How to Find Subscribers for Your E-Mail Newsletter

There's no magic place for finding the right subscribers to your newsletter. It's simply a matter of consistently seeking people who are interested in your area of expertise, and convincing them to subscribe to your list.

In most cases, this means building your list one subscriber at a time. Even when you get the opportunity to promote your list to many people (for example, when speaking at an event), each person still makes their own decision to subscribe. The only exception is when an employer gives you a group of her employees' e-mail addresses, and asks you to subscribe them all.

There are a number of places where you can promote your newsletter in order to encourage subscribers. Here are just a few:

Your e-mail signature: Include a brief description of your newsletter at the bottom of every outgoing e-mail message, along with a link to the subscription page. Your Web site and blog: Include a subscription form (or at least a link to the form) prominently on every page of your Web site and blog. Other on-line properties: Include it on your Facebook business page, your Facebook personal profile and your profile page in other on-line communities. Always be aware of a community's rules for self-promotion; but in most cases they do allow it on your profile page. Face-to-face meetings: Invite people you meet to join your mailing list. If the conversation strongly indicates they would like to join, you can offer to subscribe them yourself; otherwise, simply direct them to your Web site. Articles: If you publish articles in other places - such as other people's newsletters, article directories, or guest blog posts - end by inviting readers to subscribe to your newsletter. This is better than promoting a product (That can come later). "Tell a Friend": At the end of every newsletter, encourage your subscribers to pass it on to friends and colleagues. They are some of the easiest subscribers you'll get because they have been referred by a friend. Cross-promotion: Find other newsletters and blogs that serve the same market as you, and offer to write guest articles, which include a link to your newsletter. Paid advertising: When you've established your newsletter and you know it's working well for you, you might even consider paying to advertise in order to get new subscribers. Never buy subscriber lists, though! Instead, your aim here is simply to be in front of your target market and convince them to subscribe to the newsletter. You can do this in a number of ways - for example, with Google AdWords, advertising in other newsletters, sponsoring another Web site, and so on.

How To Get More People To Open Your Email Newsletters

One question that I've been asked over and over again as well as seeing it asked in various marketing groups is "what's a good open rate for my email and e-newsletter?" There isn't a definite answer as to what's a "good" open rate. However, there are definitely things that you can do to increase your open rate and in this article I'm going to share one tip that is guaranteed to get the job done.

Are you ready for it? Here it is...re-send your email. Let's walk through the steps. I use Aweber but the steps should be the same if you're using another program. You'll want to do this for an email or e-newsletter you sent out the day before. Click on the tab that says "broadcasts".

Next, you will scroll down to the section where it says "sent broadcast". Locate the message that you want to re-send and click on the subject line. Another window will open that has the analytics for that message, the number sent, open, complaints...all good stuff to know.

Scroll down to where it says "Opens". On that same line, if you look over to the right you'll notice two gray boxes. One says "opened" and the other says "unopened". Click on the box labeled unopened. This is everyone who received your e-newsletter but for whatever reason they haven't opened it...YET! Crazy, I know.

Anyway, we're going to scroll down a bit further until you see a BIG green rectangular box that says "send directly to these subscribers". Go ahead and click on that. A big box will open and here is where you are going to give a name to the new list that you are about to segment. To keep it simple, I usually name it with the original date the e-newsletter went out with the word "unopened", so it may look like this, 1/30 unopened.

Once you name it, click the green box that says "save your segment". Keep scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page to the section labeled view and copy...and click "copy". Your message will open in the broadcast window. You can make any changes if you want to but that's not the purpose of this exercise.

This part is very important so pay close attention.Scroll down and click on the section labeled "send to segment". A drop down menu will appear and you'll want to select the segment name that you just saved. If you don't do this step, you will be sending the same message to your entire list... not want you want to do.

Once that's done, you can save your message and queue it. That's all folks! I do this the day after every e-newsletter and I always have people who didn't open the original message, open the second message. Don't question why this works all you need to know is that it does.

Follow these simple steps and watch your open rates increase. Don't just do it once, make sure that you do it consistently.