One of the great ways to always keep your business visible to your customers is through an online newsletter. Using this form of communication helps you:
- Stay visible to your existing customers
- Helps you promote new and existing products
- Helps generate sales through targeted discounts, promotions and offers
- Help you communicate company information and news easily and effectively
What You Need to Get Started…
To be able to send out newsletters, you will first need to collect email addresses from those who want to sign up. You’ll then need to store those email addresses in a database, or repository, so they can be accessed whenever you have an email to send out. So far, so good.
Using EverWeb’s Contact Form Advanced Widget for Newsletter Sign Ups
The best tool you can use to get customers to sign up for an email is trough a contact form on your website. This form could be on your home page, or you could add a button, or text, link to a dedicated page in your site for newsletter signups. Having the contact form on a dedicated page would also allow you to have a dedicated navigation menu option for ‘Newsletter Signups’.
In EverWeb, either start a new page dedicated to newsletter sign ups, or use an existing page, such as your Home Page. Next drag and drop the Contact Forms Advanced widget on the page. Size and position the widget as you want. If you have added the Contact Form Advanced widget to your Home Page you might want to place it low down on the page. You can add a button at the top of the page with a scroll position link taking you to the contact form further down the page.
We strongly recommend using the Contact Form Advanced widget as it is a lot more secure than EverWeb’s original Contact Form widget. The ‘Advanced’ widget also has tons more customization options available for you to create exactly the form you want. Additionally, you can use the Contact Forms Enhanced Addon with the widget which we will be using later on to collect email addresses for use with our email newsletter.
Email Address Collection and the Contact Forms Enhanced Addon
Often newsletter sign up forms are simple, just enter your email address and click on the Send button. Done! But why not use your form as an opportunity to discover more about your potential customers and their needs? Using EverWeb’s Contact Form Advanced widget allows you to do just that. You can add fields in to your forms to ask your form responder specific questions. This data could be very useful for you in, for example, targeted e-mail newsletters to your customers later on. So before you finish creating your contact form, think about how you can make the most of the opportunity to find out more about your customers.
Once you’ve designed your contact form, don’t forget to complete the widget’s ‘Confirmation Email Settings’ section at the bottom of the Widget Settings tab so that the form responder gets a confirmation email that you have received their newsletter subscription request.
Sending Your Newsletter: Options
Once you have published your website, you will hopefully start to receive email replies from form responders wanting to subscribe to your newsletter. If your needs are simple, you can simply save each email and add the email addresses to an email group e.g. on macOS you would create a newsletter emailing group in the Contacts app then use this group in Apple Mail to email your newsletter sign ups. Once you have have your email group(s) setup and populated you can then export the resulting contact group to your mass emailing app such as MailChimp or use a word processing/spreadsheet mail merge combination.
If you have more than one contact form in your site, or run multiple sites with one or more contact forms, you can also use this approach. However, you may find that over time that adding and maintaining email addresses, to one or more groups, becomes quite time consuming. In addition, you also have the disadvantage of not being able to easily access any of the other data you may have collected in the contact form which may be of use to you going forward.
If the above sounds like your type of scenario, you may want to consider using EverWeb’s Contact Forms Enhanced Addon to help with this lifting work.
Newsletter Sending Using Contact Forms Enhanced Addon
Using EverWeb’s Contact Forms Enhanced Addon gives you much more control over the data that you have collected from your newsletter signups. The addon will store all of the data that has been sent to you when your form responder clicks on the ‘Submit’ button, so it’s easy for you to immediately sort your data by any field that is in the contact form. The data is also exportable to a number of different data formats so is easy to take into products such as Microsoft Excel for data analysis, or Mail Chimp to add to your existing list of customers. When exporting data you can either export all of the form’s data or a subset of the data if you prefer.
It’s also worth remembering that the Contact Forms Enhanced Addon can also be used with any number of contact form campaigns that you may have in your website – now and in the future. This makes it a great tool to capture data such as newsletter signups, sales campaigns, seasonal activities, bookings, reservations and so on.
As well as capturing data, you can also use Contact Forms Enhanced to send mass emailings to your those contact form responders using the mass emailing feature. Here you can create a simple email with Subject and Content fields. You can also include ‘tags’ in your email to personalize the content to use the data you have collected. There’s even an option to include a ‘Default Tag’ so that the field is filed in with default text if the form responder did not include any data in that particular field themselves.
The mass emailing feature of EverWeb’s Contact Forms Enhanced Addon gives you an easy way to mass email those form responders that you want to target when you want. The addon is simple, yet robust enough to be effective for many EverWeb users without having to use heavy weight applications for mass emailing.
Keeping in touch with your customers and maintaining visibility as well as properly targeting your customers is becoming ever more important in an increasingly competitive sales environment. EverWeb’s Contact Forms Advanced widget in combination with the Contact Forms Enhanced Addon’s mass emailing ability may offer you and your business a perfect solution…
If you have any questions about this post, please do let us know in the Comments Section below.
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