How to Grow Your Email List on Shopify

This question pops up (no pun intended) in our community again and again: “How do I grow my email list?” If your newsletter list growth has been losing momentum, here are our tried and true strategies:

Offer a Great Incentive

Email is one of the most valuable channels for ecommerce and often accounts for 25-40% of online revenue. It’s only fair to reward website visitors when they invite you into their inbox. It is very common, almost etiquette in some industries, to offer a 10-20% discount. We also love non-discount offers such as free downloads. For a few ideas about offers aside from a discount, read our blog post on newsletter signup incentives. Make sure to offer something of real value to your audience and make it more enticing than the ubiquitous “news & updates.”

Pop-Up Forms

Almost everyone finds pop-ups annoying, but it is precisely their peskiness that makes them so effective. There are ways to make them less intrusive by following best practices. The number one pop-up mistake we see is not giving visitors a chance to peek at your site before rudely hitting them with an email request. On platforms like Klaviyo you can trigger a pop-up after someone has had enough time to see what your site is about or after they have scrolled a certain percentage of the page.

Your pop-up should be easy to dismiss with a prominent “x” and no guilt-laden links like “no, I don’t want to be more productive.” Those are the worst! Once a pop-up has been dismissed, it should be easy to retrieve via a teaser link or pullback tab for shoppers who change their mind once they are closer to making a purchase. Some pop-up builders have a simple built-in teaser feature, which is a great place to start. We like to take things a step further with a custom-designed callout in the website header, such as the “Get a Free Printable” button in the example below.

A Sitewide Signup Form

Include a newsletter signup form in the footer of your website so it shows up on every page. This is a standard location and your visitors will expect to find it there. So many ecommerce sites don’t repeat the same offer that is featured in their pop-up and this mistake can cause visitors to hesitate or even abandon a purchase. Make it clear that the same incentive applies regardless of whether someone subscribes in the footer, the pop-up, or anywhere else.

Bonus Content on Top Landing Pages

Some ecommerce sites have informational pages or blog posts that bring a lot of traffic from people who are researching but not shopping. If this content is bringing potential customers who aren’t yet in shopping mode, you will want to stay in touch and be top of mind when they are ready to shop. Don’t ignore this traffic just because it doesn’t have a high conversion rate. Instead, design a special signup incentive that adds even more value related to the topic of the landing page. For example, if you get a lot of traffic to a post explaining an embroidery technique, offer a beautiful stitch guide as a PDF, especially for visitors who subscribe on that page. Make sure the content upgrade is well-branded and includes your web address!

Personalize with a Quiz

A well-designed and informative product recommendation quiz provides valuable customer service while at the same time collecting useful information associated with an email profile. For example, if you know a subscriber’s top skincare concern is dry skin or they wear petite size clothing, you can send content that is more relevant to their interests. You can choose whether or not to require an email address to receive quiz results, but at least make it seamless to subscribe as part of the quiz interaction.

Gated Freebies

If your site already offers free digital downloads, put these pages to work by requiring an email sign-up. This tactic can be surprisingly tricky to implement when you have more than one freebie. This is because welcome emails can’t be triggered more than once for a single email address. We don’t recommend trying to implement this through products with a price of $0 because this makes a mess of your conversion-related analytics. We also discourage any solution that hides the details of the free catalog behind an email signup because you will lose the added benefit of SEO if your pages can’t be crawled. Though a user-friendly and search engine optimized free catalog requires the expertise of a developer, it is well worth the effort and is a tactic we use often on sites where the free downloads are a big draw.

Create a Signup Page

If the only signup forms on your Shopify site are the ones in the pop-up and the sitewide footer on your site, it is hard to send people to a specific URL to subscribe to your list. You can use an embedded signup form on a page on your site or you can use a full-screen form that is triggered only on certain URLs, though a full-screen form risks being seen as intrusive. Having a newsletter signup page makes it easier to promote your list on other platforms.

Leverage Social Media

On social media platforms, you have limited control over your ability to reach your audience. An important part of your social media strategy should be to encourage your followers to join your email list so you can keep in touch on your own terms. Make it clear that your email subscribers are the first to know about new products and that you treat your newsletter subscribers to exclusive offers. Instagram now gives you multiple links in your bio in addition to links in stories, so there is no excuse not to link directly to a compelling newsletter signup offer.

Collect Emails at Checkout

If you have a Shopify site, make sure to go to your checkout settings and turn on the option to collect subscribers at checkout. Don’t pre-check the option on behalf of your customers, however. There is little benefit to getting people onto your list if they didn’t intentionally subscribe and an increased unsubscribe rate will hurt your deliverability. In your Shopify settings, you also have the option to update the copy next to the checkbox. Unless you are on Shopify Plus, updating copy is one of the few ways to infuse the checkout process with your brand voice. Just don’t go overboard, because Shopify has put a lot of resources toward optimizing every aspect of checkout.

Collect Emails In-Person

Promote your newsletter in your brick-and-mortar store, if you have one, and at any in-person events, such as trade shows, craft fairs, and pop-up shops. Many of the shop owners we work with say that more people subscribe on a clipboard with pen and paper than on a fancy iPad setup or using a QR code. But test this on your own audience.

Use Wisely

We left giveaways, contests, and partnerships for last, because these tactics can have mixed results and depending on what you’re promoting. In the case of a shop owner who has an area of expertise such as surface design and the promotion is for an upcoming course; then giveaways, contests, and partnerships can be a great way to invite subscribers to your list. 

However, we’ve also seen shop owners add a lot of low-quality emails to their list through giveaways. Use these promotions sparingly, make sure you can segment out profiles from these sources, and always follow good list-cleaning practices. We prefer list-building tactics that grow your list organically and steadily over time rather than ones that bring an influx of subscribers all at once.

A/B Testing

Split testing, also called A/B testing, is an invaluable tool to help you fine-tune your sign-up offers. Test different levels of discounts or discounts versus non-discount incentives. Test the wording and design of your signup forms and the copy on your call-to-action buttons. Testing will help you learn what appeals to the most people in your audience and this is knowledge you can use throughout your marketing efforts.

Follow Through

Wherever you promote your list, make sure to mention the benefits to subscribers. Let them know that you treat your subscribers like the VIPs that they are and then follow through with early access, special offers, and exclusive content.

Further Reading

• 6 Email Subscription Form Best Practices
• Email Pop-Up Copy: What Works Best for Online Retailers?
• Shopify Email Pop-Up Best Practices