Very often on a particular site you can see the field for entering information, which is called the "subscription form". Resource administrators in every possible way urge users to enter their data (in particular, an email address), after which various letters with information about certain materials, promotions, news of this resource begin to come to the mailbox indicated in this form. Have you noticed this?
All this is a form of work with website visitors and participants in various online communities. It assumes the presence of a “response” in the form of a collection of a database of people who visit your resource, as well as the ability to send information about your site to those who have left a postal address.
If you have your own resource and would like to know how to make a subscription on the site, this article will be useful to you. In it, we will consider the basics of creating subscriptions, newsletters: what it is and why it is used.
What is subscription and newsletter?
So, let's start with the definitions. Subscription is the user's voluntary consent to receive informational letters on behalf of the resource. In such letters (and they are sent by e-mail), the site administration, 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 the blog) . By signing up, a person leaves his address and, in fact, gives a sign that he is ready to read the letter sent to him from a particular site. A subscription is organized through a special form. It is placed in a conspicuous place on the Internet page; this form may have a different appearance, but its essence is always the same - to collect the mail address and send it to the server. Sometimes a newsletter subscription for a site also contains a "Name" field.
Newsletter is a form of notifying users via e-mail, which is expressed in mass mailing of letters. As already mentioned, these can be news, promotions, news and so on. The newsletter is carried out in order, firstly, to notify users of something, and secondly, to draw their attention to both this or that event, and to the resource as a whole, recalling its existence.
In fact, the newsletter follows the subscription: the site administrator (using special tools) makes a newsletter 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 a site, attract new users to it. With its help, you can "collect" the attention of those who signed up earlier, as well as increase the audience at the expense of new visitors by simply publishing interesting materials.
Another form of subscription for the site allows you to create a kernel of loyal, regular customers who are guaranteed to be interested in your updates. With the help of such people, you can, for example, organize sales of your information products or even real goods by mail. There are many examples of successful businesses 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.
How 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 for loyal users, then you will certainly be interested in how to subscribe to the site. We talk about the possible methods of its creation and methods of application.
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 your subscription. The first option is, of course, more complicated from the point of view of implementation, but it gives more opportunities regarding the visual settings of the subscription form. The second one can be configured to work just a few minutes after the launch of the site. This is done easily and simply. However, as a rule, the resources providing such services make restrictions on the appearance of the subscription form.
Scheme of the subscription form
Let's start with a description of how to make a do-it-yourself subscription on the site. This, of course, is a little tricky for beginners. In addition, your hosting should support the work of PHP scripts.
The working scheme of such a subscription is very simple: an HTML form is inserted into the site page to collect information that transfers data to the script. That, in turn, fulfills the condition, which 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 connection is 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.
True, the advantage of working with your own form is the fact that by setting it up once, you can forget about it and simply collect user data in automatic mode.
We are looking for services to create a subscription
The services that are involved in providing services for compiling a user base using subscriptions, as well as mailing to collected addresses, are quite well known, so you do not need to search for them. These are SmartResponder and GoogleFeedBurner. There are still small projects that teach how to subscribe on the site, but whether to use them or not is up to you, their activity can be called secondary.
Those projects that are mentioned above are engaged in the following: the first allows you to competently maintain a list of Email addresses of users and send messages to them with a certain frequency (for a fee). The second has a slightly different focus: with it, you can collect the necessary addresses, but you can send them notifications with news from your blog. Thus, the first service is, rather, an advertising tool, while the second is the ability to “feed” subscribers with fresh content.
Create a do-it-yourself 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, it looks like this:
- Step 1 Create a PHP script for processing the received data (name and email address of the user) and put it in the root of your site. If you do not know the programming language, we recommend that you contact a freelancer, such a solution will be scribbled to you for a nominal fee.
- Step 2 It is necessary to integrate the script with the HTML page. This is done simply: you only need basic knowledge of the HTML markup language and a little zeal. In order for everything to work out, you need to create a form (form tag), arrange it visually (CSS to help) and connect it to the script: register the sending of data (post) to your PHP file.
- Step 3 It includes setting up a data processing script. In it, in addition to the code itself, it is necessary to prescribe information about which file the received information will be sent to. In fact, the subscription script for the site is ready. To make it real in a couple of hours for a beginner, and in half an hour (and faster) - in case you have such an experience.
Base Newsletter
Further, only you decide what to do with the received mail addresses. You can use them to publish updates on the site, as addresses for sending marketing offers. Do not forget that for a user a subscription is access to a site that he may already have forgotten about. Do not spam your visitors with links to your resource - otherwise they will simply put you on the “black list” of mail!
Mailing Guidelines
Regarding how the mailing is done, I would like to give the following tips. First, publish only the most interesting and useful material. Secondly, regularly conduct 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 the subscription to the site. Give your customers the opportunity to unsubscribe from your updates and do not get imposed.