Case #3: Publisher

Getting started

If you’re a publisher looking to expand your audience, one of the most effective ways is by collecting subscribers to your newsletters. Newsletters can help you connect with your readers, provide valuable information, and promote your content. But how can you convince people to sign up? The first step is to show them the value of your newsletters and offer options that align with their preferences.

1. Create a Form  

Your newsletter signup form is the most important part of your lead generation strategy, so you need to consider where and how you’d like to place the form on your website. If you’re starting to collect subscribers, consider placing different signup forms in one or more places to encourage more subscriptions:

• At the end of each blog post (Below posts), as it encourages visitors to subscribe after they’ve read the website’s content.
• As a widget in your footer, serving as a fixed reminder to subscribe.
• A slide-in form at the bottom of the page grabs visitors’ attention without interrupting their reading.
• On a dedicated landing page, you can share more details about each list.

For reference:

When creating your subscription form, you must set expectations for your audience about the newsletters you’ll send. Some questions you may want to address include the type of content they can expect to receive (e.g. healthy habits, beauty, etc.) and how often they can expect to receive it (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly). 

You can provide multiple options to suit your subscribers better. This is the key to starting on the right foot and engaging your subscribers by only sending emails about  what they want and when they want it. You can create multiple lists, one for each type of content and/or for each frequency option, and ask your subscribers what list they’d like to join with the List Selection block.   

2. Import your current subscribers

Most projects don’t start from scratch, and you may already have an active subscriber list. 

Either if you are importing subscribers from another platform or simply changing your strategy, it is really important that you communicate this to your existing audience. Keeping their express consent updated is key to avoiding spam complaints.

Here’s a guide on how to clean your existing lists before sending your first emails with MailPoet and how to import subscribers to the plugin.

Marketing email strategy

Add value to capture interest

One way to encourage people to subscribe to a newsletter is by offering a freebie as an incentive. A freebie could be an e-book, a free first class, or a template. But it can also be exclusive content only delivered to users who have signed up. 

When promoting the newsletter and freebie, it’s important to highlight the benefits of subscribing, such as having access to a community of like-minded individuals who share similar interests and passions.

By offering a freebie and highlighting the benefits of subscribing, you can increase your newsletter’s subscriber base and establish long-lasting relationships with your audience.

Use segmentation to keep your users engaged

Consistency is essential, and so is personalized content to keep your users engaged. MailPoet allows you to segment your lists based on several criteria, which will help you send targeted campaigns to different groups regularly.

If you write about Healthy Habits and Beauty, for example, you can create at least two different Post Notification emails that will automatically send the latest posts from the respective categories to your subscribers. You can combine the categories of interest with preferred frequency options as well, so you’ll have different segments and emails set up for:

• Weekly Health Habits posts
• Weekly Beauty posts
• Monthly Health Habits posts
• Monthly Beauty posts

The following pages can help you set this up: 

• Segment By Frequency of Emails Sent
• Segmenting Post Notifications According to Categories

Another thing that may help with engagement is rewarding your subscribers on their subscription anniversary by using the Subscribed Date segment or, based on their score, to keep engaging subscribers who often interact with your emails. 

You may also want to review general pages about segmentation:

Keep on building the relationship and convert subscribers into paid subscribers

If you use a plugin like WooCommerce Memberships to have a membership program that offers exclusive content for paid members, it’s time to raise interest to become a paid subscriber. To do this, you need to consistently provide them with valuable information and benefits demonstrating your content’s value. Make it clear that becoming a paid subscriber unlocks even more exclusive content, discounts, and other valuable resources.

Instead of creating a single Welcome Email for new subscribers, we recommend creating a series of emails (e.g. three emails) that will include not only the freebie but also tips on how to get the most out of the community, share success cases of other members, etc.

We can use those emails to gain momentum and convert the user who signed up for a free subscription to a paid one. To create a series of welcome emails, you can either:

To give you some inspiration, here are some examples of welcome emails you can create for your drip campaign:

Example Email 1:  Subject: Welcome! Enjoy your freebie inside.

Hello  [Subscriber’s Name], welcome to our community! We’re thrilled to have you on board. As a token of our appreciation, we’ve prepared a special freebie for you. Enjoy!

Example Email 2:  Subject: Unlock the full potential of our community with these tips!

We hope you’ve been enjoying your time as a  [Website name] subscriber. To help you get the most out of your experience, we’ve put together a list of valuable tips and tricks on [category or topics].

If you’re ready to take your experience to the next level, consider becoming a paid member to unlock even more benefits, resources, and  [mention a compelling reason to join the paid program]. Click here [insert link/button] to learn more about our paid membership program.

Example Email 3:  Subject: Real success stories and an exclusive invitation

Hey  [Subscriber’s Name], we’re excited to share inspiring success stories from our community with you! In this email, you’ll find stories of members who have achieved [mention specific results or accomplishments]. Their journeys serve as a testament to the incredible possibilities within our community. We want to invite you to explore our exclusive paid membership program and unlock a wealth of opportunities. Click here [insert link/button] to learn more.

Keep adding value

Once the user converts into a paid plan, you must keep adding additional value to their subscription. Here you have a few ideas of content for paid members:

• Early access to content and promotions;
• Exclusive valuable content, such as a 30-day yoga routine, a video tutorial, and a routine for skin care;
• Organize monthly Q&A to be held online with paid members only;
• Merchandising;
• Discounts on a partner shop.

Advertising and Partnerships

Note that although we don’t support HTML in emails, which can enable advertisements through HTML codes and Google Ads, you can still advertise brands, products, and services that resonate with your business in a few ways:

• Add an image of your advertisers/partners linking to any page you want.
• Write a post about your partner and add it to your newsletter using the Posts widget. Or you could write a newsletter about meditation and mention a Yoga Studio. You can get familiar with the MailPoet Email Editor here.
• If you have a partnership with a local business, you can link to a coupon code to be printed by your subscribers so they can bring it to the store you partnered with to get their discount. 
• If your partnership is with an e-commerce store, you can ask them to create an exclusive coupon code that you can share with your members. You can also use a referral link if your partner has a referral program. By using this link in your newsletter, you can track the traffic and sales generated from your newsletter to the partner’s store. This allows you to measure the effectiveness of your partnership and potentially earn additional rewards through the referral program.

If you need to show your value to potential partners and advertisers, you can use the detailed stats from your newsletters. You can periodically show the engagement numbers (open, clicked) to your partners to keep offering more benefits to your subscribers. 

You can see more details about stats here: Detailed Stats Explained.

What’s next?

Email marketing is a good way to keep your audience engaged, and after setting your strategy up, let’s dive into statistics! Here are some metrics that you will want to check regularly:

Growth

• Are you getting new subscribers? If not, it’s time to rethink your freebie strategy. Have you considered offering a more relevant and valuable incentive?
• List retention: while it is essential to let go of the users that are not engaging, you will always want to measure the number of unsubscribed users and check if there are other ways to keep them subscribed (e.g., sending less frequently, covering fewer topics, or create more segments to deliver more specific content).
• To see if your practices are successful, you will want to keep track of the periods you implemented new strategies and check if open and click-through rates and unsubscribe rates are going up or down. 

Engagement

• Are users engaging with your emails? What are the emails with more opens and clicks? What can you learn from them?
• Is any email of the Welcome Series or the Automaiton performing better or worse than the others?

Conversion

• What is the gear that is helping you get paid subscribers?
• Is any of the products/services performing better?
• What else could you offer to your subscribers?
• Is there any email that is driving more sales? What can you learn from it?

MailPoet offers detailed stats per email and per subscriber that will help you understand how your email strategy is working.