Earlier this month we spoke about the work you’ll want to do as you think about and start creating your website. Today we’ll talk about some best practices to setup on your website and capture email addresses.
No matter your business, or the purpose of your site, chances are that capturing consumer information is going to be very important for your business. Audiences are important, and a targeted audience you can use to grow your business is very important. There are a few different ways to grow an audience. Social media is a great place to build a fanbase around a topic. It’s relatively easy to get fans and followers on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. The challenge is that while these are your channels, the sites can change the rules that give you access to your audiences at any time. The textbook example of this is Facebook. When it started to work with brands the social network incentivized brands to invest marketing dollars by promising to reach their audiences organically. Then, over the years 100% reach was reduced to where it is today: between 2% and 20% organic reach per post. While I don’t know what exactly will happen with your audience on other social channels, it’s a good bet that the site will either limit reach, change its algorithm in some other detrimental way, or like Vine, go out of business.
So, as a business owner, your best bet is to capture email addresses audience data. How do you do that on the site? Here are a few ways.
Use these types of time-based pop-ups to capture user attention. You can get these plugins through your WordPress site login, or you can go to a third party like AppSumo. These pop-ups can be set to show only when the user is about to leave, or after a certain period of time, like 50 seconds after visit. They are very customizable to meet the look and feel of your site.
Another way to capture email addresses is to give users ample opportunity to submit information on your site with email capture fields in the side bar or in the footer. You won’t get too many this way, but it is important to capture every opportunity to connect to a consumer.
Finally, give something away to the user. Use those pops or those side-bar email capture fields to give away something valuable. You may consider an ebook, a white paper, a guide, or perks. Whatever it is, this should be something valuable to the consumer.
In all cases ensure these email capture methods are connected to your MailChimp, Constant Contact or another email list provider.
Another way to make your site pop is the use of social buttons. Make it easy for the consumer to share your content. Depending on how interesting and valuable the content on your site is, these buttons can be more or less valuable. Either way, you want to give consumers ample opportunity to ensure they can share something great with their friends across social media. When doing this be sure to test sharing images on social platforms. Sometimes in the initial setup the sharing functionality is not setup properly so unnecessary text may show up in the social feed. Be sure to run this by your web designer as this is an easy fix.
Place social buttons under product images, next to pictures or videos, near blog posts, and on the sidebar as a way to share the page.
