How to get 10,000 email subscribers with conversion-centric design

When you launch an online business or a blog, your initial days are spent researching the market, analyzing the competition, and maybe, seeking funds. You imagine that subscribers will come if you offer great value and perspective. After a few months, it starts to pinch.

Why is finding subscribers so difficult? If you have just started a digital business and do not have the right partners and tools to focus on it, it can be frustrating.

Email marketing is like rocket fuel for any business, large or small. It gets the word out, enables sales, and keeps visitors coming back for more.
A successful email newsletter can drive thousands of users to your website on a daily basis and it delivers the highest ROI than any other form of online marketing viz up to $40 for every dollar you spend.

If you want to tap into this opportunity and grab a bunch of subscribers fast, conversion-centric design is the answer. We will discuss what it is and how you can implement it smartly in this guide below.

Conversion-centric Graphic Designs

Problems With Capturing Email Subscribers

Email marketing is one of the top strategic approaches recommended for companies that want to nurture leads with little to no investment. Not surprisingly, 97% of companies already use email marketing in some form or the other. Yet, not all of them are successful at it. Some of the most common factors for failure are:

• Lack of a compelling reason: Competition in the email marketing world is very stiff. And identifying a distinctive, special reason for a customer to choose you over your competition is getting more challenging than ever. The alternative: Giving users enough evidence to want to sign up. Consider the case of Amazon’s landing page that talks about ‘exclusive’ deals and offers a sample of what users can expect to receive.
• Demanding sign-up processes: Users today know they are parting with their personal data in exchange for information. But privacy is still a matter of concern and nobody wants to share more information than what’s absolutely necessary. If the lead capture form is complicated, asking for details that prospects do not readily have, customers tend to give up and move on quickly.
• No value add: Is it going to be useful for me tomorrow? That’s the question users ask and companies need to answer, convincingly. If there is no future benefit or if it has not been communicated well, you will not get signups. The alternative: Take this example from a Bootcamp - it makes the benefits of signing up very clear.
• Poorly designed landing pages: Slow-loading websites can turn off many potential subscribers. Internet users are an impatient bunch. They only give us 5 seconds to load up a mobile site before they bounce. And then you face another challenge - impressing them with your design. You get another 6-8 seconds before they make up their minds about whether they want to stay on your page. Beating these odds is only possible with a conversion-centric design.

Email Wireframes For Driven Conversions

• Incompatible target market: Finding your clique is critical to the success of a targeted email marketing campaign. New brands could be marketing to the wrong customer base due to a lack of a defined Buyer Persona. Or it could be that they have not found their target customers yet!
• Poor data management: Flaws in back-end integrations and loss of data can set back the development of email lists. If you are asking, “How do I grow my email list?”, often the answer lies in selecting a better list builder and evaluating newer tools in the market.
• No quality control: Getting email subscribers may be a low priority. Or maybe there is no accountability assigned clearly. Whatever the reason, if the quality of the signup landing page is not up to industry standards, your conversion rates will suffer.

Most of the issues listed above are compounded by rapid changes in the email marketing landscape. There’s no escaping it. Marketing leaders need to proactively identify these challenges and assess any vulnerabilities and only then can they create a comprehensive plan towards growing their subscriber database. The good news is that in 2022, you now have the advantage of conversion-centric design.

Redesign Your Websites

What Is Conversion-Centric Design

If you could get 3x more subscribers than you currently have, what would you call it? No, it’s not magic; it’s conversion-centric design! Targeted campaigns are far more successful at capturing and converting users into subscribers because they do one thing well - they play into the psychology of the customer.

The 4 pillars of conversion-centric design are:

1. Interaction: The focus is always on user behavior in conversion-centric design. How she browses a website, what she engages with, the services and software that she is comfortable using, the amount of time she spends, information that she is actively seeking, and her reactions towards specific elements of your landing page - every move needs to be carefully considered to create the perfect environment for conversions. That’s how a website becomes ‘intuitive’ for users.
2. Design: Rather than focusing on aesthetics and how attractive your landing page is, let design be an enabler. Its only purpose is to make a visitor sign up for your newsletter. Using their preferred colors and adopting design best practices can pave the way for higher conversion rates.
3. Content: Customers who land on your email subscription invite either arrive organically via a search engine or from a PPC ad because of a “reason”. It’s this “reason” that the content needs to explicitly address. There’s no room for vagueness and hints, the content has to hit.

   Example: This is a humorous approach employed by a marketing professional who knows what his customers like!

4. Psychology: Cognitive biases, brand archetypes, Hick’s Law, and subconscious behaviors - the psychological principles behind modern design are well-documented and have proven to be effective for the masses. Theoretical psychology is not new to marketers who rely on intuition and patterns to anticipate buyer behavior and persuade them into making a decision successfully. How you utilize them to convert more email subscribers is a tactical move that is best left to experts.

Perfected Landing Page Designs

How to Implement It

Conversion Centricity includes multiple factors - appealing colors, contextual content, social proof, visual cues, and a minimalistic design. These combine to define a strong purpose and persuade visitors to an ‘urgent’ action - in this case, subscribing. Here are some of the ways you can implement conversion-centric design to boost sign-ups:

1. Simplify Lead Capture: Convenience is everything. If you want users to slide into your email list, you have to follow these best practices:
2. Condense form fields: The form is the first step that a visitor takes to become a subscriber. Keeping the number of fields in the form to an absolute minimum helps in two ways. One - it reduces the time spent. Two - it makes the decision to sign upeasier! Most of the time, you only need the name and email address in order to get started with a newsletter/ email marketing campaign.
3. Reduce the number of clicks: If your sign-up form is hidden away or forces the user to navigate multiple links to reach it, then your usability is off by a large margin. Consider reducing the total number of clicks taken to reach the goal by simplifying the navigation and information hierarchy on the landing page.
4. Offer different plans/ packages: By broadening the selection for the user, you are empowering them to pick the newsletter that is most relevant to them. This is useful for brands that produce a variety of content such as media houses. Here’s how CNBC invites subscribers

1. Use a Lead Magnet: As a true marketer, you realize that it’s all about establishing a relationship with the user. A lead magnet is a perfect marketing mechanism because it helps create a value-based connection. In exchange for something useful such as a voucher, tips, freebies, or access to an ‘exclusive’ community, the company receives the user’s personal data (such as an email id, but it can also be more). The most effective lead magnets are those that are easy to digest and that guarantee instant gratification. Such as this free budget spreadsheet offered by Debt Helper:
2. Optimize CTAs: Prompting someone to sign up is not a chore if you have the right incentive. But your Call to Action can be optimized by using action words such as Register Now or Reserve Your Spot. Newer CTAs convey the end goal more clearly, such as “Become a Pro”, which plays into the user’s need for self-improvement. More interesting use cases employ reverse psychology by offering 2 CTAs - one that encourages someone to sign up and the other that makes the user think twice. It can go something like “No, thanks. I already am an expert!” It’s a cheeky method, but effective in making users pause and reconsider the options.
3. Design Better Landing Pages: The most important tip we can give you today! Every email campaign should have a dedicated landing page that will drive your conversion rates higher. Landing pages should be SEO friendly, with content that is simple and directed towards one purpose alone, to get the user to sign up.

   Example: Study how The New York Times’ landing page conveys all the important information along with good design sense.

   Besides landing pages, also consider creating a Thank you page. Adding a personal touch can convert a lead into a sale. The Thank You page redirects subscribers once they sign up, giving you another opportunity to nurture leads.

   Dedicated Graphic Designs for Emails

4. Strategic Form Placement & Types: Do you still have your subscription form in your footer? Here are alternative, high-converting places to embed your form instead:
5. Hero Image: The main banner of a website is a great place to highlight your email newsletter, especially if this is the primary objective.
6. Floating Bar: A commonly used page element, this bar sticks to the top of any website and stays visible even if a visitor scrolls through different pages.
7. Pop up: Pop-ups work! When executed correctly pop-ups and lightboxes deliver an average conversion rate of 9.28%, going all the way up to 50.2%! Paying attention to timing and the context of the pop up is highly recommended. Placing them just when the user is exiting helps convert your abandoning visitors too.
8. Welcome Mat: These are full-page ads that provide helpful information to visitors before leading them onto the main website. Perfect for introducing corporate blogs and small businesses, interstitials like these arrest the attention of the user and bring up the CTA immediately.
9. Content: A weak headline can break the impact of a well-designed campaign. A/B testing of headlines, subheadings, and your copy can help you understand exactly which ones convert better. Additionally, your content must include trust signals. When browsing, customers are not just interested in the value you provide. In the Emotion Economy, they seek validation of your brand’s positive reputation and want to feel assured about their decision. To convince them into subscribing, include reputation proof to build trust. This can include customer stories, media mentions, badges, awards, logos, and endorsements.
10. Make it Social: Social media is a powerful ally of marketers. Sharing your subscription form on new social media platforms and adding it to personal social media profiles allows you to expand its reach. You can also let users share it forward with a social sharing plugin to attract new leads through word of mouth.
11. Marketing the Newsletter: Now that you have optimized your email signups with conversion-centric design, it pays to invest in its delivery too. Email readers tend to share information forward for many reasons. While the majority share what they consider will be valuable for their network, note that 85% use it to begin a conversation or discussion that will help them understand a concept. Use these tips to maintain the quality of your campaign and leverage customer loyalty to further your brand’s reach:

Adopt the latest email design trends such as the use of vibrant colors and responsive, grid-based layouts to improve your campaign’s performance.

Maximize open rates with email snippets and the Preview feature, which increases the real estate you command in customers’ inboxes.

Offer webinars, thought leadership, courses, and videos as freebies to encourage sign-ups regularly.
Implement offline marketing with QR Codes, flyers, and stickers that will direct customers to your campaign.

Purposeful Designs for Emails

Guidance for Email Marketers in 2022

Conversion-centered design can revitalize your email marketing efforts instantly and adopting this approach will set you on the right path. If you gain 100 new subscribers every day, you will hit the target of 10,000 email subscribers in a little over a quarter!

But the only sure-fire way to grow your email list is by tracking, analyzing & testing rigorously. An email marketing campaign that is underpinned by good design, contextual content, and best practices will strengthen a company’s overall sales and revenues. With 50+ design experts at Wow.Design, we work with several clients on their email campaigns to drive their brand reputation.