Email newsletters are a great way to promote your website and business; they are the most direct marketing tool possible, since you are communicating directly to people who are expressly interested in your work. They are useful to keep your most loyal followers up to date with latest photos, news, or sales.
This page will explain how to set up a mailing list and how to add a subscribe form to your website.
Using a Newsletter Service
In order to run a successful newsletter, you must first sign up with a company that specializes in managing subscriber lists and sending mass emails. A couple popular companies for this are MailChimp and Campaign Monitor, though there are many more options you can easily find by googling around.
There are some very important reasons why you must use a professional newsletter service for this:
- They specialize in delivering mass emails without getting blacklisted as a spammer (something that will happen if you try doing this on your own).
- They offer useful tools and templates for constructing nice looking email newsletters.
- They offer all the necessary tools for managing large lists of subscribers.
- They offer comprehensive analytics to see how your newsletters are performing and who is reading them.
Newsletter services often charge a monthly subscription fee, which makes sense if you intend to send numerous newsletters per month. However, if you foresee sending out newsletters only once every several months, then it is more economical to choose a free plan with pay-per-campaign billing. (These companies tend to bury this option from their pricing pages since they prefer to get you on their monthly plans, but you can read about pay-as-you-go billing at MailChimp here, or pay-per-campaign billing at Campaign Monitor here).
Once you sign up for an account, the next step is to create a mailing list or subscriber list. You can have multiple mailing lists for different purposes, but for the rest of this article I'll assuming you'll be using one primary subscriber list for your website.
The exact instructions for adding mailing lists and creating and sending newsletters is beyond the scope of this article, but these companies provide comprehensive instructions and support documents that you can follow.
I would recommend to keep your signup form data inputs to a minimum, in order to decrease friction for people to sign up. Usually just their name and email address is sufficient for a newsletter.
Embedding a Signup Form on your Website
Once you have your mailing list ready, the next step is to embed a signup form on your website so that people can sign up to the mailing list. These services will generate the code for the signup form, which you will copy and paste into your website admin, then the signup form will appear on your website!
- How to get the embedded signup code in MailChimp
- How to get the embed signup code in Campaign Monitor
*** IMPORTANT *** When you generate the signup code in your newsletter account, you must choose the option for an "unstyled" form, which is easier to integrate seamlessly into your website's design. Please keep in mind that if you want my help to adjust or polish the look of the embedded signup form, I need to have an unstyled form to work with. Here's how to do that:
- In MailChimp, when you are customizing your form, choose the option to "Remove CSS Styles". More info here.
- In Campaign Monitor, when you are generating your form, choose the "No styling" option.
Once you have generated your signup form, copy the entire embed code that they provide, then paste it in the WideRange admin at Mail > Contact Page, in the "Subscribe Form" field. The signup form will then be included on your website's Contact page, below the contact message form.
At this point, you may need some help from me to make some minor adjustments for the form look a little better, so that it looks like the rest of the input forms on your website. Just contact me and I'm happy to help.
More Possibilities
You can also embed the signup form elsewhere on the website, on any page you'd like. To do this, edit the page or gallery where you want to include the signup form, then in the text area put the cursor where you want to insert it, then click the "Embed Code" button on the right side of the text toolbar, then paste the signup form code in that box. Do not paste any code directly into the text area - that won't work. You must paste it into the "Embed Code" box.
Some clients like to have a compact version of the signup form included in the footer section at the bottom of every page of their site (if there is a footer section). If you'd like this, let me know and I can program that for you.
Pop-up Signup Forms
Most people find pop-ups super annoying on websites, but if you want to have a pop-up signup form on your site, that is a feature that the newsletter services can provide too! The process is similar, but a little bit different.
First you need to create the pop-up form; here are instructions for MailChimp and Campaign Monitor.
Once you do that, they will provide a code snippet to include on your website. Unlike the signup form, the pop-up code needs to be included on every page of the website, in the head section of the website. So, you will copy this code and paste it in the WideRange admin at Settings > Analytics, in the "Other Non-Tracking Script Code" field. If you have other code in there already, just paste this code above or below it.
Please note that I cannot help to customize pop-up form designs, so these will have whatever design you create with the form-builder configurations.