Over and over again, we’re constantly urging marketers to focus on getting interested subscribers to sign up for their emails. The inbox is where you can reach potential customers easily and efficiently. More brands are turning to email as their primary marketing channel because it’s proven to actually work.
But before we get into driving organic traffic, you need to make sure your site is optimized and effective at converting email subscribers.
Creating an email-optimized site
In this case, the term email-optimized means that your website is designed to (or at least intended to) convert viewers to email subscribers.
Websites that are designed to drive email signups, first and foremost, put their subscription forms in very easily accessible places. Your potential subscribers shouldn’t have to search across your entire site to finally stumble upon a form.
It should be easy, including tactics like having a signup form in the footer, utilizing an email popup form, and using creative CTAs to usher people toward signing up.
Sometimes this may require a perspective that views your email list as a product you sell. Trying to funnel people into the signup flow to receive your newsletter or updates is similar to funneling people through a sales journey—and you need to make sure your website treats emails this way.
A good way to know your website is fully email-optimized? Testing. Try putting up different offerings, placing signup buttons in new places, and other variants in your website strategy make your visitors more likely to convert.
Once you have a site that converts, it’s time to drive traffic so there are people to actually convert!
Tips to drive organic traffic
So many marketers struggle with their efforts to drive organic traffic. But before we move on, let’s define organic traffic. This definition from Omniconvert states that organic traffic consists of: “visitors that land on your website as a result of unpaid (“organic”) search results.” These visitors are searching for terms and keywords that are relevant to your site’s information, causing a search engine (e.g. Google, Bing) to offer your site as an appropriate result.
The good thing about driving organic traffic? It doesn’t cost you advertising money! These are essentially free visitors to your site, which will become potential email subscribers and customers.
So when your web traffic isn’t at the level you want, how do you drive organic traffic? Here are seven ways.
1. Promote your email list on social media
This is a simple one. Give a brief description of what people can expect to receive from your email list, and maybe an incentive of offerings or content that are unique to just your email list to inspire more signups. Then, offer a link to sign up for your email list on your website, and you’ll instantly drive organic traffic (and email signups!).
2. Encourage sharing and referrals
You can apply this to both email and your website. Offering a referral program (which you can inform your customers of via email) can inspire customers to share your site with their friends. And providing a big call to action at the end of every email that urges readers to share your email with others can both drive organic traffic and more email signups in one fell swoop.
3. Create (and gate) a piece of valuable content
Opinions vary on this subject of content: whether to gate, or not to gate. Content marketing has been around for a long time, but the conventions and strategies around its form and function constantly changes. Let’s examine pro’s and con’s of the gating methods, and you can decide for yourself.
Gating content
Putting a “gate” on your content means that you’re offering content for someone to download (a guide, white paper, song, video clip, etc.) but they’re required to enter some of their personal information in order to download it. By requiring this information, you glean an email address and subscription to your email list, as well as a potential lead for your sales team. But that content needs to be really appealing to inspire someone to overcome their form fears.
Ungating content
This method is becoming more and more common, mostly due to SEO. If you have a 10,000-word guide, putting that massive amount of content on one page can tell search engines that it’s an authoritative page, and therefore drive organic traffic to your site. As we’ve talked about, if your email signups are converting well on your website, then this would be a good tactic to draw in more of an audience.
You can see an example of ungated content by looking at one of our guides, here.
4. Optimize your content for search engines
This method piggybacks a bit off the last point. Making your content (blogs, guides, even normal web pages) optimized for search engines (like Google and Bing), you can drive organic traffic simply by people searching for answers to their questions. We have a lot of resources to help boost your SEO here.
5. Test paid search
Paid search isn’t quite in line with organic traffic (since it’s paid, and therefore not organic, but putting even just a little bit of money behind some paid ads on Facebook or Google can go a long way.
6. Invite a guest blogger to your website
Guest blogging is an easy win. It brings authority and traffic to your site because they’re promoting to their respective audience, while it also brings the blogger more visibility being on your site.
7. Host a webinar
A webinar (a website seminar, or online seminar) is an incredibly effective way to drive organic traffic, promote email list signups, and generate leads for your business. Tips on this front: It’s really helpful if you can host the webinar signup form on your own website. Many webinar services require registrants to sign up on their own pages, which takes your audience away from your site. But if you can create a form that lives on your own site, that will drive organic traffic, and then create email signups and sales leads when people sign up for this free content.
Wrap up
There are some remarkably simple yet very effective ways to drive organic traffic to your website. As stated earlier, make sure your focus is first and foremost to make sure your viewers are converting once they’re on your site! All the traffic in the world is only as good as it converts to increase your revenue. Focus first on the conversion, then start generating more organic traffic with these accessible ideas.