Collecting email addresses from your website visitors is key if you want to cultivate a community of regularly returning readers and life-long customers. But it is not always an easy task as you will find few people willing to share their data without good reason.

In this article, we will discuss 9 tactics for collecting email addresses that are tried and tested. These include displaying pop-ups and floating opt-in bars on your website, hosting webinars, running competitions, driving traffic from social media to landing pages, and more.

By the end of reading, you will be armed with 9 actionable strategies power up lead generation on your website in 2019.

1. Use Custom Email Opt-in Pop-ups

Email subscription popup by GetSiteControl

Exit popups are an incredibly popular marketing tool and that’s for one simple reason. They are very effective. In fact, given that 9 out of 10 website visitors leave to never come back, exit intent popups are your only way to keep them engaged. And if you’re smart about the incentive, you should be able to convert those who were about to leave your website into subscribers and customers.

As you have probably guessed, in this post, we’ll talk about using exit popups to optimize conversions and lower webpage abandonment. Moreover, we’ll show you 5 proven examples you can easily replicate on your website. And if you’re searching for an exit popup tool, all the examples below were created in GetSiteControl.

So, what's an exit popup?

It’s a modal window that's shown to website visitors right before they close the page. And if you’re wondering how it works, the technology behind exit intention recognition is quite simple. It tracks mouse movement and triggers the popup when the visitor's mouse is reaching the area where they close or change browser tabs. You've probably seen these popups many times. For instance, on ecommerce websites, they usually offer discounts or free shipping in exchange for an email address. They also may offer incentives like free downloads or ask you to leave feedback about your visit. There are so many possible ways to use exit intent popups, and today we are going to share 5 examples you can easily implement on your own website in a matter of minutes.

Offer an irresistible discount or free shipping

When you want an easy way to add functionality to your WordPress site, WordPress widgets are there to the rescue!

Without requiring any special knowledge, WordPress widgets let you add all kinds of cool functionality to various parts of your WordPress site. From a list of your most popular posts to a survey of your visitors, there’s a widget that can do it for you.

In this post, we’re going to cover all types of widgets that you can use with your WordPress site, including:

• Dedicated WordPress widgets that you can use via your theme’s widget areas (like your sidebar, and sometimes your footer)
• Generic widgets that you can use to add content to other areas of your WordPress site, like a notification bar or a slide-in.

And as a bonus, you can also use many of these widgets with a page builder plugin like Elementor or SiteOrigin for even more flexibility.

Basically, widgets aren’t just for sidebars anymore! You’ll be able to put helpful widgets pretty much anywhere on your WordPress site.

Let’s dive into the 12 best WordPress widgets in 2019.

Smart business owners know that customers and non-customers can be a source of vital feedback on their products, branding, customer service, and more. Though your business’s Yelp page or social media replies can be a helpful source of feedback, customers rarely use those platforms to offer focused feedback on specific aspects of your company’s operations. That’s where surveys come in handy.

Talking directly to your customers or target market can be invaluable for your business. When designed and disseminated effectively, even the simplest surveys can add a lot of value and used in a number of ways.

If you haven’t started using surveys to speak to your customers, here’s why you should start:

Brand lift survey conducted on Facebook

You've probably noticed how it seems like every single website you visit nowadays includes some notification about using cookies. Now you might be wondering...does my site need one of those cookie consent notices? And if so, how can I actually create a cookie banner for my site?

The answer to the first question is "probably". And as for the second question, that's what this post is all about!

In the rest of this post, you'll get a quick primer on whether or not your site actually needs a cookie consent banner. Then, we'll share a step-by-step tutorial for how you can use a free tool to create a cookie consent banner for your site without needing to have any special knowledge.

What Type Of Websites Need A Cookie Banner, Anyway?

If your website receives visitors from the European Union, you probably need a cookie consent banner if you want to stay on the good side of European Union regulations.

Originally adopted in 2011 and expanded with the GDPR in 2018, the European Union's rules on cookies essentially require that you get "clear, informed consent" from visitors in order to use cookies that track user data.

That's technically not every single website, but with the popularity of tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, social media share buttons, and others, there's a fairly good chance that your website uses at least some tracking cookies.

So in practice, most sites that receive visitors from the European Union need a cookie consent banner. And in this global world, that's most sites - period.

So...long story short...you probably need a cookie consent banner if you want to comply with the European Union's regulations!

The first update of the year we’d like to announce is a long-awaited integration between Live Chat widget and Slack. Those of you already using GetSiteControl live chat to communicate with the website visitors will now be able to manage conversations right in your Slack dashboards and respond to the incoming messages even on-the-go from its mobile app.

For those yet unfamiliar with Slack, it’s one of the most convenient team communication tools used by thousands of teams and millions of users worldwide. And if you haven’t had a chance to try it, we encourage you to check it out!

With the new feature available in GetSiteControl, you will be able to do the exactly the following:

• Receive real-time Slack notifications about new chat conversations on your website.
• Respond to the incoming messages directly from your Slack account.
• Use Slack mobile and desktop apps to chat from anywhere.

Now, let’s take a closer look at how this integration between Slack and your website live chat works.

Customer feedback is crucial. It helps reduce the guesswork and optimize the customer journey – which in its turn can increase your revenue by up to 15% according to McKinsey research.

Yet, many website owners are still reluctant to start collecting customer feedback. Some believe it’s pointless because too few people respond to feedback requests anyway. Others are only interested in the opinion of those who have converted. (But how do you find out why some people didn’t convert if you never ask?). Finally, there are entrepreneurs who fear that collecting feedback may be technically challenging.

The truth is, with no-code apps like GetSiteControl, interacting with website visitors becomes super-easy even for non-techies. You can add surveys and contact forms to the most important pages of your website – those, where you know a potential customer is supposed to make the decision. And once you start engaging with the audience at earlier stages of the funnel, even if just few of them care to respond, you’ll already get a better idea on which step might be the bottleneck.

So why wait?

In this post, we’ll show you how to easily collect customer feedback with zero coding knowledge, and provide a few examples of feedback widgets installed on real websites that will hopefully inspire you for creating one.

To start using GetSiteControl widgets, all you need is install the freemium plugin from the WordPress repository if your website is on WordPress.

And if you’re using any other platform, simply copy and paste a tiny code snippet to the code of your website. Don’t worry, you don’t have to understand coding, it’s a basic Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V action. Here is a short four-step instruction on how to do it in less than 2 minutes.

Now that we’ve sorted that out, here are 8 ideas on how to use website feedback widgets to learn what your audience thinks and wants.

Looking to grow your email list but not sure where to begin? One of the best ways to start building your email list is to see what other successful websites are doing and use it as a jumping off point for your site. These email newsletter signup examples will help you do just that.

We've collected seven newsletter signup forms from websites across a range of niches. And beyond just showing you what each site is doing, we'll also explain what makes each example great and tell you how you can create something similar for your own site.

Keep reading to see them in action...

Before we begin, a quick note — all the popup examples you will see in this post are created using GetSiteControl. It’s a tool that helps you add smart webpage popups to get more blog followers and subscribers. The cute owls are also included 🦉

Growing an audience is not an easy task. But thanks to the experience of thousands of successful bloggers, we don’t have to invent the wheel when there are so many proven ways to do that. In this post, we are going to focus on one of the key techniques every aspiring blogger should know about. We are going to talk about popups and how they can easily help your blog grow.
There are different kinds of blogs, of course, so the details may vary depending on what you write about and who your readers are. However, no matter what type of blog you have – a personal blog, a business blog, a professional blog – we are sure you want more readers. That's one common goal of every blogger – attract more readers, build a community, and get more blog followers. Below we’ll show you six types of website popups that will help with just that. You’ll see how to increase engagement with your content, get more views and traffic, and attract subscribers.

Email newsletter subscription popup

It's common practice to invite your blog readers to subscribe to your email newsletter. You have probably noticed that many bloggers choose to use opt-in popups to collect emails on their blog. The reason popup lead forms are so popular is very simple - they work.

However, you do need to put some thought into creating your popup opt-in form.

Here are a few tips for you to start:

• It should match your website design and look good. There is no need to compromise your website's appearance for the sake of email leads;
• The form should have the right incentive. What is it your readers will get if they subscribe? What's the value for them? It can be unique content that they can't get anywhere else, it can be an e-book or a downloadable report, it can even be a chance to win something. Always remember that the wording is very important and can greatly affect the popup's CTR;
• The popup should appear at the right moment. In most cases, you don't want to show it as soon as someone opens the page. They don't yet know what your blog is about, right? There are several options you can use to avoid this: delayed popups that appear after a certain time period; scroll-triggered popups; exit popups; popups targeted to returning visitors only; popups displayed on selected pages only. To choose the right scenario, think about how visitors behave when they visit your blog. If you are not sure, you can always run an A/B test to see which behavior gets the best results;
• Consider adding an autoresponder email to thank your readers for subscribing, send links to useful resources or a link to download the promised content.

You can use the Email subscription widget to create a perfect lead generation popup for your blog.

Did you know that GetSiteControl tools are free for non-profit websites? We are proud to be working with hundreds of non-profit organizations from all over the world and helping them connect with their audience through their websites. Free website engagement tools are a small thing, but we are glad that in a small way we are helping these cause-driven organizations achieve their goals.

We’ve come to know some amazing organizations through this program. Today we would like to introduce you to some of them and showcase the widgets they are using on their websites. We hope it will give you ideas on how you can use GetSiteControl widgets in new ways on your own website, either nonprofit or commercial one.

Mall Galleries, Federation of British Artists, UK

Mall Galleries is an Art Gallery based in Central London and the home of The Federation of British Artists - an Arts Charity comprising nine of the UK’s leading Art Societies. The Federation provides exhibition facilities and organises Open Art exhibitions for public viewing in the Mall Galleries. The Open Exhibitions provide opportunities for developing artists to exhibit alongside more established artists. Their education programme incorporates collaboration with people of all ages, backgrounds and abilities. Mall Galleries and the Federation also operate an Art Consultancy and an Online Sales Platform - Buy Art | Buy Now as well as a Venue Hire operation to sell the Mall Galleries space to others wishing to organise exhibitions and events.

Here is what they say:

The GetSiteControl widgets are amazing and extremely effective. We’ve seen newsletter subscriptions rise, users on our website sign up to our Friends Scheme and help to convert users to buyers on our online sales platform. We’ve also had fewer complaints about hard-to-find information regarding closing times.