Any blogger or site owner wants to have a significant subscriber base.

This is a key to online success. It means you have a large group of people who want to hear from you regularly. A captive audience if you like.

The challenges are obvious, especially considering the amount of noise and online competition we face as web publishers.

How can we overcome these obstacles?

Once you have attracted people to your site, there are then two main challenges:

1. Getting people to sign up
2. Keeping people subscribed

The first is what most people focus on while the latter is in many cases more significant to your long term success.

I can see why people focus on the initial conversion from visitor into subscriber. That is the “sale”, the “win”, and the statisfying “ka-ching”. Seeing your subscriber count boost is incredibly gratifying, it gives you a feeling of validation.

We set up incentives, such as a free download (you can see an example right on this page), or an exciting prize draw with attractive rewards like on my own site.

What tends to happen after the initial spike though is you see the inevitable drop-off.

This is because what brings people to subscribe is very often not the tactic that will keep people on board. We call this “churn”, your subscriptions become a revolving door where you lose as many people as you gain.

A certain amount of churn is inevitable, I see more people leave my subscription than many people gain and if I focused on this statistic too much I would get demoralised. The key is to work out why people leave and why people stay.

People stay because:

1. Valuable content
2. Anticipation

People leave because:

1. Lack of relevance (to them)
2. Changing priorities
3. Annoyance

So the main way you can keep people involved is to deliver lots of valuable and relevant content, while telegraphing lots more future goodies to come. Series posts are an excellent way to do both.

As for stopping people leaving, you need to get people to tell you why they unsubscribe and keep on top of the things you can control. Keeping happy subscribers is as much about customer service as it is content.

On my own blog I use Aweber for email subscriptions (I explain why I use Aweber for blog email here) and I get notifications when people unsubscribe. They tell me that daily emails are too often, so I set up a weekly option. They tell me they don’t like excerpts, so I try to remember to put the full HTML into the excerpt field so email subscribers get the full article (I don’t always manage to copy and paste before the email goes out but I am getting better!).

So bottom line:

1. Provide an Incentive
2. Constant Valuable content
3. Build Anticipation
4. Interact and Engage
5. Monitor Unsubscribes

Do all these things and you will see your subscriber base grow and grow!

Posted in Blogging