consultation and quote by letting us know your needs, via this contact form here.
