RSS is not dead, it's more than alive - nowadays it's used to sync content across services and devices.
After finishing installing push notifications for my blog I decided to re-check my e-mail marketing strategy. Wow, it's hard to compare actually - I got about 200 push notifications subscribers in less than 3 days, while my attempts of collecting e-mails…
Collecting an e-mail address from your business website or blog is a must have standard for the past decade (at least). Thus - it all depends. In today's article I'll share my knowledge how you can grow your e-mail signups from your existing website / blog using HelloBar.
HelloBar is not another new kid in neighborhood, in fact it has been around for a few years already. Installing and using HelloBar is really easy. You don' t even need much technical skills, as all of the HelloBar features can be enabled and customized by using visual text editor.
Free and paid versions are available.
Customizing HelloBar
Once you have installed HelloBar code on your site, you can start using Live Preview and customizing your e-mail signup. There are for styles for collecting e-mails: bar (show a bar at the top of your website), Modal (Pop up window in the middle of the screen), Slider (show a small window on the bottom of your site) or Page Takeover (show a window that totally covers your webpage content)
From those four above mentioned, I prefer to use a bar at the top of website with fixed position (always stays on place)
Another great feature of HelloBar - sync your contacts with other e-mail marketing tools. I'm using Mailchimp to deliver newsletters and I'm syncing HelloBar with Mailchimp, so I don't need to update contact list manually.
Data miners will enjoy HelloBar's variation feature (A/B testing feature) to maximize conversation ratios
Should you collect e-mail signups?
It depends, most probably yes, my findings are following- you will need to have a solid traffic before making any conversations for e-mail signups. Collecting signups and sending e-mails is a good way to build a buzz around your brand. As for me - a blog with many different topics covered, it doesn't performs very well (thus I have more than 40,000 users per month). For me an email marketing is another drop in the never ending sea of promotion, but it will depend on niche and your goals - are you selling online or are you just publishing a diary.
Give it a try and let me know!
Update - after few month of testing HelloBar for my blog, I have decided to remove it permanently, because of - the conversation rates are very low (I don't have the most engaging community most probably; I want to limit as much as I can third party JavaScript sources for my site)