Very often on this or that site you can see a field for entering information, which is called a "subscription form". Resource administrators strongly encourage users to enter their data (in particular, an email address), after which various letters begin to come to the mailbox indicated in this form with information about certain materials, promotions, news of this resource. Have you noticed this?
All this is a form of work with site visitors and members of various online communities. It assumes the presence of some kind of "response" in the form of collecting a database of people who visit your resource, as well as the ability to send information about your site to those who left a mailing address.
If you have your own resource and would like to know how to subscribe on the site, this article will be useful to you. In it, we will consider the basics of creating subscriptions, mailing lists: what it is and why it is used.
What is subscription and newsletter?
So let's start with definitions. A subscription is a user's voluntary consent to receive informational letters on behalf of a resource. In such letters (and they are sent by e-mail), the administrationsite, as already noted, can publish portal news, some promotions (if we are talking about an online store), information about contests (for example, those held on a blog). By signing, a person leaves his address and, in fact, gives a sign that he is ready to read a letter sent to him from one or another site. Subscription is organized through a special form. It is placed in a prominent place on the website; this form may have a different appearance, but its essence is always the same - to collect the mail address and transfer it to the server. Sometimes a site's newsletter subscription also contains a "Name" field.
Newsletter is a form of notification of users via e-mail, which is expressed in the mass mailing of letters. As already mentioned, it can be news, promotions, novelties, and so on. The mailing is carried out in order, firstly, to notify users about something, and secondly, to draw their attention both to this or that event and to the resource as a whole, reminding them of its existence.
In fact, the distribution follows the subscription: the site administrator (using special tools) sends a distribution with information about his site to the email addresses collected using the form. This is how the subscription to site news works.
Why is this needed?
Subscription is an effective marketing tool that can increase the popularity of the site, attract new users to it. With its help, you can "collect" the attention of those who subscribed earlier, as well as increase the audience bynew visitors simply by posting interesting content.
Another subscription form for the site allows you to create a core of loyal, regular customers who are guaranteed to be interested in your updates. With the help of such people, you can, for example, organize the sale of your information products or even real goods delivered by mail. There are a lot of examples of a successful business built exclusively on subscriptions and mass mailings among regular visitors, both among Western and domestic bloggers and webmasters. Monetization of the list of subscribed users is limited only by your imagination.
Ways to organize a newsletter subscription
If you already have your own resource, and you are interested in the opportunity to create your own database of contact data of loyal users, then you will probably be interested in how to make a subscription on the site. We talk about the possible methods of its creation and how to use it.
So, if we talk about collecting email addresses, then you, in fact, have two ways - creating your own and using someone else's site to work with a subscription. The first option is, of course, more complex in terms of implementation, but it provides more opportunities for visual settings of the subscription form. The second one can be set up to work within a few minutes after the launch of the site. This is done easily and simply. However, as a rule, the resources that provide such services make restrictions on the appearance of the form forsubscriptions.
Scheme of the subscription form
Let's start with a description of how to make a subscription on the site with your own hands. This is of course a bit difficult for beginners. In addition, your hosting must support PHP scripts.
The operation of such a subscription is very simple: an HTML form is inserted into the site page to collect information, which passes the data to the script. That, in turn, fulfills a condition that ends with writing the user's address to a text file or sending his data to another service (depending on the wishes of the administrator). The most difficult thing in this bundle can be called the work of a PHP script, since the HTML form is extremely simple, but the script may have some problems, for example, an incorrectly set encoding. If you do not have basic programming skills, we recommend that you ask someone to help with this issue.
However, the advantage of working with your own form is the fact that once you set it up, you can forget about it and just collect user data automatically.
Looking for services to create a subscription
Services that provide services for compiling a user base using subscriptions, as well as mailing to collected addresses, are well known, so there is no need to look for them. These are SmartResponder and GoogleFeedBurner. There are also small projects that teach how to subscribe on the site, but it’s up to you to decide whether to use them or not, their activitiescan be called minor.
Those projects mentioned above do the following: the first one allows you to competently maintain a list of users' email addresses and send messages to them at a certain frequency (for a fee). The second one has a slightly different focus: with its help, you can collect the necessary addresses, but you can send notifications with news from your blog to them. Thus, the first service is more of an advertising tool, while the second is the ability to “feed” subscribers with fresh content.
Creating a DIY subscription form
In fact, it is much more useful and interesting to develop your own mechanism for processing data received from users. If you describe this process step by step, then it looks like this:
- Step 1. Create a PHP script for processing the received data (user name and email address) and place it in the root of your site. If you do not know the programming language, we recommend contacting a freelancer, they will draft such a solution for you for a nominal fee.
- Step 2. It is necessary to integrate the script with the HTML page. This is easy to do: all you need is a basic knowledge of the HTML markup language and a little diligence. In order for everything to work out, you need to create a form (the form tag), design it visually (CSS to help) and connect it with the script: send data (post) to your PHP file.
- Step 3. It includes setting up a data processing script. In it, in addition to the code itself, you need to write information about which file the received information will be sent to. Basically the scriptsubscription for the site is ready. It is realistic to make it in a couple of hours for a beginner, and in half an hour (or faster) if you have similar experience.
Mailing to the database
Further, only you decide what to do with the received mail addresses. You can use them to publish updates on the site, you can use them as addresses for sending marketing offers. Do not forget that for a user, a subscription is access to a site that he may have already forgotten about. Do not spam visitors with links to your resource - otherwise they will simply blacklist you in mail!
Recommendations for mailing lists
Regarding how the mailing is done, I would like to give the following advice. First, publish only the most interesting and useful material. Secondly, regularly hold some kind of interactive events (promotions, contests) with which you can attract new users. Thirdly, do not forget to create instructions on how to disable a subscription to a site. Let your customers unsubscribe from your updates and don't be intrusive.
