Most Owners Do It Wrong: How To Get More Email Subscribers On Your Shopify Store

Let’s get real for a second. Today, I’d like you to ask yourself one question. Which of these would you prefer to take action on?

Sign up for our newsletter to get updates

OR

Free Report: 5 Ways To Increase Your Sales This Month (with free updates)

If you chose option #2, you’d be among 99% of people. I would love to see more people on Shopify using their mailing list signups more wisely. Having worked on over 100 Shopify stores, a common theme we see is ‘get free updates‘ resulting in few email signups.  This post provides some suggestions on the topic.

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If you’re not receiving new subscribers to your mailing list, this post will help you understand why and offer some suggestions (read: bribes) to increase your subscribers and customer list.

Why Most People Don’t Want To Sign Up To Newsletters

Let’s face it: we all have enough newsletter subscriptions. Inbox overload is common. Many of us unsubscribe to email lists each week. The last thing we want is another ‘update’.

How To Bribe People To Join Your List

Recently, I’ve been reading extensively about the concepts of “Opt In Bribes” and “Incentives” to join a mailing list, instead of the old-fashioned ‘get updates‘.

The concept is simple: If you want people to become your customer, you need to offer them something that’s valuable to them. It could be:

• Offer them a discount
• Give them a free report with information they want to know about
• Send them a list of resources that will help them
• Give them a link to a video with helpful information
• Gradually send them free email series that helps them with a real problem.

Some examples of this are:

• On our website, we offer a free report about top Ecommerce mistakes. Since adding this free report instead of “Get updates”, we have increased our subscriber rate exponentially.  See the bottom of this post for an example.
• Notes In Spanish offer a free Spanish report for signing up to their list.  I signed up for this long ago and it helped me immensely in learning Spanish.
• Lead Pages offers free sales page templates, which I also use extensively.
• Sean Ogle offers a 6-step email series to building a location independent business

These are all excellent examples of giving something away for free, in return for loyal subscribers.

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How You Can Do This On Your Shopify Store

Almost all themes now come with a mailing list built-in. You can link up your Mailing List with your Shopify Store in under 5 minutes. Once you’ve done this (so you can capture their email address), take the following steps:

1. Think seriously about what would be of interest to your customers. An email series? A video? A free report you can create? A resource list? It could be anything that’s of value, and ideally can be delivered in a digital format, so you can automatically send it to them.  If you’re not sure, think about questions you’re asked regularly, and answer them in a report.
2. Add your new digital bribe to your website. Don’t make it public yet. Just create a page for it but don’t link it to your navigation, or add it to your library as an asset.
3. In MailChimp (or your other email software), create a “Welcome” email. Include a link to your new digital asset.
4. In your Shopify Store, make it enticing for them to sign up. Replace “Get updates” — which no-one wants — with your new digital asset — e.g. “Download free report when you join us“.

How Long Will This Take?

It depends — but it doesn’t need to take long. You could easily draft a two-page PDF report in Microsoft Word in 1-2 hours, post it to your website, then link it to an automatic email you send out. In half a day, you can create an asset that will increase your subscriber list exponentially, potentially resulting in many more sales. It’s a time investment that pays off in the long term.

Check out the examples above or feel free to sign up to our list, if only to see how it works. You can always unsubscribe afterward.

Lastly:  Some Things We’re Making

We’ve quietly but surely been working away at new things here at Shopify Ninjas:

• Support Program: We’ve introduced the world’s first Premium Support Program for store owners who want to spend less time doing fixes themselves, and more time managing their business.  Click here for the details.
• Affiliates Program:  If you’re interested in making a 40% commission on selling products that help people, you can check out our new affiliate program here.
• New Bilingual Theme: We’re working on a newly designed version of the Bilingual Theme which we’ll be realizing in Q1.  Stay tuned for that!
• Lastly, we announced last week that we’re building the first-ever Shortcodes App for Shopify.  You can grab those details or sign up to be notified, here.

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Thank you for checking out our Shopify Insider Blog @ Blackbelt Commerce. Please make sure to check out our services. We also have some top blog recommendations for you to check out; More Sales and Happier Customers,  major update, shopify redirect, what is the best strategy for a good e-commerce store, 8 ways to grow your shopify store plus,  and  Shopify Store and Customer Service. Keep a lookout for new blog posts.

Questions? I’m happy to answer in the comments.