If you’re building a website for your business, or if you already have one up and running, you might want to also add an email list. This is a list that people can subscribe to with their email address. Once people agree to be on your list, you’ll be able to email them, send out newsletters, etc. It’s a way to stay in contact with people who are interested in your website.

How to start an email list with MailChimp
Mailchimp is my go-to for email lists. It’s free and does all the things that you want an email list to do. You can create newsletters and add design to them to make them really stand out. You can add images, change the colors and fonts to match your branding, and add links and buttons that go back to your website. Mailchimp even lets you schedule emails or newsletters to go out in advance, so you can get everything set up and then schedule it to go out in the future. They also let you save your newsletter template so that you don’t have to start from scratch every time.
Another good thing about Mailchimp is all of the good analytics that you get. You can see what percentage of your list opened your email. Plus, you can see how many clicks you got and which specific links were clicked. This helps so you can figure out what content your subscribers liked and didn’t like so you can make decisions about how to improve your emails and content.
Create an opt in incentive:
In the early days of the internet and blogs, people would readily sign up for newsletters and subscribe to blogs and websites. That worked really well in 2008, but not so much in 2023. Today, we need to create an incentive to entice people to sign up to our email lists. People are overwhelmed by spam and receiving emails is not as much fun as it once was. So, we need to offer something to get people to want to join our lists and open our emails.
What you offer as an incentive can be just about anything. Many people with books or digital products offer smaller versions for free. Freelancers who offer services often offer a free discovery call or 15 minute consultation. I’ve seen people offer audio files, eBooks, or links to otherwise ‘secret’ YouTube videos. You can offer just about anything you can think of. Then, you can use wording like, ‘Enter your email to get ….. for FREE!,’ and voila, people will come flocking to. join your email list.
Pro tip: Avoid spamming your subscribers!! If you send too many emails or don’t have good content in your newsletters, people might just unsubscribe. Make sure you give them a reason not only to join your email list, but to stay on your email list.
How to add an email opt in to your website.
If you have the Divi theme, it’s super easy! They have their own module that’s an email opt in module. You can just add it to your design in the drag and drop builder. To connect the website and Mailchimp, you just need a code called an ‘API key,’ which is just a fancy developer words for a password. And, if you read this article, you can be super fancy and add a pop up window to get people to sign up!