Email subscriber list growth for Ecommerce stores

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December 21, 2024

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Ron

Email marketing is an integral part to every successful eCommerce brand, it gives a way of staying in touch with your customers to build long-term relationships through emails that keep them wanting to come back to your website and engage more. And in order to be successful in email marketing, you need to invest in a vital component, a subscriber’s list.

We often see newsletter forms on websites telling us to subscribe to them by giving your email to avail rewards, but today, simple pop-ups on your website will not always do, especially when you overdo it and adds tons of them that oftentimes drive customers away.

Long lasting relationships and repeat business for many is the best source of revenue and email marketing often is the key to that. But how does one build a long-lasting relationship with their customers? We interviewed a number of brands this month to see what their biggest challenges were with email marketing, and this is areas could not be ignored. The first of the brands we spoke to, Hydratis – who sell water enrichment products to stay hydrated, communicated that optimising sales and repeat business is one of their biggest challenges as they tackle their email marketing with the time that they have available.

Email subscriber list growth for Ecommerce stores: Tips and Tricks to Grow your Subscriber’s List

Creating Subscription Forms

Klaviyo already has templates for making subscription forms that are customizable for whatever your preferences are. You can create subscription forms as popups, which are very common and usually pop up once you start scrolling on a landing page. Or as Flyouts, which are less intrusive as it appears from the side or bottom of the page. Or you can have them embedded in a certain location within the page already (like how we usually see in the footer or sidebar of the page). You can also schedule the frequency of when forms appear and their display time which you can optimise as some customers might find it irritating when forms pop up too often or too intrusively. When designing your form, a simple go-to design is often quite effective, but something that is unique or aligned with your brand’s character would be better. The amount of information that you request is an important consideration too as requesting too much can be off putting to your audience which is why most stick to asking nothing but the essential fields like the email and names of the customers.

Now you have a form, but how can these forms encourage your customers to subscribe?

There are various strategies you can implement to entice subscribers to your email lists, and we hope these tips will help to grow yours further.

Don’t just give a discount or rewards, make them feel special on a day special for them!
You can reach out with something that’s personal for them, that would make them feel special and want to be more engaged with your shop, for example asking them to subscribe and put in their birthdays so you could give them a special discount as a gift on their special day like how Collyer’s Mansion does. You could also request other special dates if they are relevant like their anniversary with their loved ones, graduation day, etc, and make a discount as a congratulatory gift for them. Giving them discounts on days special to them can make it more sincere and have them feel more valued by your store!
Fear of missing out (FOMO)
The video gift store Tribute makes their offer seem a bit more exclusive by having a countdown clock for when the offer expires. Their popup has a one hour countdown at the bottom of the page offering a $10 discount on all products. This encourages the potential customer to take action by securing that discount before it expires. The fear of missing out is a great incentive for some.
Play with your Words
By manipulating the words that you use in your form you can encourage more people to hand over their email and subscribe to your shop. This is one of the things Armadillo Hat Co. have implemented to great affect by using the terms “No, I don’t like Saving Money”. Also for the shop By Jillee that uses “No thanks, I don’t like free stuff” as their decline buttons to their subscription offer that comes with a discount rewards. Playing with the words and making them sound like it’s the customer’s loss if they don’t subscribe often makes the customers think twice about passing up an offer.

You can also win subscribers by just simply phrasing your sentences accordingly. If you’re an enthusiast sneaker store like Limited Resell, talk them into subscribing to you by showing off your sneaker expertise, if you sell products for men, talk in a manly manner, if your website is themed as loud and fun, then be loud and proud in encouraging them to subscribe to you. An example would be the shop Little Giants Shorties which is a children’s shop, the phrasing for their subscription form is simple, quick, and very much sounds like a kid talking to you to subscribe.
Host a Giveaway
In exchange for handing over their email you could give an incentive such as the chance to win a prize, something that is low effort for them and potentially a worthwhile exchange for you. Giveaways are exciting and are appealing to a lot of people. One of the more effective rewards you could offer is the chance to gain a discount or benefit when shopping with your store. A spinning wheel with various benefits is a common sight on eCom stores these days and quite an effective tool to drive both sales and email subscribers. A brand that we spoke to who have implemented this fantastically is Hydratis, they have the possibility of receiving a range of discounts or product offers if you are willing to enter your email address. Even after navigating away from this the wheel can be reopened for the offer to be redeemed giving potential customers every opportunity to engage.

For the hair and beard care brand The Bearded Chap they have a pop up with the chance to win a $100 gift card in exchange for your email, phone number and product preference. Winners are announced by SMS which gives some justification as to collecting that additional piece of information beyond email.”

With Klaviyo, you can use an integrated third-party tool in hosting giveaways such as viralsweep, wherein you can pick what kind of giveaway you want to host and which service you want to use. With tools like this you can easily connect it to Klaviyo so it can manage the automation and flow of data from the giveaway form to your subscriber list.
Do a Product Recommendation Quiz
Short quizzes that show your customer’s preferences can be of big help in enticing them to shop with you, especially with Klaviyo as your choice of email marketing tool. Klaviyo has partners such as Interact, The Quiz Collective Inc, where you can make the best quizzes suited for your site and customers and connect them to Klaviyo for integration, that way, all information your customers give, their likes and dislikes, will be stored and can be later used for targeting the customers with products and offers best fitting for them.

For example, if you’re a clothing brand, create a quiz about what style is suited for the customers based on their personality, location, work, and hobbies. People enjoy answering mini quizzes especially if they’ll get a result of something that describes them like a style/outfit, which can be from your shop! We spoke with the face toning brand Face Yoga Method who use a free skin care quiz which asks personal questions about your skin type and care routine, at the end of this your email is requested so that they can send you your personalized skin care analysis.
Collect emails wherever possible
At every point where you have a potential customer’s attention we recommend that you try and capture their email address. For example, the italian clothing brand Hardcore Italians have the option to leave your email for items that are out of stock to be notified when they become available. That is a great way to utilize email to secure future sales and revenue. Furthermore subscription forms can be used on blog posts, contact pages, product pages to draw in those you already have the attention of

Other Recommendations

Keep your subscriber list healthy.

Retaining subscribers is another important aspect to consider. Ensuring your emails are being well received is the best way to go about that. This has become much easier with the targeting tool within Klaviyo, in which customers are already categorized based on their demographics and behavior or action while shopping. When sending out emails for campaigns, you can select the emails or customers who were active in recent hours or days and exclude the ones who are unreactive. There are tons of categories Klaviyo can give you when targeting your potential customers and you won’t need to hustle much as they also have automatic targeting based on the campaigns you wish to launch or email you want to send.

Maximise the potential of popups

Putting too many pop-ups on your pages can be overwhelming for the customers even if they do contain huge discounts and rewards. Practice moderation and try to place those signup requests in the most highly converting places such as when scrolling part way down a landing page. You want your customers to feel welcomed and not bombarded. The fashion and accessories brand Pink Dot Styles do this well in our opinion with a banner at the top with a 10% discount and a popup on the page which tucks neatly away at the bottom when you close it should you wish to open it again. If you can, we would highly encourage that you A/B test different signup methods to discover what converts best for you.

With Klaviyo you can automate when your signup forms appear and how often they will be seen on the customer’s screen, by setting your pop-up’s loading delay to 3 seconds, you can already make a good entrance to introduce your campaign together with the subscription form.

Klaviyo also allows you to create a popup flow that targets customers based on their behaviors and allows you to give conditions on what discount to give, for example:

– Popups that give visitors who have been to your site more than 3 times and never purchase, a 20% discount
– Popups that give visitors who have been to your site 180 days ago and purchased, a 15% discount
-Popups that give first time visitors 25% off when they subscribe

Conclusion

Growing your subscriber list can be a difficult task, especially for eCommerce brands who are already so occupied with so many other tasks that restrict time and resources, so finding the right tool and the right hook can unlock a passive way to fill up your subscriber list! All of the ecom brands we interviewed this month are using Klaviyo to great success, the automation and data segmentation give eCommerce brands huge opportunity to achieve growth with their customers. Having a tool to execute your campaigns and grow your subscriber list is one thing but having a strategy to maximise customer and subscriber growth is another. Some of the tips here should help you strike the right balance, however with each store and audience being unique the best advice we can give is to test multiple strategies to discover what converts best for you. For that you need the time and resources to experiment. At Underground Ecom we have set up effective strategies for hundreds of brands and are proud to say that this is an area we excel in. We hope this article can encourage you to go and implement a new way to your campaigns and subscriber list!

We would like to thank all of those who took the time to talk to us this month to share their email marketing experiences and to help us uncover the obstacles and challenges faced by Ecom stores when it comes to email marketing. All of those we spoke to are linked below and we would encourage you to visit their unique stores!

Contributors:

Out of Sync

Statewide Appliance Spares

PackIt

London & Avalon

Affordable Mallorca and Affordable Marina