 So my name is Heather Solos, and I work for an email marketing company, not the one sponsoring the conference. So this is how I also run a website called HomeEC101. I started it back in 2007. It's on WordPress. And even though it suffers horribly from Cobbler's Child Syndrome, because all I ever do is test things for my company on it now, but it still pulls in 250,000 page views a month, so that's good for testing these different items on. I have learned, again, working for Feedblitz two and a half years ago. I've learned a lot about email marketing and best practices over that time. I have seen a lot of people say, but it works. It's not always an excuse to do anything. So as we go over things, I want to start with best practices because having a lot of names in a list doesn't matter if they're never going to respond to you anyway. Feedblitz. We do RSS in email marketing. So you'll hear people say, just buy a list. Well, the problem with buying a list is that it is full of email addresses that we already know are bad. So if you try to import it into us or MailChimp or something like that, it's going to hit what's called a spam pot, and your email list is going to get blacklisted. You're going to lose your money and you're set there. When you are putting plugins on your site, don't annoy your visitor. You don't need to start off with a relationship by irking somebody and trying to give you your email address just to access the information they want. Do not mislead the visitor. If your landing page, and buy this at this time, I just mean whatever page on your website that they happen to arrive on, is about a topic that you never normally write on. It was a one-off. Don't try to get them to join the list on a completely different topic because they're not really your readers anyway. Monetize that page in another way. Put ads on it. Find something to sell through an affiliate link on that page. Make it work for you in a way that fits that page rather than trying to make people fit into a shoe that doesn't fit. Again, don't annoy the visitor. Do you know what dual opt-in is? Two. It doesn't mean two. It means that not only has somebody given you their email address, they have also given you permission to email them. And that permission is what's important. If I give you my business card today, or yesterday, and I say, hey, let's keep in touch. This doesn't mean you add me to your newsletter. I never agreed to be on your newsletter. I don't want to be on your newsletter and you're going to make me angry if you put me on your newsletter. If you host an event and you have a fish bowl and you're collecting business cards and things like that, make sure it says, put your card here to get my newsletter. That's okay. They have then given you permission. It's not, you don't just take anybody who hands you their card. There are many different places you can put opt-in forms and pop-ups on your site. We mentioned landing pages before, but at that point I only meant a page where people showed up. A landing page sign-up form is a form on a page specifically dedicated only to collecting the email address. You can use that like in your signature and you just link to that page. So you're like, hey, you want to follow me? Just link to the page. That would be a landing page sign-up form. You can integrate forms into your theme. One of my favorite places, and you're going to hear me mention it a bunch of times, is at the end of an article. So you've written an article. Somebody has actually read through to the end. That's when they're most interested in you and you already have their attention. Go ahead and ask for their email address at that point. Standard widgets fit into your theme, into your WordPress theme. Sometimes you use a short code. Sometimes you paste HTML in. Scrollbox is another one of my favorite ways to have people sign up. What that is, is it measures, it watches as people scroll down your site. When they hit a certain point, 30%, 40%, 50% of the way down the page, that's when the box sign-up appears because you know they're interested in you. Pop-ups are a mixed blessing. They're totally a mixed bag. You don't know what you're getting into. Why would I give you my address? But if you set what's called an intelligent pop-up, a respectful pop-up, you set it to go in two, three pages into the visit, and they've already decided that they're interested in you, and then you're giving them a way to ask to join. Lightbox is just another form of pop-up. It depends on what plug-in you're using as to how they phrase lightbox. Sometimes it's just a part of the theme. Sometimes it shows up on the theme. Veteran footer bars. In my experience, you probably see this as hello bar. Do you know what I'm talking about? In SumoMe, it is the smart bar, but it stays at the top of your page, and then as you scroll down, it follows you. I haven't had much luck with that one personally. Those are just the different types we'll be mentioning. The more expensive plug-ins usually have analytics, but you need to know what you're looking at, and you need to have Google Analytics working with that as well to understand what you're actually seeing. Impressions means that somebody has seen or been exposed to the form. It does not actually mean they've seen it because of ad blindness. How often do you scroll past things in sidebars and never see them? Submissions is after somebody has given you the email address and hit submit. A conversion is when they have hit the submit, gone to their inbox, and activated the email. That's for you. Now, sometimes the analytics described by plug-ins will tell you a conversion is somebody has hit submit. Does that make sense? So what I recommend doing, if at all possible, with the plug-in you choose is on your own page, on your own website, create what's called an activation reminder page. So it'll say thank you for your email address. Don't forget to go to your inbox and click the activation link. We look forward to hearing from you. Whatever, however you want to phrase it, whatever fits your site. So you collect the analytics on that. This will tell you, and you can compare the submissions to the submissions given to you by the plug-in to the activation reminder pages within Google Analytics. Set up a thank you page on your site too for the people who actually go as far as hitting the activation link. When they hit the activation, then they go there. This is going to depend on your email service provider if they give you the ability to do this. It varies by provider. Now, your hosting company, depending on what plug-ins you choose, it also depends on what hosting level is, how much it matters. Because some plug-ins can add a lot of page load to your time to it. Sorry, to your website. These are three tools to where you can spot check during the trial period of any plug-in to see if it's slowing down your site. This matters because if you go to webmaster.google.com and use their page load test, you can see that you may be penalized for load times. You especially want to be paying attention to mobile right now. Make sure your site is responsive. Make sure any add-ons you've put onto your site are also responsive. Because if you add a plug-in to your site that's supposed to collect email addresses, but when it shows up on that mobile screen and you can't close it, you've just lost a potential reader. If they can't input their address, you've lost a potential subscriber and you're just shooting yourself on the foot. When you're testing a plug-in, don't forget to put a trial period reminder in your calendar so you remember to go cancel it if it's not working for you. Because I don't know about you, but I've had many monthly ones kind of adding up rather rapidly. All right, so this did say five list-building plug-ins, but because Natalie Lucier is here, I added pop-up ally to it, and she starts off with a free pop-up. You get two choices, so you can just do a little bit of A.V. testing on your copy or your colors. She does have optional upgrades, and she calls it a light box pop-up. And she calls it Exit Intent, and I agree that the term is proper, but there's Exit Intent and then there's Aggressive Exit Intent. You know, the ones that won't let you leave. Natalie doesn't use that. It's very, I went and tested it a bunch of times on a bunch of different browsers, and it's a good Exit Intent. It's when you poke around a little bit and you're looking and then it suggests that you sign up. And a lot of that is her ability to write good copy in the plug-in, because that matters to you. How you make the ask will really affect and test everything. Let's see, what else would I want to say about her? Her 30, she also has a 30-day email list course. Highly recommended, and I'm not an affiliate or anything. Gravity Forms, their developers are here. We use them at Feedblitz. I spend a lot of time doing support for Gravity for people who use our company using Gravity Forms. They are nice and reasonably priced at $39 annually for unlimited forms. Now, these forms can be used for many, many things, and List Building is only one of the potential options there. Yes, ma'am? What if you have multiple sites? Is it per site? Yeah, $39 per site. Then they have, I want to say it's $79 for three sites. So each jump up, you get... Yes, they do have that too. Thank you. Ninja Forms, their sponsors, thank you. And Zach did a very good presentation if you happen to see it yesterday. They're also freemium, as in the base is free. And correct me if I say anything wrong, please. And as an example add-on, they have like a MailChimp integration. They have the forms already pre-put together that you can then adjust, and it's $18. So that'll save you a lot of time and energy trying to do it yourself. Those forms integrate anywhere on your website, and then I spent way too much time poking around their demo this morning. So definitely give that a shot. Pop-up nomination. I like this one because it has a... because I've been using it, and it has a lot of granular targeting. What I mean by that is that I can... I can put different copy on different pages depending on what somebody is going to be doing on that page. Like on Home Act, I have a lot of recipes that do okay on Pinterest. And when somebody is browsing through on Pinterest, they're probably not signing up for email, but I can tell them, hey, why don't you follow me on Pinterest and I grow things that way? And it makes more sense for me to grow that user base there for those people. If people are solving a problem, then when I... they arrive by an organic search, and I know that's the bulk of the traffic on that page, then the copy I have there says, hey, would you like to learn more ways to solve problems? You're still in that mode. I've given them the answer, and they've gone far enough into it that I know they may be more interested in hearing more from me. And I then target the list that they're added to by category. The single site is 47, and the developer is 97. This is annually. They only do pop-ups, so that means you're not going to have, like, the forms that go into your site. OptinSkin, this one is good for forms integrated into your website. I enjoyed using it. Their support has been kind to me while I was figuring it out. They don't do pop-ups. They are a little more expensive, and they do have a lot of already pre-populated designs, and as you can tell from me, I'm not a designer. OptinMonster, another one with good response times, at least when I've had to talk to them. They have, not only do they have the forms that integrated into your theme, they also do the pop-ups. You can do the granular targeting as well. They do have the exit intent, and I can't remember exactly how aggressive it was, but sometimes you do want an aggressive form depending on your goal with that list. You only have 14 days to try it out, which I don't know about you, but that's not really a lot of time to dig into testing. This is their pricing model. It was way too complicated to just... And then lead pages are on the cheaper end. It's 37... Well, no, they weren't. Sorry. Take that back. It's $37 monthly, so that adds up very quickly. What you can do is if you have a campaign of some sort where you are driving people to a specific page, say you're doing a big Facebook push, and the goal of the Facebook campaign is to drive people to your website. You can drive them to a lead page landing page. It's very easy to build very nice squeeze pages or whatever you want to call them to drive people to your final destination. Then do that campaign for a month. See how it works. Is it worth the investment at that point? Sumo-mi, this is one of my favorites, just personal bias. I enjoyed working with their support team. Again, it's a freemium, meaning the base level is free, but they have a lot of optional monthly add-ons, so be careful because it can add up quickly. They have the... excuse me, the list-builder is a pop-up that you can get very granular with how it's targeted, or you can let them, or the plugin itself, make the decision based on the user behavior. That's what I've left it at because I'm lazy. And one of the things I really liked about it is because when I was testing this plugin, I was very focused on site speed at the time, and I had a hard time with OptinMonster, which, when I was doing research for this presentation, I found that they released a fix in the interim. Sumo-mi was not slowing down my site like OptinMonster had been. Does that make sense? They fixed the problem when I was... Okay. They do have the scroll box, which is the one that pops up as people scroll down, and they do have the smart bar in the header. Now, I went through that way faster than I wanted to. So, does anybody have any list-specific questions or plugin-specific questions? Yes, ma'am. Some of them are cloud-based services that have a WordPress plugin component. Yes? Yes, ma'am. Yeah, there are absolutely specific limitations for that. I will agree. But my question is, what is your end goal with your list-building? Are you trying to grow traffic with your list? Are you trying to make a specific sale? Are you trying to do customer... Okay, so you were doing something for a client who's specific. The reason why I asked is because I have had a lot of interactions with people who are adding barriers to people signing up to their list. Unless you are going to do something with the information, don't ask for their name. Unless you are going to specifically target these people and address them, why do you need their name? All you're doing is adding one more reason for them to not want to sign up. But then for you, then the... Which one was it? Consider the easiest to customize. Let's see. Are you looking for pop-up only, non-pop-up? Look at it. The CSS part, the styling of it, then be able to put in there what you want, what look you want for it. OptinMonster was pretty good for that. I don't have personal experience with Ninja Forms, so I can't speak to the ease of that part. Pop-up Alley will probably not be it because it says that you can do psycholors and stuff like that, but I think you're wanting to get really into it, aren't you? Yes, and feel free to pitch in whenever. Yes, ma'am. This is a little off the list about email marketing. Absolutely. In the past couple of months, I've had a lot of clients calling in and they're saying stuff to me like, we want to send out 3,000 emails a week, et cetera. How would you handle something like that? What would you use? Because we technically, you know, typically don't use that kind of thing. Don't send out that many emails. Okay. Is it a duly opted-in list? If you don't know where it comes from, you need to know that information. If you are doing it yourself, because you can damage your own ability to send an email in the future, send emails that end up getting hit by spam. I would definitely use an e-mail service provider. Mailchimp's an option. Feedblitz is an option. Constant contact. Aweber, you're going to want to use a service like this. I often, Monster, ask how granular targeting and sumo means granular integration. Would you please explain that? Okay. And what I mean is, I use those interchangeably. I'm sorry, but what I mean is that you are able to change what you're doing based on the URL or the user behavior. It means that you can really get in there and fine-tune what's going on with your forms based on where the user is or what they're doing. Yes, ma'am? Do people integrate easily well with different... No. These have various levels of integration with various e-mail platforms. Mailchimp, you're going to find a lot of ability to be integrated with many of the plugins because they are just one of the largest e-mail providers out there. Does that make them always the best option? Sometimes. You'll need to look at the integration pages of the plugin itself to find out what it works with. Sometimes you only have to paste in a form and it'll work, but again, that's going to depend on the plugin and the e-mail provider you're using. Yes, sir? Apart from the nuts and bolts, what type of verbiage or incentives do you find overall can pull better? Well, it depends on what you're looking for. Are you looking for an immediate sale? Are you looking to just bring somebody back and form a community? And so if you want the immediate sale, you're going to want to use the call-to-action that says, you know, hey, join this list to get whatever deal you're offering. If you are trying to join a community, you want to say join, become, use the appropriate verb for it. Don't use a ton of exclamation points. I know they want you to get excited sometimes, but what I want you to think about is think about your own behavior. Think about, but more, think about your users. What mode are they in when they are going through your site? What are they looking to do? And one of the things that helps, too, is to create what's called user profiles. So you have it, so you have, you know, all of them, and this is Joe, and Joe is looking to do X. What is going to make Joe do X? And so if you can put a personality with it, that helps you form the copy around your call-to-action. Another thing to think about as you are actually sending the mails to your list is if you're looking for your subject lines and you want to stay out of the spam box, take a tour of your spam box. What is in your spam box? You're going to need a shower after, but... Do not use capital letters except for title case. You don't want to say free. You don't want to say hot deal, exclamation point, exclamation point. I have many conversations about this stuff. It's not one particular word or thing, except Cialis, that puts you in the spam box. It is a very gray filter. Okay, this will raise your potential spam score a little bit. And this over here, this sender is not as reputable. So that raises your chance of being put in there a little bit more. Would you need to... Oh, yes. That's why the custom activation page that I suggested you set up to track for Google, that needs to have that information in there as well. You know, hey, go check your inbox for the title of the email you're sending. And make sure you add us, the sender email, to your white list. And so that way, you're telling the client how to make sure they follow through with it. Okay, that's what I'm saying. That's why you helped them create that activation reminder page. Or if that's your role, you know, or... Does that make sense? Oh, right. To make sure that their people make sure that they get the double off the email. Right. I'm talking about them getting the final notification to say, hey, you've had a new subscriber, or this person has contacted you. Okay, so you want them to be able to get the auto responder that alerts them to that? You know, it might be how just in the back of the WordPress, if they don't get that email. That seems to happen quite a bit. That's Gmail being exceptionally helpful. Yeah. And you can create a filter. In Gmail, always put it in the inbox. You may want to set up... There's a plugin that's an SMTP WordPress plugin. It might be called something like SMTP WordPress, but it could be that the server, the tool within WordPress that sends emails, sometimes that fails. So it may not be getting out of the server at all. And you may need to set up something that actually goes through your client's own mail server, the SMTP server, and give it a WordPress way to log into the SMTP and send that mail out to get out of the first place. It may be stuck before it ever leaves WordPress. That's a very good point. We deal with many forms of email issues a lot. And part of the problem is that every host handles emails differently. So the way that people set up their form, maybe their contact form gets filled out and they get that notification. They want it to show it's coming from their user. Well, for their host, that looks like spam. You're sending email as someone who is not you. And so the host will just throw that email out. It's also the most common issue that we see, but another one that we see fairly often, and this is getting kind of complex. So if you would like more information on it, Yoast has a blog post on it, but it's about setting up an SPF record for your domain. And what that basically means is that you allow another service to send email on your behalf, but that has to authenticate through your domain. So if you use a service like MailChimp or something else, and you want all of those emails from MailChimp that shows coming from your domain, when users receive that in their mailboxes, the kind of metadata in that email says that it's from MailChimp and not from your domain, even though the email address does. And if your domain doesn't have a special record that says, yes, I allow MailChimp to send email on my behalf, it can automatically route people's spam folders. So that's kind of an advanced topic, but I would definitely recommend going on Yoast's website and reading his blog post about that, but that's a consideration if email is really important to your business. And that no effect on the host issue that you were talking about, that helps fix that? No, every host does things a little bit differently. The best way is to make sure that your host, if your host has limitations, you can talk with them and you say, hey, who can I use you to send email from? Like, what email addresses do I have to show that email is being from? And that's the best way to make sure that you don't have any issues. But if you find your host is not responsive, because some hosts aren't, then using something like Mandrill, that's what we recommend with Nidget Mortars is to use Mandrill to help kind of take your host out of that equation. Great, thank you. Yes? With my small business clients, we're recommending Office 365 for their personal email needs. I've jumped at what you were saying about the SPF record. I'm not familiar with Mandrill, but the goal with when you're using Office 365 when you're setting up your MX records to point there, you can't have any other non-Microsoft addresses as far as I know. The SPF record is actually set up with your domain registrar. So where are all the Microsoft links? Oh, they're on there as well. The big client is on Microsoft, and we have Microsoft SPFs that I had to put in. Okay, yeah, that should take care of everything. The email address that you've used to send from your form, given a real Microsoft 365 or Google apps for that matter either way, they're not the same that way. And then use that SNTP plugin so that when it sends out, if it's going from your system now, it's coming from your form. Yeah, I'm not sure how you type that in. Do we have any list-building specific questions? Yes, ma'am. It's okay. If I'm talking to a designer, if I'm talking to different clients, some clients may feel it's appropriate, both are using MailChimp just to have the sign bar MailChimp widget join my mailing list here. And so what would be kind of a use case or an encouragement that I can share with them about the necessity of going these extra steps and using the list-building-focused plugin instead of just that? Well, let's say that you have a developer's license for one of these that you like. Ask your client if you could do some A-B testing to prove. And one of the things that I like to do when I'm testing the list is use what's called a hidden field to tell where people are coming from, or you could even have a second list for each form, right? So you make sure that your test that you set up has approximately the same number of users landing on the page. And then you follow which list is growing faster. That's how you can demonstrate it. It won't take, you know, it's less work to demonstrate it than to try to just insist. Yes, ma'am? When you're... I'm a business owner, so development is not my thing. So if you're going to do this A-B testing, and let's say you have some commit-through rates and commit-through B, do these plugins integrate into MailChimp to create two different lists that would you treat them differently afterwards? You can have different lists within MailChimp. And so, yes, you can do that. You can say, okay, so we use this copy on this one, and the open rate, you look at that later, the open rate on list B is much higher than the open rate on list A. So we're going to go with the copy on list B because it creates the better lead than the copy we were using with list A. And so where you might find that useful would be to compare whether you're giving away an incentive like an e-book or a prize or something like that, and compare the open rates. It doesn't matter how many people sign up if nobody opens it later. So, yes, you might be able to get a lot of numbers, but can you sell, let's say you do sponsorships for your newsletter down the road, if you don't have an open rate, brands are not going to be interested in it. Yes? I think to tag onto that question, if you can already A-B test like that in MailChimp, what's the advantage of having the form maker do anything like an A-B test? Okay, well the A-B testing in MailChimp is more about your subject line. Which subject line is going to get people to... Well, I mean just in the segmentation, like they came in from this group and went to one group, and I hear my response rates in that group. I mean the audience segmentation. Right, okay. I don't use MailChimp on a daily basis, so I can't tell you exactly what their A-B testing is. I'm sorry, it's just out of my wheelhouse. But from what I know about MailChimp, their A-B testing is more about a single send. You give it two different subject lines and then it picks the one on the fly that... Well, they don't call it A-B test. I'm just saying when you look at what you send, and you know where they came from, you put them into a group called third page. What I'm saying is we're using it like A-B testing. They're not calling it that. So what's the advantage of doing it again with the form for a builder person? It just makes it simpler. You want... I'm going to explain it. Neither one is better than the other. It's one form of testing versus another form of testing, and it fits your workflow and your priorities. Yes? If you're giving an incentive to get the email, is it best to deliver that right away? After the double opt-in. It depends on how often you normally email. If you only send out a newsletter once a month and they join on date two, they're not going to hear from you for 29, 30 days. So what you need to do then is send them a couple days later, hey, you know, here's what's... you're going to get a sample of what you're going to see. Maybe say, would you like to see last month's and provide that? And that way they're not waiting that long to hear from you, because when you go that long between contacting somebody on your list, they're more likely to hit spam because they're not likely to remember having signed up. And as far as I know, every email provider has what we call the people factor, people who don't understand that hitting spam is not the same as unsubscribe. But another thing I do recommend is within your email template itself, go ahead and make a prominent unsubscribe at the top so people are less likely to hit spam because Gmail also likes to truncate newsletters and oftentimes that unsubscribe is hidden in the truncated portion and people get upset and say that you're hiding it and it's broken and whatever. Yes, Carl? You mentioned that you use pop-up domination a lot, but during your testing, you found that SumoMe was really easy to deal with. I use pop-up domination on feedblit. That was set up when I came on, and it has been working, but pretty much left alone. I've only gone through to test different functionality. I know that it works. I know the way that we have it set up works. I have thoroughly worked with the SumoMe. So that was my experience with the customer service and adding it to my own site and the way it functioned on my personal site. And then I guess we won't take up any more of your time. Thank you very much.