One way to increase Newsletter signups is to promote the pages that drive the most signups. Email marketing companies like Aweber and Mailchimp, allow you to create a ‘Custom Thank You Page’ on your website. You can use the custom thank you page along with Google Analytics to find the pages that drive the most newsletter signups.
What is a ‘Custom Thank You Page’? When a user enters his email address and presses the ‘subscribe’ button, he is generally shown a ‘thank you page’. The default thank you page is hosted on the Email marketing company’s (Mailchimp, Aweber etc.) servers and on their URLs. Instead, you can create the ‘Thank You Page’ on your own website. Then you can configure your Email marketing service to direct users to this custom page instead of the default page.
Aweber and Mailchimp have provided tutorials a custom thank you page configuration:
Custom Thank You Page configuration on Aweber
Custom Thank You Page configuration on Mailchimp
After you have understood ‘custom thank you page’, follow the below steps to find the pages that drive the most newsletter signups:
- Create a custom thank you page on your own website. Example: http://example.com/content/almost-finished
- Configure this Thank You page on your Email Marketing service’s settings (as mentioned in the links above)
- After you receive a few signups, login to your website’s Google Analytics.
- Go to Behaviour>>Site Content>>All pages
- Find your custom thank you page in this list (in this example ‘/content/almost-finished’)
- Click that link to see a detailed report for that page
- In the Secondary dimension option, select Behaviour>>Landing page
- You can see here a list of landing pages that have driven signups
- Now change the secondary dimension to Behaviour>>Previous page path. This will show you the actual page on which the user clicked the ‘subscribe’ button
Landing Page vs Previous page path reports
Visitors may not have subscribed on the landing page itself. The user could have browsed many pages before actually hitting the ‘subscribe’ button. The Previous Page Path report shows you exactly the page on which the user clicked the ‘subscribe’ button.
But which page should you promote more to increase subscribers – the landing page or the previous page? Any page that is regularly driving signups, be it a landing or a previous page should be promoted more to increase signups.
