15197804185_d4a1f3d9b3For many businesses, it’s not the number of hits that generate sales, but the number of people who subscribe to their newsletter. Even if sites have a significant amount of traffic, most people will visit a website only once. Subscribers, on the other hand, sign up because they like what they see and want to learn more. Every one of them is a potential recurring customer.

Before starting to convert visitors into subscribers, a website needs two things: quality sign-up and newsletter software; and web hosting that provides them with both the capacity to send high volumes of newsletters and robust internet security to stop hackers gaining access through the sign-up process.

How to increase newsletter sign up

A well-designed, simple to complete subscription form is the key to success here. Good subscription software will create forms that have attractive backgrounds and compelling text that incentivises readers to sign-up, such as offering a discount or free shipping.

For greatest impact, a subscription form needs a prominent position on the page. Good sign-up software creates pop-up subscription forms that can be set to appear either after the visitor has been on a page for a certain amount of time or as they click to leave.

Features of effective newsletter software

Increasing the number of subscribers is only the first step to increasing sales. The next step is to entice those subscribers back to the website. To do this, it is best to install good quality newsletter software that can create professional looking newsletters, which offer a range of layout options and let businesses feature their branding and social media icons. The software should be able to find any newly published articles and products from the website and insert them automatically into the newsletter. It will also allow newsletter posting to be scheduled for optimal opening times.

Finally, the software should provide statistics to monitor how well the newsletters are performing. How many were sent? What percentage was opened? How many users unsubscribed? How many readers clicked through to the website?

What to look for in a web host

When using newsletter sign-up forms, it’s important that your web hosting can provide adequate security. Spammers and hackers will try to sign-up with fake email addresses in order to gain access to the back end of a website, where they can do enormous damage.

If a website has a lot of email subscribers, or intends to have a lot, then it’s vital to have a web host that can provide the capacity to store lots of user information and allow high volumes of emails to be sent without affecting the performance of the site itself. It’s also important that the host will carry out regular backups so vital customer information is not lost.

If you are intending to use newsletters as a marketing tool, check that your ecommerce hosting package provides the necessary capacity and security and ensure you get good quality sign-up and newsletter software installed.