Email Marketing | Web Training Wheels

How To Add A Top Bar Mailchimp Opt-In

A top bar email sign up is a nice way to boost your opt-ins without being overly obnoxious. Especially with the current trend toward one column blogs, without a sidebar, it’s a great solution for making an opt-in prominent without being an eyesore. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

I wanted to add a top bar email opt in to a site and was prepared to have to research and test a few plugins, maybe fiddle with some styles and generally sink a little bit of time into the whole endeavour.

However I was able to get the job done in less than 15 minutes thanks to a couple of wondrous plugins.

How To Set Up a Free Download with Email Capture in your WooCommerce Shop

I’ve had some clients in the past who wanted to set up a free download in their WooCommerce store, as an email list building strategy.

In reality it can be a little cumbersome to do a free download in exchange for an email address within a store context because it takes several more clicks on the part of the user, than it would for a typical opt-in form. The steps I provide here will significantly streamline the process. I wouldn’t recommend it as your only opt-in process, but if you really want/need to use your WooCommerce store for this, the method below will certainly ease the pain points.

How To Create High Converting Email Opt-Ins: Magic Action Box Review

Do any of these problems sound familiar to you?

1) You want to place a high impact email opt-in in key places such as your sidebar, or post footer
2) You want to make forms you’ve built with Gravity Forms or Contact Form 7 look more attractive
3) You are not a designer or developer and are stumped about how to do the above!

The solution:
Magic Action Box!

Magic Action Box is a wonderful plugin that will help you with all of the above. It allows you to create strong calls to action – typically an email subscription opt-in box, or a sales box that highlights a product – and place those calls to action at the top or bottom of your post/page content, or in a sidebar widget. It provides some built-in styles to choose from which look good, but if you want to get creative it also provides a way for you to customize the design, without needing to do any coding (but you can do that too if you know how).

Examples of Beautiful Email Marketing

Mailchimp is providing a pleasant surprise for users upon logging out by presenting them with a gallery of beautiful email marketing designs from some of their users. Take a look and consider how you can improve your own email transmissions.…

How To Provide RSS Blog Updates Via Email With Mailchimp

Offering blog updates via email is a must-have feature for most blogs, since many real, non-geek people are not familiar with RSS, but are very comfortable with email.

I mentioned this possibility in my post on updating readers when you post a blog, but since this wonderful feature of MailChimp seems to remain largely undiscovered, I thought I’d dig into it a little further.

You’re probably already using Feedburner to manage your RSS feed, and while it does offer email subscriptions as an option, it’s not the best solution if you want to build an email list for marketing purposes.

Here’s how you can integrate RSS-via-email into your WordPress blog using MailChimp. You will of course need a MailChimp account which is free for up to 2000 subscribers.

Email Marketing Lessons from Firestone and Bath & Body Works

This past week these two major companies have provided a mini-study in a few do’s and don’ts of email marketing.

I hate to call people out, but, you know, a huge national company should really know better.

I signed up with Firestone to receive their email coupons (I’m way overdue for an oil change…..).
This is how their conformation email appeared in my inbox:

Well, actually it was in my junk mail folder. Fortunately I’m smart enough to check there ;)
But, yes folks “DO-NOT-REPLY” in all caps is really how they set up their “from” email address and “Confirm Sign Up” is really their subject line. If I hadn’t checked my email right away, and had seen this a few hours or a day later, I may well have not remembered that I signed up, or would have simply discounted this message along with the many other spam emails I receive every day since there was nothing about it that signified legitimacy.