I’ve been using Aweber as my email capture and delivery software for a few years now. It’s a no brainer. All the big guns use it because of the price and features. Anyway…
My friend Andy Sernovitz (Author of Word of Mouth Marketing book) and I did a podcast a while back and I had mentioned to him how I used Aweber, and a trick I learned from him about word of mouth to increase my email signup subscriptions by over 300%. Andy wrote a post about it here.
Jim Kukral makes a crazy offer when you sign up for the email newsletter on his blog, the Daily Flip: On your birthday, he’ll send you a video of him singing happy birthday to you.
Simple, silly, fun, and effective. Subscribe rates up 300% and with 95% of the people who do sign up giving their birth date. Why does it work? Because most sites are boring, everyone loves personal attention, and Jim solves both problems with one great idea.
Andy gets full credit for the inspiration. I’ll take an assist for the implementation on my behalf. :) So, go sign up!
By the way, the Aweber hover box is a huge part of those signups. Those things work.
Honestly, you must read Andy’s book. My video review below.
That might work for me if I could promise new signups that YOU would send them a birthday video!
Congratulations on your tremendous success with your RSS signups. That's phenomenal. I do agree with Andy in that your site offers a personal touch that few blogs have even attempted to tap into. It's fun and thoughtful. You are definitely doing something very innovative.
Hehe i must increase my members at first :)
I will try. Btw those are great tips!
Cheers!
Thats an innovative way of increasing your email signups!
I must admit, I did sign up to have some crazy white guy sing me Happy Birthday with a ukulele!
Who would pass that up? They'd be crazy not to… :-)
Interesting…I thought it was such a unique idea that I signed up about 10 days before my Nov 1st birthday …but I received nothing!
Yes, Mike, I admit it. I was so busy with my new launch I missed a bunch of them. I'll get you next year, I swear, or I can still do it now if you want? :)
Happy Birthday Mike Saunders
Hi Jim, I hadn't heard of Aweber Communications before and I am setting up my first blog so will look into it – thanks for the tip and your regular newsletter which is appreciated. Looking forward to receiving my happy birthday video – it's a great idea!
Yes this is a great idea. I signed up to receive one too…..so I can see how it works. Was wondering…..do you sing happy birthday to Cheryl? and personalize each song or do you sing happy birthday in a generic way and send them the link via an autoresponder system? Even that would be cool. Cheryl
That's the most interesting idea I've heard and since it worked so well for you, I'm sure many will think of other great out of the box ideas to get more email signups. You may have unknowingly given many people more than a nudge to start thinking more seriously about this.
Peter