How to Get More Subscribers for Your eCommerce Website

What if you can have thousands of people waiting for your eCommerce promotions? Wouldn’t it be easier to sell something if you already have people listening to you? With this, you no longer have to convince them aggressively. You just need to talk and they’ll listen. But this is hardly the case online. Try visiting one of the popular social media websites and you’ll have hundreds of updates and ads competing for your customer’s attention. Expecting them to respond to you more than the hundred others asking for their attention is just plain impossible.

Since this is the case, you have to approach marketing differently. You have to learn how to get people to listen to you and nothing else. How? You use one of the most focused channels there is – email. With email marketing and using the right email marketing tools, you can send promotions with just a click of a button and you’ll have your subscribers clicking at your links and buying from you. Of course, it is not as easy as a ‘click of a button’. You have to win your subscribers’ trust for them to respond to your emails. Honestly, a typical subscriber can have multiple subscriptions at once. You have to give them a good reason to respond to your email more than the next person. Email marketing is quite easy to implement in eCommerce websites. Unlike an ordinary website that needs a free offer to get the attention of the market, eCommerce website owners can do with just some discount coupons. Another option is to collect emails on the go upon customer checkout. With this, eCommerce website owners don’t even need to ask the prospects to sign up. It is automatically done  and can be tracked in your email marketing dashboard.

Another option is to regularly send a discounted items newsletter. You can ask your prospects to sign up to your list so that they can get the newsletter in their email. Today, I’ll show you how you can get more quality subscribers to your email list. This article is created for eCommerce website owners and how they can implement an effective email capture system in their website.

Put the Form in Front of Your Customer’s Face The easiest way to get more subscribers into your website is to let them see your subscriber form right away. How? Through a pop-up. At first, it may seem intrusive. After all, your visitors will see this pop-up as they are reading through your website. But this strategy worked for the big marketers like Brian Dean. Here’s what he did. He implemented a popup in his website that looked like this.

Doing this alone has helped him get from 35 to 75 subscribers per day converting his traffic at 3.42%. While the percentage may not be as impressive, the sheer bulk of the traffic has allowed him to get as much as 3643 subscribers in as little as 3 months.

And he did not stop there. He kept on experimenting and found a way to increase his subscriber conversion by as much as 785%. What he employed is a technique that he calls as the Content Upgrade. This is where he adds something extra to his existing content and offer it as a PDF in that particular content in exchange for the readers’ emails. In the same way, I think that you should have pop-ups in your eCommerce website. This will allow your prospects to see the discount code right before they buy. A good place to put this is in your product pages or checkout pages. This way, your prospects will be more inclined to sign up just to get the extra discount code. Go ahead. Try it. You don’t have to be afraid of pop-ups. You’ll see that it can really help you get more subscribers to your eCommerce website.

Give Them a Good Reason to Sign Up You can’t expect people to just sign up to your list without getting anything in return. While good branding may encourage people to follow you, it may not be enough to get them to disclose their emails. With this in mind, you have to give your prospects a good reason to sign up. For eCommerce website owners, this is easy. You can get your prospects to sign up with something as simple as a discount code. Many online shops are already doing this. Usually, you’ll see something in the front page that looks like this.

This can come in two forms: a discount percentage or an amount. Some may be more effective than others depending on what you are selling. For products that sell over $100, a percentage may be better. While for products that sell for a lower price should get a discounted amount instead. There are also some eCommerce website owners that may be feeling a bit generous. A website called Althea did the same thing when they are trying to rid themselves of old stocks of makeup products. What they did is they gave away these products for every purchase. They just noted that the giveaway is only until supplies last. Why do this works? It works because it gives the prospect an extra incentive before they buy from the website.

Before they even make the decision of buying anything, they already have a discount coupon. The good news is that this is an easy offer to give when you’re an eCommerce website owner. Just decide on the amount or a product to give away and you are ready to go.

Set Up an Opt In System for All Who Bought From You Some eCommerce websites have systems where they capture all the emails of their customers. You can do this through plugins or some built-in systems in your eCommerce platform. Take Shopify for instance. It has an Email Popup Box add-on and a way to capture emails upon checkout. To do this on Shopify, you can just click on Settings and choose Checkout. From here, you can go to the Order Processing section and go under ‘Collecting Consent to Send Promotional Emails to Customers from Your Store’. You then have to choose from the following options.

Here’s an explanation of each option. Customer agrees to receive promotional emails by default This option allows you to send updates to your customer by default. They will be receiving emails from you. Customer does not agree to receive promotional emails by default If your customer chose this, you will not be allowed to send any update or email. Disable and hide this field Or you can just hide the feature altogether. If you choose this, you will not even have a chance of capturing their email. Once you have activated this, click Save. Once the campaign is running, you can get your customer’s email addresses in the Customers section in your Shopify dashboard. When you are there, you can choose the ‘Accepts Marketing’ tab to reveal the customers who are willing to receive emails from you.

Alternatively, you can also export the emails and transfer them to an autoresponder like Mailchimp or Aweber. This way, it will be easier to send scheduled promotional emails.

Host Contests This is perhaps one of the easiest ways to get more subscribers into your list. With contests, you’ll be giving something that is highly valuable in your niche in exchange for their email. This is a strategy that worked for email marketers like Bryan Harris. Here’s what he did. He created a case study of his giveaway that got 2,239 subscribers in just 10 days. He got inspired when Josh Earl of Smart Passive Income did the same thing and had astounding results (3,418 subscribers to be exact). Here’s what his giveaway looked like.

It looks incredibly simple, right? No design mumbo jumbo and just plain straight to the point. According to his case study, he followed this 3-step process.

STEP 1: Choose a Product to Give Away You cannot just giveaway what you feel like giving away. Your customers will ultimately decide on what they like. The best way to know what your customers like is to ask them. You can do this by setting up a survey on your website or interviewing some of your customers. But if this is not possible, you can just do some basic niche research. This involves searching through forums for products that your market is interested in and offer that for free. The best products to give away are high end products or monthly subscriptions. As you can see in the giveaway above, Bryan chose to give 10 years of free Leadpages subscription. The amount is intentional. It is designed to be out of this world in order to get the attention of the potential subscriber.

STEP 2: Set Up The Giveaway Setting up a giveaway is easy with the right tools. For this, I love using KingSumo Giveaway.

It is a WordPress plugin that you can download and activate. From there, all you need to do is fill up the form and upload an image and voila! You’ll instantly get a decent looking giveaway page just like this.

STEP 3: Promote the Giveaway The next step entails getting people to sign up to your giveaway. This is where you have to pull the strings and get as many people to promote your giveaway as possible. For this, you can do the following.

  • Start with your Friends It really never hurts to ask. Just ask them if they can share the giveaway and it will instantly give you the boost in initial subscribers
  • Email Webinar Creators that Featured The Product You Plan to Give Away There will be people who will be creating webinars about the product that you are giving away. You can email these people to promote the giveaway for you. Why will they promote you? Well, they are already promoting the product in their webinar. The giveaway is just extra.
  • Email Video Creators that Featured The Product You Plan to Give Away In the same way, you can also email video creators. These are people who may have recommended the product in passing in their video. You can ask them to add a link to their video description to your giveaway.
  • Email Bloggers that Featured The Product You Plan to Give Away Even if you have video creators, don’t forget to get bloggers on board as well. They may have written a review about the product that you plan to give away. If they did, asking them to link to your give away will not hurt. Giveaways is by far the quickest way to build a real list of subscribers. Other methods just build the number without considering the quality but giveaways are different. It funnels a list of people who are authentically interested in the product or niche – and this is what makes this strategy really powerful.

BONUS IDEA: Leverage the Power of Referrals  Also, you can add a referral reward system in your website along with your email capture page. This is where you give extra offers or discounts for people who promote the website to their friends or family. A simple referral reward system works like this. For each referral that the brand gets, the user will automatically get a reward. This is what Uber did when they gave away free rides to referrers. But for an email referral reward system, you just add a form where users can add their friends’ email addresses and you give them an extra discount coupon or another product as a reward.

Getting subscribers to your eCommerce website doesn’t need to be hard. With just a few techniques, you’ll be surprised on how quick your subscriber count can grow. The best part is you don’t have to create an offer from scratch – you don’t have to write an ebook or create an online course like bloggers and other online business owners. You just need to give them a discount – that’s it. What do you think of the strategies above? Have you used them in the past? What strategies do you plan on using? Tell me all about it below.

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5 Response to "How to Get More Subscribers for Your eCommerce Website"

  1. Comment From Jill Stein

    I have always know that building a community through a mailing list was good, I just never had a great way of doing it. It definitely makes sense to use engaging pop ups and other ways to attract people.



  2. Comment From Bob Dumond

    For years I have been managing a homegrown customer referral system however I now see that it makes sense to get a software system to manage it. I never realized how important referrals were.



  3. Comment From Diane Taylor

    One tactic that works for me is to grow my mailing list by getting people to sign up for a giveaway. More people are interested in joining my list if they have a promise of receiving something extra.



  4. Comment From Leigh Redman

    It seems as if I implement all these areas of engagement, I can grow my community. My only concern is that I don’t want to be too much in my customers face. I guess you have to be strategic about the placement.



  5. Comment From Anthony Stevens

    The cool thing about newsletter opt-ins is that most shopping cart solutions have opt-in forms that you can connect to third party systems.



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