I’ve noticed a few common fundamental mistakes that keep eCommerce stores from seeing results from their blog content.

Investing time and resources into content only to find it isn’t producing the results you expected?

Don’t give up. Ignoring inbound is a huge missed opportunity.

The following three tips don’t take much time to implement, have been proven to work, and have outsized returns for the time you’ll invest.

Making these few small changes will add more subscribers and build a strong foundation to start adding subscribers and potential new customers to your email list. .

Make Sure Your Content Is Doing Its Job.

Yes, your content should demonstrate authority and expertise.
Yes, your content should provide massive value to your reader.

But one metric is more important for all others when it comes to content: Traffic to subscriber conversion.

(The average traffic to subscriber conversion is 1.95%, with the top 10% of marketers achieving 4.77%. I guarantee if you do both of the below fixes you can be in that top 10%).

TIP #1: Craft Hyper-Specific Content Upgrades

One of the highest leverage things you can do to get the most out of your traffic is to create highly relevant content upgrades for every piece of content.

If your content lays out the steps for how to launch a book, your content upgrade will be a set of tools to help put the lessons into practice (this content upgrade for example converts at around ~8%).

This may sound like it will take a long time, but it’s super high leverage. It’s always easier to optimize the conversion of existing traffic than it is to actually get more traffic.

Think about it: if you’re getting 10000 uniques per month to a specific page right now converting at 5%, that generates 50 new subscribers.

In order to get to 100 subscribers per month, you can either double your traffic(very hard), or double your optin conversion rate (relatively easy).

Above is an example of some Hyper-Specific Content Upgrades for a previous client that are far and above the average of “1.95%”.

The content upgrade is another tool to advance the sale, and you should absolutely invest time and resources into improving it, or else you are leaving subscribers and potential sales on the table.

TIP #2: Improve Form Placements (without being annoying)

This is especially true when that annoying slide-in or full screen popup says nothing more than ‘Join Our Newsletter’.

But there’s a fine line between annoying your readers and being helpful.

If you implement Tip #1, you won’t be annoying your readers, you’ll be offering value. It’s all about getting your content upgrade placements right. I recommend at a minimum you should add opportunities to join your email list in the following places:

TIP #3: Create a Simple Onboarding Automation

I always recommend those just getting started with automation to keep it simple.

It’s tempting to get carried away with all the possibilities automation offers, but for now your main focus should be educating and providing more value to your new subscribers.

This has a few big advantages. Setting up this type of automation:

- Resurrects your old blog articles. Get more mileage out of content you’ve already invested in.

- Keeps your engagement high and your list healthy (by regularly sending valuable, relevant content).

- Builds a strong foundation that can be added to later as needed.

Most importantly, it also collects data from subscribers based on their interactions with the emails. Coupling this with knowing which hyper-specific content upgrade they entered from, you’ll be gathering valuable customer profiling data as long as this is running.

This helps you identify potentially high-value subscribers that may be suitable leads. This is where you can think strategically about adding more automations to nurture this subscriber segment more, or alert your sales team to reach out to schedule a call.

A Minimum Viable Onboarding Automation:

Part of the beauty of this is you only need very basic automation features to pull it off.

It’s just a string of emails.

Even the basic plan of Mailchimp is enough to set this up. With this in mind, these guidelines should help you figure out how it should all look when you’re finished:

1. Begin with a Welcome Email

Immediately after you add a new subscriber, send them a Welcome email.

Here you’ll briefly give an introduction to the problems you’ll be helping your readers solve. If you’re outside of the EU, this can also act as a double-optin email with better UX.

Welcome emails are super-high engagement by nature, but don’t be tempted to add an ask just yet. Focus on introducing yourself and setting expectations on the value you aim to provide in coming emails.

2. Create Blog Content emails (as many as you have).

At least once per week, send out a specific article from your blog.

Write a short description for each email, and include a clear call-to-action that links to the blog post, video, etc.Write a short description that connects your content to the problem you’re helping your reader identify.

3. Add a “How We Can Help You” email.

Somewhere in the middle of the content emails (above), add in this email. If you have a well written ‘about’ page on your site, this is a great way to repurpose that.

The goal of this email is to establish not only do you understand what the problem of your reader is (which you’ve already proven by linking useful content), but also that you’re uniquely poised to help solve it.

This is Just the Tip of the Iceberg.

If you implement tips #1 and #2, your content will be doing it’s job and converting your hard-earned traffic to email subscribers. The “Minimum Viable Onboarding Automation” I’ve outlined here is very basic, but will help keep your list engaged, provide value, demonstrate authority while collecting engagement data.

For a more comprehensive look at how to build basic automation that scales with your organization, sign up to my free email masterclass here for more.