email subscription

Most websites these days have an email subscription form. As businesses realize the importance of email marketing, they develop new and creative ways to build an email list. Website builders also recognize the value of offering tools and features on their platform, making it easy for people to get email subscribers.

Gone are the days when businesses only used to rely on the traditional means of marketing. These days, digital marketing is on the rise more than television, radio, or billboard advertisements. An important aspect of digital marketing is content marketing, and a subcategory of content marketing is email marketing.

Email marketing refers to distributing content about your brand, products, and business to your subscribers by sending them newsletters. These newsletters give your subscribers updates about your brand, such as sales discount announcements, new product launch news, upcoming event invitations, industry analysis reports, or simply product photos and service descriptions to keep them reminded about your business. Whether a newsletter is fancy or simple, it impacts your audience and their buying decisions over time.

a volunteer subscription form on a Strikingly user's website

Image taken from Strikingly user’s website

To build an email list to whom you can send newsletters, you need a signup or registration form on your website. Once you have that, you can set your process of collecting email subscribers on auto-pilot, which means you don’t have to put in extra effort to get each new subscriber.

This is very helpful for businesses because it saves them a lot of time and cost. By simply creating an email subscription form on your website once, you can keep developing your email list for an indefinite period, as long as your website stays live. This is very convenient and cost-effective for small and large organizations, as they can invest more time and budget into the other business operations and marketing activities.

Features of a Successful Email Subscription Form

A good and effective email subscription form can attract many entries and help you create a long email list in a short time. Of course, the number of email subscribers you get would depend on your website traffic. Still, the design and technique of your email subscription would also make a difference in whether or not your site visitors want to register with you.

A successful email subscription option has the following features.

  1. It has the minimum number of fields for users to fill up. Creating too many fields in your email subscription option will exhaust your users, and they won’t feel like filling it up and submitting it to begin with. Hence, the fewer fields you create in the form, the more people will feel like subscribing to your site.
  2. It has a simple design. Very fancy forms often look too complicated. Users should be able to understand what exactly they are required to do to subscribe to your website. If the text on your form is unclear, its fields are not aligned, or its colors are too sharp on the eyes, people will naturally not feel inclined to join your online subscribers group.
  3. It is free from technical errors. It is annoying for any user to try to fill up a form that keeps giving technical errors. When someone comes across such an email subscription option, they would somewhat back off and leave your site, increasing your bounce rate, than keep trying to submit the form until it is finally accepted. Nobody enjoys technical errors on a site. Thus you need to be cautious of that.
  4. It gives an incentive to site visitors to subscribe. Telling your audience why they should subscribe to you helps in building a longer email list faster. Some companies offer a free ebook download upon subscription, while others offer a discount on your next purchase from the online store. Whatever incentive you use, make sure it is stated clearly on top or around the email subscription option. People usually want an instant reward for their actions, and giving them a reward or incentive for signing up can contribute to the success of your subscription option.

subscription form stating a clear incentive on a Strikingly user's website

Image taken from Strikingly user’s website

Now that you know about the features of a good email subscription option, let’s discuss why you need to build this option on your website and get more email list subscribers.

10 Benefits of an Email Subscription Form

Here are ten benefits that an email subscription feature on your site can give you.

1. Get Personal Information About Your Site Visitors

When users fill up your email subscription feature, you get access to personal information about them. No matter how brief and simple your signup form is, it will at the least ask users to fill up their name and email address. When you use their email address to send them newsletters or marketing emails, you can address them with their name. This will give them a personalized feel, which always has a positive effect on how they think about your brand.

email signup form on a Strikingly user's website

Image taken from Strikingly user’s website

2. Enhance User Engagement with Your Brand

After social media, users generally prefer to be contacted via email. This is because they can get instant email notifications, but at the same time, don’t feel the pressure to open up an email on the spot. This is why having an email subscription feature on your website is an excellent way to enhance user engagement with your brand.

Your subscribers can either engage and interact with your business by replying to your emails or clicking on the links in it to visit your website landing page. Either way, they get one step closer to becoming your customer by taking the desired action.

3. Build Intimate Relationships with Your Users

Sometimes using an email subscription option can go beyond just enhancing user engagement. You can also end up building intimate relationships with your online subscribers. Since emails are a great way to communicate one-to-one, email subscribers often feel comfortable asking questions about your products that they would shy away from asking in an open online community without pressuring the other party.

contact form encouraging interaction on a Strikingly user's website

Image taken from Strikingly user’s website

4. Boost Your Digital Marketing Effectiveness

An email subscription feature lets you build an email list, allowing you to run email marketing campaigns. Email marketing is not only cost-effective but also quite efficient in getting you results. As long as your online subscribers open up your emails, they will surely take some desired action that will benefit your business in the long run.

This is because you can target emails to a specific niche and categorize different emails into different groups or customer segments. It’s almost as if you can choose to send the same content that a certain group of email subscribers is looking for. This kind of targeted promotion helps you get faster returns on your marketing expenses. That, in turn, makes your overall digital marketing campaigns more effective.

5. Own Your Email List

Unlike your Facebook or Instagram followers or your YouTube channel subscribers, an email subscription feature on your website helps you build your very own email list. You are the owner of this list, and your online subscribers have willingly given you their information. This clearly means they have volunteered to receive updates about your brand and are interested in receiving emails from you.

signup form offering a free ebook download upon subscription on a Strikingly user's website

Image taken from Strikingly user’s website

6. Convert Your Subscribers Into Your Customers

Once you build an email list through an email subscription form on your website, you can keep sending interesting content to your subscribers. Ultimately, some of your online subscribers will visit your website and purchase your products or services. The effect of email marketing is usually slow but is relatively cheap and shows results in the long run.

Your emails and newsletters can help in spreading brand awareness among your online subscribers. This means even if they don’t directly buy your products, they might end up sharing your content with their friends and peers, who might be interested in buying from you. Therefore, you can enjoy the benefit of increased sales and more revenue for your business.

Using the Blog Subscription Feature on Strikingly

If your website is built on Strikingly, you can use our blog subscription feature to run your email marketing campaigns. This feature allows you to collect email subscribers to send regular updates about your blog to them.

To conclude, we would like to mention that if you plan to run email marketing campaigns for your business, it is best to create an email subscription feature on your site. Some businesses try to save costs and do not build an email list via a signup form. What they do instead is use scraped emails or purchase outdated email lists from third-party websites. This is not an effective technique and does not give you most of the benefits described above.