In this post, we teach you how to grow your email list by determining your top posts and setting up an advanced email capture strategy. This is one actionable strategy you should focus on this year.
How to Capture More Emails Using Your Top Posts
Sometimes, you can use what you already have to grow your business. You don’t need to buy anything new, hire a contractor, or spend money in any other way.
In fact, it’s likely that you can capture more emails using the most popular posts on your blog. That way, you can accomplish two things with your content marketing efforts: improve your reach in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and add more people to your email distribution list.
Here’s what you need to know about how to do that.
First, Find Your Top Posts
Before you can use your top posts to add to your email reach, you have to first identify them. Fortunately, that’s easy to do.
That’s assuming you’re using Google Analytics, of course. If not, then now is the time to set it up.
Once you have GA set up, and once it’s been running for a while, it’s a cinch to identify your top posts. Just fire up GA and click on the “Behavior” menu item on the left-hand sidebar and click “Overview”
Once you’re there, select a date range that’s at least 6 months in length. You’ll find the date range selection option in the upper, right-hand corner of the screen.
If GA hasn’t been running on your site for more than 6 months, then select as long a date range as you can.
Once you have your date range selected, click the “Apply” button just below the date field.
After the screen refreshes, scroll down to the bottom. On the right-hand side, you’ll see several URLs with numbers and percentages next to them. The URLs at the top are your best-performing posts. Those are the ones you’ll want to use to recruit new email subscribers.
You can see some of our top posts below. You will want to filter your top posts so you can locate the posts you are most comfortable adding email captures to.
These are usually on your blog or another content section.
Note that, by default, GA will only show you ten posts. Just click the “view full report” link at the bottom of the table to see more than 10 of your best posts.
Determine the Theme of Each of Your Top Posts
Now, it’s time to reread your own top posts and determine the theme of each one. That’s important because your recruiting campaign will be based on that theme.
If you find that a few of your posts share the same theme, that’s actually a good thing. But it’s not a bad thing if your top posts are all based on a different theme.
Once you’ve highlighted the themes of each of your top posts, it’s time to get to work.
Create a Guide
Next, write a “How To” guide for each theme that covers the subject in more detail. This is probably going to be the hardest part of the process.
For example, if you have a top-performing post about how to implement Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) on a website, then you’re going to write a guide about that same subject. The difference between the guide and your blog post is that the guide will go into a lot more detail.
Read that last sentence again. It can’t be emphasized enough.
The selling point of getting people to sign up for your list is that you’re offering them additional information that isn’t provided in the blog post. If you fail to do that, they’ll just unsubscribe from your list at the earliest opportunity.
Put your guide in PDF format and upload it so it’s accessible via a PDF link. Fortunately, that’s easy to do with WordPress.
Update Your Original Blog Posts
Another thing that’s easy to do with WordPress is to update and edit existing blog posts. You’ll need to do that for the recruiting campaign.
Specifically, you’ll want to add a call to action (CTA) button that takes people to a page where they can sign up for your email list.
The CTA should be preceded by some text that effectively markets your new guide. For example: “Would you like to learn the secrets of webmasters who’ve already made a fortune with AMP? Click below!”
Below that text, they’ll see your CTA with a message like: “Click here to learn the secrets of AMP pros!”
Once people click the button, take them to your sign-up form with a promise that you’ll send them the link to the PDF guide at their email address. That’s “the carrot” you’ll use to incentivize them.
Of course, once they’ve signed up and confirmed that they want to be a part of your email distribution group, your autoresponder will send them a link to the PDF. For details on how to do that, consult the documentation.
Determine The Best Strategy
A sidebar email capture widget is just one way to do this. I have actually seen that popups work the best. So make sure you test a popup as well.
Also, you could see success with a static bar capture, a scroll down capture, a page takeover or even a click to capture. All of these are good options and available though tools like OptinMoster and SumoMe.
Start Capturing Emails From Your Top Posts Now
It’s easier than many webmasters think to capture more email addresses. All it takes is a little effort to leverage the resources that you already have. If you’ve got some blog posts that are very popular with people in your target market, why not use them to expand your list?
