You want to get more email subscribers, of course. But in order to do that, you need more traffic.

One of the best ways to drive organic traffic to your site is through content marketing. Your customers are, very likely, hitting the search engines to find the solution you provide. If you know what they’re searching for, then you can write a comprehensive post about how they can get what they need. Then, your target audience will find you, learn about you, and opt into your email list.

Through the magic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), if you write your blog posts with your target audience in mind and throw in the right keywords, your target audience should one day stumble upon your content. Either through a search engine, LinkedIn articles or a share on social media.

Your blog post could be just the thing they were searching for. You’ve answered their questions, so they’re practically ready to give you their email address. Unfortunately, calls to action and opt-ins have become synonymous with SPAM MAIL!

The trusty “Sign up for our newsletter” just isn’t going to cut it anymore. You need to offer something super valuable and targeted to your target audience. What is going to get them to exchange their all-important email address with you?

Here are ten ways to get more email subscribers

1. Follow this rule: every blog post ends in a call to action

The more calls to action you have on your site, the more email addresses you should be able to collect. A great place is put CTA’s is at the end of every blog post. Why? Because someone, not just anyone, a member of your target audience, has just taken the time to read your blog post right to the very end. How many times do you start reading a blog post and leave halfway through because it’s not what you’re looking for? The people who read to the end are the ones who are interested in your content and are going to be really valuable on your mailing list.

The end of a post is a great place to stick a really enticing CTA, right under your target audiences nose and it should get a lot of bites. In fact, when crafting the content calendar for your blog, you should be writing posts that coordinate with your different offers. If one of your CTAs is an amazing eBook, write a load of posts that revolve around the topic of the eBook. People who go on to read that post will more than likely give you their email address for the eBook because it’s something they’re already interested in.

ConvertPro makes this really simple. You can create an end-of-post call to action (CTA) that will automatically go at the end of each blog post.

2. Create a PDF version of your post

It’s unrealistic to have a different CTA for every single one of your blog posts. If you’re posting once a week, that means coming up with and creating an amazing offer every week as well. This would be fantastic, but who has the time!

You have a particular area of expertise, so a lot of your posts will revolve around the same kind of material. If you come up with 3-5 different offers for your CTAs you should be able to reuse and alternate these at the end of your posts.

BUT… what can you do if you don’t have an appropriate CTA for your post? Well, then you need to create a post-specific opt-in. This doesn’t need to be hard or time-consuming. A great thing to do is to adapt your post into a downloadable PDF version that you can use in your CTA. If your post is a step-by-step guide then you can make it more concise and turn it into a tick list or cheat sheet. I myself am a sucker for a good cheat sheet. This is another great way to convert your traffic into subscribers and grow your mailing list.

3. Create a pin that leads to each landing page

Social media is a great way to direct traffic to your site and convert them into email subscribers. One particular way of doing this is on the social networking platform, Pinterest. Creating pins that lead to your landing pages is a great way of directing your target audience to your site and getting them to subscribe to your mailing list.

Pinterest is a visual platform, and as we know, great visual content is always a winner. If you (or a professional) can create some fantastic looking pins that target and appeal to your audience and gets them pinning, then they’ll be signing up for your mailing list in no time!

Pinterest users are also really keen to purchase products that they’ve pinned. And if all you’re asking for is their email address in exchange for a killer eBook, I’m sure they’ll jump at the opportunity.

4. Send paid traffic to your landing page

With an ever-crowded digital space, it can be difficult to get your content in front of your target market. And if they’re not seeing your amazing content, how can they subscribe and join your mailing list? From Facebook ads on social media to Google ads in the search engines, paid traffic is one of the more efficient and cost-effective ways to market and promote your content, ultimately resulting in more subscribers.

One of the main benefits of sending paid traffic to your site is that you can target it to your audience. Age, location and even device. This gives you a pretty good chance of getting your content seen by the right people and obtaining those all-important email addresses.

5. Create MORE opt-ins

It stands to reason that to more opt-ins you have, the more traffic you’ll be able to convert into email list subscribers. But it’s no use simply having MORE of any old opt-in. You need to have more opt-ins that work! Test different CTAs, images, taglines and titles on your opt-ins to see which ones grab your target markets attention the most.  Test, review and optimize you’re opt-ins to make sure they’re as effective as possible in converting your traffic to subscribers. According to Why You (Yes, You) Need to Create More Landing Pages — there isn’t a golden number of landing pages, but you see a bump in subscribers at 21 and another HUGE bump at 40. But let’s face it — 40 landing pages is bananas!

6. Create a quiz

Who doesn’t love a good quiz? The quiz will, of course, revolve around your area of expertise so, in theory, you should only have people from your target market interested in it and taking it. As is the case with a lot of online quizzes nowadays, you go through the entire quiz before you’re asked to submit your email address to get your results. At this point, you’re thinking “Well I’ve gone through the whole quiz, so I might as well give my email address, so I can see my result”. It’s a great strategy and will work more often than not to help you build on your mailing list and get more subscribers.

Quizzes don’t need to be overly complicated, but they do need to give some value to the people taking them. As with any product, put yourself in your target audiences shoes. Imagine the problems their facing and come up with a quiz that could help them to solve a problem.

For example, let’s say you’re a health coach who works on the principle that different types of people need to take different approaches to their health. Then you can create a quiz that helps your target audience to figure out what category they fall into, and therefore, what approach they should have to take care of their health.

7. Create a webinar

People love registering for webinars, and they’re all the rage right now. Why are they so popular? They’re personal. When the person holding the webinar talks to their webcam, somehow, it really does feel like they’re addressing YOU and helping YOU. It’s so much more effective than any download or pop-up because you get some live, real-life, human interaction (virtually, of course).

I bet you see CTAs for webinar registration on a daily basis. And why are you seeing them so often? Because they work. You’ll have your target audience practically lining up on your virtual doorstep to watch your webinar. Only people who are genuinely interested in your content are going to sign up for a webinar and take the time out of their busy schedule to sit and listen to what you have to say.  So you need to come up with a killer webinar topic that will have your target audience hanging on your every word. Valuable, insightful content that is going to help them out.

The email addresses you obtain through webinar registration are probably the most valuable. These people are engaging with you on a personal level. They’ve listened to your voice and seen your face so have started to form a relationship with you and your brand.

8. Use an exit intent pop-up

How frustrating is it when you’re happily navigating a site or reading a great blog post and then BAM! The world’s biggest CTA pops-up, right in your face. It can be such a turnoff and I have to confess… we hate pop-ups too. But somehow they work!

So one idea, to help make these necessary pop-ups less annoying, is to program them to only show up when someone is about to click the ‘x’ on your site. It makes them stop and think a little longer. You never know, you might just convert them into a subscriber.

9. Another not-super-annoying idea: the slide-in

For those of you not familiar with slide-ins, they’re just a type of pop-up that discreetly slides into the screen, usually on the right under the sidebar, when it’s triggered. The reason they’re less annoying than the conventional pop-ups is that they’re not obscene and in-your-face.

HubSpot tested these types of pop-ups and found that, compared to static CTAs (call to action) “the slide-in CTA had a 192% higher CTR (click through rate) and generated 27% more submissions. The number of submissions actually wasn’t higher, because the conversion rate on the slide-in CTAs was lower than the static CTAs. But the volume of clicks was so great that it was worth it.”

10. Create a 3-5-day email course

This is a super clever way to get your target audience to hand over their email address, almost without thinking about it. If you can come up with a short but valuable 3-5 day course that appeals to your target market, you could be inundated with email list subscribers. How? You make it an email course. Not one that’s held on a website. Subscribers will get daily emails with content, challenges, and tasks to complete for the course. It’s ingenious and a perfect, creative way to convert your traffic into subscribers and grow your mailing list with a valuable audience who’s genuinely interested.

Can’t get an email course without giving up your email address, now, can you?

We love ConvertKit for this. They both give you the ability to tag and segment your list in tons of helpful ways.

In Conclusion

Email addresses and invaluable to your business. Growing a mailing list is a huge priority because it’s a great way to market, promote and communicate with your target audience. However, it’s becoming harder and harder to obtain these all-important email addresses. Call to actions such as “Join our newsletter” basically scream to people SPAM. In order to grow your mailing list, you need to give your audience something that is equally valuable to them, as gaining access to their inbox is to you.

Email addresses are also qualitative, not quantitative. You could have 5,000 subscribers on your mailing list but it doesn’t matter if only 1% are opening and clicking through the emails you’re sending. You need to add the email addresses of people who are interested in your content to your list. And how do you do this? You put yourself in the shoes of your target audience, find out what problems they’re suffering from and how you can help them. Give them the solution to their problems in exchange for their email address. That’s a pretty fair swap if you ask me.