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!

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...

Here Are The Techniques That Make A Great Newsletter Signup Form

To set the stage for these newsletter signup examples, we're going to give you a quick crash course in creating high-converting email newsletter signup forms.

Great signup forms...

• Offer an incentive - give subscribers immediate value by offering an incentive for signup, like a coupon or content upgrade.
• Tell people what emails they'll get (and how often) - because of email spam, people are wary of giving away their email addresses. Remove these fears by telling people exactly what type of content you'll send and how often you'll send it.
• Match your forms to your content - if possible, create signup forms that are personalized to the page a visitor is reading.
• K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple) - for newsletter signup forms, shorter is better. Keep it to one or two fields max.
• Use social proof - by highlighting how many existing subscribers you have, you demonstrate the value of your newsletter to would-be subscribers.
• Make your CTA clear - don't use something generic like "Send". "Subscribe" is ok, but it's even better to use your CTA to reinforce the incentive or benefit a subscriber is getting.

You'll see these techniques play out across all the examples below.

7 Email Newsletter Signup Examples That Are Built To Convert

1. RemoteOK

RemoteOK is a popular job board for remote jobs. To grow their newsletter, RemoteOK uses an unobtrusive, dismissable opt-in bar at the bottom of every page:

Here's what makes this newsletter signup form so great:

• Simple design - with just two small fields, the form only takes a few seconds to fill out.
• Unobtrusive, but still eye-catching - by using the notification bar instead of a popup, the form is fairly unobtrusive. But its sticky position at the bottom of the page also makes it impossible to miss.
• Clear frequency - subscribers know exactly how often they'll receive emails, and can even customize the frequency with the drop-down.
• Personalized - while the screenshot from above was from the homepage, each job category gets its own personalized form

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.

Before we begin, a quick note — all of the examples you will see in this post can be easily recreated using GetSiteControl widgets. The owls are also included 🦉

Today we would like to focus on blogs and how you can use popups to get more traffic and engagement for your blog. There are different kinds of blogs, of course, so details may vary depending on what you are writing 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 - to get more fans and followers. In this post, we are going to talk about five types of website popups that will help you increase engagement, get more views and traffic, get more subscribers and exposure.

Email newsletter subscription

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:

• 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 Subscribe 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.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for your convenience and does not constitute legal advice.

May 25 is fast approaching which means the new European data protection regulation will go into effect very soon. The EU General Data Protection Regulation also know as GDPR is a huge update that "was designed to harmonize data privacy laws across Europe, to protect and empower all EU citizens data privacy and to reshape the way organizations across the region approach data privacy." Let's talk about what this update means for you as our customer as well as for us, who will be affected and what needs to be done to be compliant.

While the new regulation may seem intimidating, it's actually intended to make compliance with European laws easier. Prior to the GDPR, each country within the EU had different data protection laws, making it difficult for companies to comply across Europe. With the GDPR being a unified set of rules, companies can comply at the European level rather than on a country-by-country basis.

If you know all the theory already, scroll down to read what we have been doing to prepare for the GDPR.

Who does the GDPR apply to?

The GDPR applies to all organizations, located within the EU and outside of it, processing and holding the personal data of data subjects residing in the European Union. It means that regardless of the location, all companies processing personal data of EU citizens are affected by the GDPR.

Today we would like to introduce you to one of our amazing customers, Kern River Outfitters, who have had great results using GetSiteControl Subscribe widget to collect email leads through their website. They are sharing their lead generation process and tips on getting the best results.

Kern River Outfitters is a whitewater rafting family business located in Southern California, near Los Angeles. They offer rafting trips of varying length and difficulty from just a few hours to a few days varying from Class II to Class V. They have been operating on the Kern River since 1980 and are rated by National Geographic as "One of the Best Adventure Companies on Earth"!

People coming to the Kern River Outfitters website are obviously interested in whitewater rafting or similar adventure activities, but they don't necessarily know what exactly they need or how they should proceed, so there is a high chance they will look around and leave. One way to turn these people into potential customers is to ask for their email address promising to provide assistance with the exact things they most likely find confusing. This is what Kern River Outfitters are using GetSiteControl Subscribe widget for.

Kern River Outfitters started using a Subscribe widget to collect leads on their website in 2017. As you can see, it's a very simple form, but it does a great job at clearly conveying the value of the offer. Here is what they have to say about the widget's effectiveness:

The conversion rate for getting an email sign up was 2.26%. This beat out the other pop up plugins we tested by 23%. From the emails collected, 71 became customers with over 100% of them booking more than one space. The cost of GetSiteControl was more than paid for by the first conversion.

Do you rely on reviews when looking for new tools? Or do you prefer to experience every product first hand and form your own opinion? If you are interested in reviews, here are some of the expert opinions on GetSiteControl we've recently come across. If you like to write your own reviews, check the end of this post for great places to share your opinion.

FinancesOnline

GetSiteControl Reviews: Overview, Pricing and Features

GetSiteControl has been awarded the "Rising Star" award as well as the "Great User Experience" recognition for best conversion rate optimization tools by the popular review directory and SaaS platform FinancesOnline.

GetSiteControl is also one of the top 20 Conversion Rate Optimization Software products on FinancesOnline and was recommended in their What Is Conversion Rate Optimization Software guide!

GetSiteControl provides you with a set of friendly and lightweight call-to-action forms. You can create, edit, activate, deactivate and analyze all of them in a single user dashboard, which helps get an overview of the overall performance and make quick adjustments when needed.

Want to share your opinion? Click here to leave a review.

The short answer is "no". Your GetSiteControl popups will not be affected by the new Chrome ad blocking update. We have received several questions from our customers who are worried about this new feature affecting GetSiteControl widgets on their websites, so we decided to investigate this question further and write this post to answer any concerns you might have.

What is this ad-blocking update?

Last year Google announced an update to their Chrome browser that was designed to "improve advertising on the web" and on February 15 the update was released as promised. Now Chrome blocks ads considered "frustrating or intrusive". Some examples of such ads are full-page ad interstitials, ads that unexpectedly play sound, and flashing ads. To come up with the types of ads that are considered the most annoying by users, Google conducted a big research aimed to identify the most intrusive ad experiences. Based on the results of this survey, Better Ads Standards were devised. If you want to learn more about the types of ads that are now blocked by Chrome, check the Coalition for Better Ads website.

Do we need to worry?

Only if there are intrusive ads on your website. If you want to know for sure, you can see detailed results, such as the specific violations of the Better Ads Standards if they were found, via the Ad Experience Report in Google’s Search Console.

However, your GetSiteControl widgets will not be affected by this update and will not be blocked by Chrome. This new update is only about ads, and GetSiteControl widgets are not ads. To quote Google, "an “ad” is promotional content displayed on the web as the result of a commercial transaction with a third party." This means advertising only, things like ads served by AdSense and DoubleClick, not email lead forms, discount popups, surveys, etc.

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner which means businesses around the world are flexing their romantic advertising muscles. How about you? Are you preparing any Valentine's Day themed offers and promotions? Valentine's Day marketing is not only for hotels, restaurants, florists and jewelers, it's a great opportunity for any website to create engaging online marketing campaigns inspired by the most romantic day of the year.

To make it easier for you to create beautiful Valentine's Day marketing campaigns, we have added new icons that you can add to your promotional pop-ups in just a couple of clicks. The new icons are already in your dashboard, ready to be added to your website widgets. If you need help with creating a popup with an image, like the one below, check out this step-by-step guide.