How To Get More Subscribers For Your Email List
Your email list plays a pivotal role in your digital marketing. Why? Your email subscribers want your information.
Building your email list is one of the most important pieces of your hotel or B&B’s marketing strategy. Email marketing is a direct marketing tactic because when you contact your subscribers, you are communicating with people who’ve signed up to receive your communications.
Your email subscribers sign up for your list because they trust and value your brand. (tweet this) At this point, you are already well into the process of convincing them to stay at your property.
According to McKinsey and Company, email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter. Another study found that email marketing is the most effective tactic when it comes to lead nurturing.
Email marketing helps keep your property top of mind.
Today, we’re going to look at how to get more subscribers for your email list. We’ll look at a number of ways you can grow and nurture your email list for the most marketing success.
Make Your Form Accessible
Got your email sign-up form on your home page? Great. Now, let’s get it on all of your landing pages.
The first tip when it comes to getting more subscribers for your email list is to make it incredibly easy for people to sign up.
If you want people to sign up for your list, don’t bury it on your page. Put it where they’ll easily find it. On your landing pages, put your sign-up form in the sidebar or very close to the top of your page.
Create An Easy Sign Up
Now that you’ve peppered all of your pages with your email opt-in form, don’t give them too many fields to complete. Name and email are sufficient.
Some marketers even agree that asking for the email address is all you should ask for. They say that adding fields reduces opt-ins and that asking for the name in addition to the email address causes “friction.” What do they mean by friction?
They don’t want you to add any friction to your forms so you discourage opt-ins. Adding too many fields discourages sign-ups.
On the other hand, some marketers believe you should ask for email and name. These experts say that personalization lifts open rates, and there are studies to back that up.
While there is proof on both ends of the spectrum, we’ll leave it to you to test what works best for you. Consider A/B testing your landing pages with an email form on one page asking for just the email and on the other page asking for both email and name.
Choose the option that works best for your site and use it on all of your forms.
Ask Current Subscribers to Forward
Your current email subscribers are already loyal followers, so invite them to forward your email to a friend.
The best way to do this is to have your current subscribers click a link to compose their message online. Not all email programs will let you forward an email while keeping the images.
This also allows you to track the click-throughs to see how many people forwarded your email.
Use Social Media
Your social media followers are a captive audience. Connect with your audience and invite them to join your email list.
Be sure and use your email service provider’s app to put an email sign-up form on your social media platform. (tweet this) Additionally, you can periodically direct them to your sign-up form landing page with a special offer.
Add a Pop-Up
Yes, pop-ups can be annoying. But, they can also increase your conversion rate.
Consider the exit pop-up. Your website visitors are browsing your site. They have clicked through a few pages, looking at photos. Yet, on their first visit they decide not to book a room.
Are these folks lost forever? Not if you get their email address.
As your site visitors are in the process of exiting your site, use the exit pop-up to ask for their email address. Either offer them a special deal (think 10% off a weekend stay) or the promise of a special sent by email.
Exit pop-ups (or overlays) do increase conversion rates and encourage people to opt-in to your email list.
They are effective because they provide your site visitor with a last chance offer. Plus, they let your website user stay connected with your brand so when they are ready to book, you’ll be there in their inbox.
Tell Subscribers What To Expect
You also want to include a short sentence about what email subscribers can expect. Tell them upfront if you send daily, weekly or monthly newsletters and how often you’ll send special deals.
This goes a long way towards instilling loyalty and trust. Just be sure you stick with what you promised.
Give Subscribers a Choice
Let’s say you have properties in several different cities that are very far apart geographically. If you want to increase your email subscribers, give them a choice of properties.
Your sign-up form might list the following choices:
- Get info about New York hotels
- Get info about Hawaii hotels
- Get info about Martha’s Vineyard B&Bs
- Learn about all of the above
This way you give your email subscriber control and let them see only what interests them.
In addition, if a subscriber wants to leave your list, you can simply ask your subscriber if they want to change the frequency of their emails or the types of messages they get. They might stay on your list if you offer them a choice between receiving weekly promo emails as opposed to daily promo emails.
This goes a long way towards letting your email subscriber know you value them as well as their time.
Final Thoughts
Email marketing can shape the future of your hotel’s marketing strategy. If you haven’t started an email subscriber list, it’s time to do so. If you have a list, but you aren’t actively adding to it, get busy.
A study on email marketing shows that people who buy products marketed through email spend nearly 140% more than people who don’t get any promotional emails.
This is perhaps the single most important reason to get more email subscribers for your email list. It is certainly worth the time, money and effort you spend building it.
What’s more – you can drive visitors to your website through email marketing. You’ll increase your site conversion rate by actively using email to attract visitors to your website.
Don’t have a website? Or, perhaps you do, but it isn’t mobile friendly. At Hotel Propeller, we build beautiful websites. You’ll find everything you need to attract guests to your website through your email marketing. Take a look at our showcase and contact us today.
Images: Samuel Zeller and Gabriel Santiago
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