Strategies for getting people to sign up to your mailing list on Pattern

[romaarellano]

Hi fellow Pattern users. I finally got my MailChimp account to talk to my Pattern site--yay! And now that I have the mailing list sign-up working, I was hoping those of you who've been at this longer than me could share your strategies for getting people to sign up to your mailing list. Do you promote the mailing list via social media? Offer giveaways? Have people sign up via other venues (physical shops, events, Facebook Biz Page, and such) then manually add them in? Would love to hear what has worked best for you to build a following. Thanks in advance. Oh, and if anyone wants to sign up to my Pattern site, it's https://romaarellano.com and I'd love to reciprocate because then we can share best practices on using the mailing list for newsletters and such!

[funkydreamsmosaics]

Excellent question!  I hope others give great answers. 

My only strategy at the moment is to offer a 10% coupon when people sign up for the newsletter.  I have a banner at the top of my shop letting them know if they sign up, they'll get the coupon.  Which means I have to get them to my shop first.  I don't have a huge mailing list, but I feel like it at least has quality members.  

[romaarellano]

Thanks @funkydreamsmosaics I just went and added a banner to my pattern site as well (and learned how to change my banner color--yay!). I'll do some research and let you know what I find out. One thought is since I have a vintage booth, I can also add a sign up sheet there. Not sure if that will work, as I'll have to find a place to tape it so it doesn't get moved, but I'll noodle on that. Also thinking of doing a post on both Facebook and Instagram that encourages sign-ups.

[romaarellano]

BTW @funkydreamsmosaics I was poking around MailChimp last night after putting up my banner and noticed there is a way to embed the sign-up on Facebook. So in additional to doing a post to encourage sign ups, I'll have a standing sign-up dialog box, I hope, assuming I get it to work. I'll report back.

[funkydreamsmosaics]

@romaarellano , I hadn't realized that.  I will have to look into that, not that I have a lot of FB followers, either. LOL.  Thanks for sharing!

[funkydreamsmosaics]

Did you find a secret to getting Pattern and Mailchimp to cooperate?  There's a thread in the Bugs Forums right  now where they are having an issue, but I don't know what to tell them.  🙂  

[romaarellano]

I did. There's another thread, someone shared with me, that did the trick. I thought you shared that with me, didn't you?

[romaarellano]

By the way, I was just heading over here because my new issue is that I've had a few friends test signing up to my Pattern site, and I've signed up using my personal email account. In my case and that of at least one friend, we are not being signed up. Has that happened to you @funkydreamsmosaics or anyone else?

[funkydreamsmosaics]

I had a couple of friends tell me that they got errors when they signed up, but the sign ups were successful.  And since there isn't anything that can be tweaked in the setup, I couldn't figure out what to do anyway.  But they were signed up, so I didn't work too hard on it.

[Sundrench]

i did sigh for your site 

may be i get to learn  something new

[romaarellano]

Hi @Sundrench Did you sign up for my site or for @funkydreamsmosaics ? If for mine, I hope you got a message sending you my welcome message with coupon code as a thank you for signing up. That is one of the things I wanted to test out but can't since it's not allowing me to sign up. 🙂 I signed up to @funkydreamsmosaics and their welcome message worked great.

[funkydreamsmosaics]

@romaarellano , I just signed up for your newsletter.  I got the confirmation email, followed by the coupon email.  So it all seemed to work fine for me.

Two things: first, you give a coupon code in your welcome email, but you don't say how much it is for.  You say it is for 10% at the top of your site, but in case people are coming back to the email later, you may want to put it in there.  The other thing is that when I get to the confirmation page, it has an option to "Continue to website".  Your link is not working.  I signed myself up for my newsletter again, and my link does work.  So I think you are missing a setup on Mailchimp somewhere.

Lastly, we both need to rename our email lists.  What I didn't realize (I think it has changed since I set mine up) is that Mailchimp uses the name of your mailing list when sending the confirmation email.  So your email has a subject of "romaarellano.com Email List". That's not that bad. Maybe that's okay.  But mine has "Pattern Email List", since that's what I named mine. That's not good. LOL

The confirmation email (which is really quite ugly) uses our Etsy shop names as the From instead of our store names by default.  I think I found the setting that under Settings where I also changed my email list name.  The Welcome email uses the store name.  

I think the confirmation part was added after I initially set mine up due to the new laws regarding email lists.  It has the feeling of something someone just quickly threw together and never touched again.  😞

But I'm glad I took a recent look at this process so I can make a few adjustments.  Let me know if you see anything in my emails. 

And like I said, I had no issues signing up for your email, so I'm not sure why you are. 

[romaarellano]

Thanks @funkydreamsmosaics I will take a look at the suggestions with fresh eyes tomorrow morning. I also got your email when I signed up for yours, so let me also check yours. So valuable to do this for one another, as we aren't always considering the buyer's (recipient's) view when creating these things!

[Sundrench]

i will sign again for both of the 2 site  emails 

i just want to see how it looks like and set it up

please provide the email title so i can copy and paste and find it easy ,  as i do not check tons of email daily 

love to follow and learn from you

[romaarellano]

Hi @Sundrench my email title is romaarellano.com Email List, which is not the most exciting, and I have yet to figure out where to change it again (I did change from Pattern list but it's still kinda staid). Thanks, Roma