How to Create an Email List for Your WordPress Blog

Are you looking for a way to pull over traffic and boost conversions? Creating an email list could be just the thing to help.

Blogging for your business has the potential to become a powerful marketing tool that pulls over traffic and boosts conversions. So, naturally you want to get the most out of it.

Creating an email list and newsletter is a great way to take full advantage of your blog's potential. It's an invaluable method for your business to reach out to your target market.

An email with all your latest blog posts, news about your business and any special offers you’re running goes directly where you need it to. From there, you can point people to your website and hopefully encourage them to convert.

This saves you waiting for them to come to you, you can go to them directly.

How to start an email newsletter

If you'd like some tips on how to create an email list, read on.

Select a newsletter mailing service

The first decision in creating an email list and newsletter is to choose a service to send your emails through.

MailChimp is a popular choice and is relatively simple to use if you’ve never had experience with email marketing. Although we’d recommend shopping around to find the best platform that meets your needs. For more information on using MailChimp you can take a look at our post on how to make a MailChimp contact form for WordPress.

Whatever platform you choose to use, spend some time getting used to how it all works. Luckily, there are plenty of blogs and video tutorials online to help you get started. There's also a lot of material to help you troubleshoot any issues that occur.

Create a template for regular emails

Templates are your friend if you’re looking to save time (and who isn’t?)

When you first design an email campaign, save it as a template if you know you’re going to use a similar layout next time. For example, if you send monthly newsletters, you might want to keep the template the same for each month.

As well as saving you time in creating campaigns, this also helps to keep things consistent for your audience.

Have a checklist

We’d recommend that you have a checklist, particularly if you’ve got a few people responsible for your newsletters. This helps to keep everyone on the same page.

Having a central checklist that everyone can refer to can ensure consistency. Even if you’re the only one managing the newsletter, it helps to have something to refer to. That way, nothing is missed out or forgotten. Remember, emails cannot be unsent!

Invite subscribers to your mailing list

The next step once you’ve got the hang of an email platform is to get a list of people to send the newsletter to.

Getting people to sign up to your mailing list can be a challenge. You may need to offer an incentive first. Some people run competitions, special offers or free downloads. Others rely entirely on creating quality blog content that people will want to read regularly.

Take a look at our blog post if you'd like more tips on how to increase conversions in your email sign-up form.

Segment your newsletter mailing list

When you have people signed up to your list, you may find it useful to split that list into segments.

For example, you may have some announcements you’d like to email only to certain customers or subscribers. With email marketing platforms, you can usually segment according to age group, gender or whenever they subscribed or purchased from you.

This allows you to closely target your audience to ensure that the newsletter is relevant to them. Sending out emails to people when the subject isn’t relevant to them could lead to people unsubscribing or simply ignoring your emails in future. We’ve all done it at some point.

Decide on email frequency

It’s important to be consistent and regular with your newsletters. However, you don't want to bombard them with emails. This will just end up annoying your subscribers. No one wants endless emails every day. All it does it boost your unsubscribe rates and reduce your click-through rate.

A lot of businesses decide to do monthly newsletters. At the end of each month you should have enough material, news and blog posts to promote in each email.

However, some businesses prefer to only send emails out if they have special news or product/service changes that customers need to know.

The frequency of your emails may also depend on how often you publish blog posts, if they’re a feature of your newsletters. It may take a bit of experimentation to get the right frequency for your target market at first.

Streamline your email sign-up process

Ideally you want to make it simple and straightforward to sign up subscribers. Having a sign-up form that’s easy to use is the first step towards securing your email list.

Our simple drag and drop form builder can help you create an email list for your blog. It's easy to use and customize, saving you time while you boost your email list. We can also help you organize your emails with auto-responders and notifications to keep your customers in the loop.

If you're interested in learning how Formidable Forms can help you build an email list, head over to our features page. In the meantime, if you've got any questions or thoughts to share, please comment below.