You want to choose a payment plugin that is trustworthy, fast, and hassle-free for both you and your customers. To achieve successful payment integration in WordPress, you’ll also need features that are tailored to your type of business.

In this article, I’ll review the 8 best WordPress payment plugins, including features, pricing, and the type of business they’re best for, to help you make a smart and profitable decision for your business.

• What Is a WordPress Payment Plugin?
• 8 Best WordPress Payment Plugins
  • 1. WP Simple Pay
  • 2. WPForms
  • 3. Easy Digital Downloads
  • 4. MemberPress
  • 5. WooCommerce
  • 6. WP Full Pay
  • 7. Accept Stripe Payments
  • 8. LearnDash
• What’s the Best WordPress Payment Plugin for My Business?

What Is a WordPress Payment Plugin?

A WordPress payment plugin is a software extension that you install on your WordPress website to facilitate online payments. These plugins are designed to integrate seamlessly with your WordPress site, enabling you to accept payments from customers through various methods such as credit cards, debit cards, and online wallets.

Key Features of WordPress Payment Plugins:

• Easy installation and setup: You can install these plugins directly from the WordPress dashboard, making it simple to configure your payment options without needing extensive technical knowledge.
• Multiple payment options: Many plugins support various payment methods, giving your customers the flexibility to choose their preferred way to pay.
• Additional functionalities: Beyond processing payments, these plugins often offer features like recurring billing, refunds, order management, and transaction reporting.

Interaction with Payment Gateways and Processors

WordPress payment gateways and payment processors are integral components of online payment systems, and understanding how they interact with your WordPress payment plugin helps business owners to ensure smooth operation.

A payment gateway is a front-end service that collects a customer’s payment information. It acts as an intermediary between your website and financial institutions to ensure secure transaction data transfer. When a customer makes a purchase on your site, the payment plugin connects to the payment gateway to verify the transaction.

• Role of payment gateways: Authorizing the transaction by encrypting sensitive information and ensuring it reaches the bank securely.
• Examples: Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net

A payment processor is a service that handles the technical aspects of completing a transaction. This includes communicating with the cardholder’s bank and your merchant account to transfer funds.

• Role of payment processors: Facilitating the transfer of payment data between the buyer’s bank and the seller’s bank, ensuring funds are deducted from the customer’s account and credited to your merchant account.
• Examples: Square, PayPal, Stripe

As you can see, many services, such as PayPal and Stripe, perform both the gateway and the processing functions in online payments.

How They Work Together

1. Customer Makes a Purchase: A customer decides to buy a product on your WordPress site and proceeds to checkout.
2. Payment Plugin Activation: The payment plugin captures the payment details and sends them to the payment gateway.
3. Transaction Authorization: The payment gateway securely processes this information and authorizes the transaction.
4. Funds Transfer: The payment processor handles the actual transfer of funds from the customer’s bank to your merchant account.
5. Completion: Once the transaction is approved, the payment plugin updates the order status on your WordPress site, completing the purchase process.

By using a WordPress payment plugin, you integrate these processes seamlessly into your site, ensuring a smooth and secure payment experience for your customers. This integration not only enhances the functionality of your website but also builds trust with your customers by providing reliable and secure payment options.

8 Best WordPress Payment Plugins

1. WP Simple Pay

WP Simple Pay is an easy-to-use WordPress payment plugin.

It’s perfect for beginners and veterans alike because it comes with payment form templates, it requires no coding, and it’s fully optimized for mobile.

You can easily add recurring payments, create your own payment forms inside the builder, and allow your customers to pay directly from their bank accounts.

Features:

• Secure payment processing
• Optimized for mobile
• Payment form builder
• Payment form templates
• Coupon codes
• Non-card payments

Payment Gateway/Processor:

Stripe

Best for:

Self-employed individuals, small business owners, consultants, nonprofits, and developers. In short, anyone who wants a hassle-free payment experience without having to worry about coding.

Pricing:

The pricing starts at $49.50 per year for the Personal plan, and it goes up to $299.50 per year for the Elite plan. No transaction fees, outside of those charged by Stripe.

Get started with WP Simple Pay today!

2. WPForms

WPForms is the best form plugin for WordPress, and it doubles as a payment plugin.

The Pro version of WPForms allows you to accept payments. It also allows you to set up recurring payments and receive money without additional fees.

One of the best things about this plugin is the freedom it gives you. More specifically, you can add a payment form anywhere on your website, within widgets, posts, pages, and any other place you can think of.

Features:

• Recurring subscriptions
• Flexible placement
• Unlimited forms
• Integration with multiple marketing platforms for Plus, Pro, and Elite plans
• Integration with CRMs for Elite plan

Payment Gateway/Processors:

Stripe, Square, Paypal for Pro plan and above. Authorize.Net for Elite plan.

Best for:

Any site that needs to include a variety of forms and accept payments through them. Form types include registration forms, surveys, and contact forms, and there are over 1,800 templates available.

Pricing:

The Pro plan, which is required to accept payments, starts at $199.50 per year, with no additional transaction fees. The Elite plan starts at $299.50.

Get started with WPForms today!

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With OptinMonster, you can easily integrate WPForms with your popup campaigns! See how in this quick video:

3. Easy Digital Downloads

Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) is my go-to WordPress plugin for selling digital products.

This particular plugin might not be a good fit for you if you’re selling physical products, but if you’re solely dealing with digital goods, then you can count on it to handle all your transactions..

It’s easy to work with, it has advanced functionality, and great customer support.

We use it at OptinMonster, and it never fails us. You can read our full Easy Digital Downloads review to get more details.

Features:

• Full shopping cart
• Discount codes
• Download activity tracking
• Full data reporting
• Customer account page
• Unlimited file downloads

Payment Gateways/Processors:

PayPal at Personal plan and above. The Extended plan and above includes all of EDD’s payment gateway extensions, which include Stripe and Authorize.net.

Best for:

Any business that deals primarily in downloadable digital products. If you do offer a small number of physical products, the Professional plan offers basic product management functionality.

Pricing:

The Personal plan starts at $89.50 per year, with no additional transaction fees. If you want access to more advanced payment gateways, the Extended plan starts at $199.50 per year. For more advanced functionality, such as physical product management, choose the Professional ($269.55) or All Acces ($449.55).

4. MemberPress

MemberPress is the very best WordPress membership plugin, and it lets you accept payments through PayPal and Stripe.

What are membership plugins for? These tools let you require users to log in to access members-only content. This content could include online courses, subscription-only blogs, downloadables, or member-only products.

MemberPress won’t be right for just any business, but it’s an excellent choice if you use a membership or subscription-based business model.

Features:

• Recurring payments
• Locked downloads
• Flexible payment gateway
• Pricing pages
• Paywall
• Coupons

Payment Gateways/Processors:

PayPal and Stripe

Pricing:

The pricing starts at $179.50 per year for the Basic plan, with no transaction fees. It goes up to $399.50 per year for the Pro plan.

5. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is one of the most well-known WordPress plugins on the market.

It’s the perfect option for those who want to run full-fledged eCommerce stores, because it has plenty of useful features.

Most WordPress eCommerce websites use WooCommerce as their main plugin. If you’re doing eCommerce, you should give it a try.

Features:

• Extensive list of additions and plugins
• Stripe integration
• Stripe refunds
• A wide variety of themes
• Fast mobile checkout

Payment Gateways/Processors:

WooPayments, Stripe, Paypal, Square, and more

Best for:

Online store owners who want an extremely customizable experience.

Pricing:

WooCommerce’s basic WordPress plugin is free. For more advanced features, WooCommerce offers a wide variety of free and paid extensions, so you can tailor your payment plugin to have exactly what you need.

6. WP Full Pay

WP Full Pay is a beginner-friendly WordPress Stripe payment plugin.

It doesn’t require coding, it’s easy to use, and it’s trusted by over 7,000 users.

The vast majority of payment management tasks can be done inside the WordPress dashboard, so it’s not confusing even if you’ve never used a similar plugin in the past.

Features:

• Recurring payments
• Donations
• Settling invoices
• Collecting customer payment information
• Secure payments

Payment Gateway/Processor:

Stripe

Best for:

WordPress sites that want to be able to quickly and easily start accepting payments for one-time purchases, donations, or subscriptions.

Pricing:

There is a free basic version of the plugin. For more features, the Starter plan is $49 per year with no transaction fees, and pricing tops out at $269 per year for the Agency plan.

7. Accept Stripe Payments

Accept Stripe Payments does exactly what the name says it does. It’s a WordPress plugin created specifically for those who want to receive payments through Stripe.

It’s simple, and it doesn’t have advanced functionality. All you can use it for is to add “Buy now” or “Donate now” buttons on your website with the help of shortcode.

Features:

• Responsive
• Flexible placement
• One-click payments
• Stripe payment history
• Easy installation

Payment Gateway/Processor:

Stripe

Best for:

Individuals and small websites with low sales or donations or that are just getting started.

Pricing:

Free

8. LearnDash

LearnDash is a learning management system (LMS) plugin for WordPress. In simpler terms, it helps users sell online courses in a format similar to Udemy.

Just like MemberPress and WooCommerce, LearnDash is not a standalone payment plugin, but it allows you to receive payments for your courses.

Features:

• One-time payment or subscription courses
• Automatic user enrollment after payment
• Course and group management
• Beautiful design
• Detailed reporting

Payment Gateways/Processors:

PayPal and Stripe

Best for:

Websites that offer a significant number of online courses.

Pricing:

The LearnDash LMS plugin starts at $199 per year for a single site. It’s $399 a year for up to 10 sites and $799 for unlimited.

What’s the Best WordPress Payment Plugin for My Business?

The list we put together has several standalone payment plugins, as well as more robust plugins that have a more targeted purpose.

• If you want something efficient and easy to install, your best option would be a standalone payment plugin like WP Simple Pay.
• If you need to host multiple types of forms on your site, WPForms is the best plugin.
• For subscription or membership-based sites, MemberPress would be a better choice.
• Full eCommerce stores should consider WooCommerce
• Educational sites should look into LearnDash.

In short, there is no single best payment plugin for WordPress. Instead, you should choose the one that best fits your business’s needs.

Get More Sales Through Your Payment Plugin

I hope this article helps you find the best WordPress Stripe payment plugin for your business!

If you found it helpful, then you might want to also check out these resources:

• 15 Best WordPress eCommerce Plugins
• 23 Best WooCommerce Themes for Your Online Store
• 11 Best WordPress Marketing Plugins (Compared)
• Ultimate eCommerce Optimization Guide: 13 Steps to Instantly Boost Revenue

Now that you’re all set to accept payments on your WordPress site, it’s time to start making sales!

OptinMonster is the best tool for converting more of your website visitors into customers and subscribers.

You can use our popups, floating bars, and other onsite campaigns to show your best offers to the right people at just the right time. For the visitors who aren’t quite ready to buy, our optin campaigns let you collect email addresses so you can nurture those leads through email marketing.

Plus, your first high-converting campaign is on us!

When you join OptinMonster, one of our conversion experts will create a powerful campaign for you – FREE of charge.

You’ll be able to generate sales from the get-go!

If that sounds good, sign up for OptinMonster below.

Get Started With OptinMonster Today!

1. Optimized content that earns a #1 ranking for your search keyword
2. A piece of copy that Google sees as valuable enough to feature

With so much competition out there, featured Google snippets can feel like an impossible goal. However, there are plenty of SEO strategies that can improve your chances.

In this article, I’ll show you how to get featured snippets for your content. While there are no guarantees, these tactics will make it more likely for Google to feature your content as a search snippet, driving more traffic to your site.

• What Is a Featured Snippet?
• Types and Examples of Featured Snippets
• How to Get Featured Snippets (4 Proven Tips)
• FAQs

What is a Featured Snippet?

A featured snippet is a Google search result that provides a short answer to the user’s search query, in addition to the link to that answer’s source. Featured snippets are sometimes called “answer boxes.”

Here’s a featured snippet example that I found by Googling “featured snippet”:

This brief definition is at the very top of the SERP (search engine results page). Google bolds the most important part of the definition and highlights it in blue. The URL and linked title tag are listed below the snippet.

This answer box draws the eye of searchers, hugely increasing the chance that they’ll click on that search result.

In fact, a study from the digital agency Tallwave found that featured snippets boost click-through rate (CTR) by a whopping 859%, from 2.7% to 25.9%.

Types and Examples of Featured Snippets

I’m going to cover for 4 most common types of featured snippets and provide an example of each:

1. Paragraph snippets
2. List snippets (both numbered and bulleted)
3. Table snippets
4. Video snippets

Of these, paragraph snippets are by far the most common, with about 70% of search snippets falling into this type.

Lists are the next most common, with table and video being fairly rare.

1. Paragraph Snippets

For this type of featured snippet, Google uses text from the source page to provide an answer to the searcher’s question immediately.

For example, here’s an answer box we earned for our OptinMonster blog. Users who searched for “email subject line” saw this definition, which was pulled from our post on 184 Email Subject Lines And Why They Work.

This article is one of the highest-traffic posts on our blog due to search volume, our consistently high ranking, and the fact that we often have the Google featured snippet.

How did we achieve this snippet?

• By creating a high-quality, helpful post
• By optimizing the post for the top SEO ranking factors
• By including a concise and precise explanation for the search term
• By making it easy for Google to find that definition

This screenshot shows the blog copy that the featured snippet was pulled from:

We wrote our copy as a direct answer to the question in our subheading. We followed this formula:

“What Is X? X is . . . “

By formatting our definition in this way, Google can easily find it and pull it for a featured snippet.

2. List Featured Snippets

List snippets come in 2 flavors: numbers and bullets. They often feature steps, tips, or instructions.

Here’s an example of a numbered list snippet for the search term “tips for email copywriting”:

This exact list doesn’t exist within the HubSpot article. Instead, Google pulled the list from the article’s subheadings.

List snippets can also take the form of numbered instructions, like in this recipe result:

Bulleted snippets will come up when content doesn’t use numbers, and the order doesn’t really matter.

If your list doesn’t fit within the answer box, you’ll see “More items” link. This signals to the searcher that there is more information available and could easily lead to increased click-through rates!

3. Table Featured Snippets

Table snippets show collections of data in a clear table format.

Here’s a table featured snippet example that I found by Googling “American to metric conversion”:

This example shows the potential pitfalls of table snippets, as Google has actually incorrectly pulled the data. After all, 1 inch does not convert to 4.929 ml. In this case, Google pulled data from multiple side-by-side tables in the original article.

Here’s an example of a more successful table snippet, which provides correct information:

In both of these cases, the original article included tables that Google could pull data from. As with the “More items” link for list snippets, Google will feature a “More rows” link for longer tables.

4. Video Featured Snippets

Google often prioritizes video results for how-to search queries, and that can include the occasional video featured snippet, where the video can be played right on the SERP page. In this example, Google highlights the 90-second clip that’s most relevant to the user’s search.

Video snippets are always pulled from YouTube, as that platform is owned by Google. Despite the fact that there are 14 billion videos on YouTube, video snippets are quite rare.

What’s more common these days is getting a rich search result, like the one below that features key moments in the video:

You can also win a spot in a list of video results:

In order to win video featured snippets and rich results, you should:

• Organize your content in a step-by-step format
• Upload a script for the video’s closed captions
• Optimize the video’s description using long-tail keywords
• Add timestamped chapters to your YouTube videos
• Use a video schema markup on any videos you embed on your website

How to Get Featured Snippets (4 Proven Tips)

Featured snippets are challenging to earn. However, here are 4 actionable tips to help you learn how to get a featured snippet for your chosen keyword.

1. Include Concise Explanations
2. Help Google Find Your Snippet With Headings & Questions
3. Use Data-Driven, Well-Structured Content
4. Always Consider Search Intent

1. Include Concise Explanations

While it’s no secret that Google favors long-form content, you need to be precise when providing your definitions and explanations.

The average length of a paragraph snippet is 40-50 words, so keep that in mind when you’re writing the content that you’re specifically trying to get recognized as a featured snippet.

After that initial brief explanation, you can go into more detail with examples and use cases.

2. Help Google Find Your Snippet With Headings & Questions

Once you’ve written a perfect and concise answer for a search query, you need to make sure Google can find it. You can do that through your subheadings and by including direct questions in your content.

Here’s a featured snippet example for the search term “accounts payable vs. receivable.”

I clicked on that result so I could see how GoCardless had presented their snippet text:

GoCardless included both a subheading and a question to make it easy for Google to recognize that their copy would make a good featured snippet.

3. Use Data-Driven, Well-Structured Content

Google loves lists, numbers, and steps that are well-organized, and it picks up on standard formatting tags like <table>, <ol>, and <ul>.

Here are a few tips for getting list and table snippets:

1. Number your subheadings: If your content includes steps, instructions, or best-of lists, create numbered subheadings that Google can easily recognize. Also, place those subheadings under a descriptive main heading. For instance, you might have an H2 heading that reads “How to Start a Butterfly Garden.” Your H3s under that heading might be, “1. Pick a Sunny Location,” “2. Till and Fertilize Your Soil,” and so on.
2. Include tables of contents: A table of contents that includes all your headings and subheadings also helps Google find lists to pull for featured snippets.
3. Summarize your content in a table: Your article might cover a topic such as the average income in top cities. If you add a table that summarizes the data in your article, Google will be more likely to use it as a featured snippet.
4. Use bulleted and numbered lists: Always look for information that would be best presented as a bulleted list. Not only do lists make your content easier to scan online, but helpful lists are often used for Google snippets.

Remember that your ultimate goal is to be the best at answering the searcher’s question, so your answer should always contain well-researched and factual information.

4. Always Consider Search Intent

When implementing any of the above strategies, you have to ask the question: What information is the searcher looking for?

Search intent, also called keyword intent, is the ultimate goal of the searcher. Google uses search intent to determine which results to display for a given search query.

If you want to get an answer box for a specific topic, Google some of the top related keywords to see what Google believes the intent is for those queries. Then, try to make your content more concise, precise, and helpful than the competition. This keyword research will help you earn higher search rankings, get more answer boxes, and drive more traffic to your site.

Featured Snippet FAQs

1. Are featured snippets good for SEO?
Yes, featured snippets are excellent for SEO. They place your content at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), significantly increasing your visibility and click-through rates (CTR). Featured snippets drive more traffic to your site, as users are drawn to concise and relevant information.

2. What is the difference between featured snippets and rich snippets?
Featured snippets provide a direct answer to a user’s query at the top of the SERP, above the regular search results. They often include a summary of the content pulled directly from a web page, along with a link to the source. Rich snippets, on the other hand, are enhanced search results that include information such as ratings, reviews, or product details. Rich snippets make use of structured data markup, also called schema markup, to provide this extra context within the search results.

3. What tools can I use to find featured snippet opportunities?
There are several tools you can use to identify answer box opportunities:

• LowFruits: Helps you find low-competition keywords to optimize your chance of getting high rankings and Google snippets.
• Semrush: Offers a powerful feature for finding keywords that trigger featured snippets and can help you identify gaps in your content.
• Ahrefs: Provides insights into which keywords your competitors are ranking for in featured snippets and how you can optimize your content to capture those spots.
• Moz: Helps you track your rankings and find potential featured snippet opportunities by analyzing the SERPs.
• Answer The Public: Lets you discover common questions and search queries related to your topic, which can be used to optimize your content for featured snippets.

4. Can I lose a featured snippet once I have it?
Yes, it’s possible to lose a featured snippet. You may lose it to a competitor that has optimized its content, or Google might update its algorithms.

5. How often should I update my content to maintain featured snippets?
Google favors fresh and relevant content, so you should revisit your posts every few months to add new information, update statistics, and improve readability. Additionally, keep an eye on changes in search intent and your competitor’s content, so you can find opportunities to re-optimize your pages.

6: How do featured snippets impact voice search?
Featured snippets play a significant role in voice search. When users make voice queries, virtual assistants like Google Assistant often read out the featured snippet as the answer. Because of this functionality, optimizing your content for featured snippets can increase your visibility and engagement in voice search results.

Level Up Your SEO With Featured Snippets

When you optimize your content for Google featured snippets, you can catch the attention of more users, improve your search rankings and traffic, and demonstrate your authority in your niche.

If you’re interested in more ways to boost your rankings, check out these resources:

• Beginner’s SEO Guide: Learn the Basics & Most Important Tips
• What Is Off-Page SEO? 15 Proven Off-Page SEO Tips to Boost Rankings
• On-Page SEO Checklist: Drive More Traffic with On-Page Optimization

Of course, driving traffic to your site is only the first step. Next, you need to focus on converting that traffic into subscribers, sales, and revenue.

That’s where OptinMonster comes in!

You can use our popups, floating bars, and other onsite marketing campaigns to show your best offers to the right people at just the right time.

In a 2023 study by Venngage, 80% of marketers said visual content was either “Very important” to their marketing strategy or chose the answer, “My strategy is nothing without visual content.”

The bottom line is that if you want to stay ahead of the marketing game, you need to use visual content marketing.

But not everybody’s a design whiz. We totally get that, but free tools and software are available to help.

And so, in this article, we’ve compiled a list of the best visual content creation tools.

And there’s a bonus: All visual content creation tools listed below are free.

Recommended Resource Need to jumpstart your content marketing results? Get more traffic and conversions with our Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing.

We’ve divided the tools into categories, so you can easily find the visual content creation tools you need first:

• Image Creation Tools
• Video Creation Tools
• Animation Tools
• Infographic Creation Tools
• Screen Capture Tools
• Meme Creation Tools
• GIF Creation Tools
• Presentation Creation Tools

Image Creation Tools

Let’s start our list of digital content creation tools with some tools focused on creating and editing images.

1. Adobe Express

Adobe Express is a fast content creation software that lets you easily combine text, images, and video content for better storytelling online. While we’re including it as an example of image creation software, you can also use it to make just about any visual media.

The basic version of Adobe Express is completely free, with no credit card required. There are tons of templates available for different image types, such as Instagram posts and Reels. Note that there are some templates that require the Premium version, which is $9.99 a month with a 30-day free trial.

2. BeFunky Graphic Designer

If you’re looking for a way to quickly create collages and other photos, BeFunky Graphic Designer can help. You can also make cards, banners, brochures, and posters with this fast content creation software package. Enjoy the free version, and you can always upgrade to the premium plan if you need more advanced features.

3. Canva

Canva is one of our favorite tools, making it easy to create and edit customized images for sharing on social media, illustrating blog posts, and much more. It’s an essential content marketing tool for any visual content creator.

Most of Canva’s basic functionality is available in its free version. Features such as the background remover and Magic Resize tool require Canva Pro.

4. Fotor Photo Editor

Looking for photo editing, photo effects, and image retouching? Try the templates and tools from Fotor to make graphic design easy.

5. Pablo

If you’re looking for content creation tools for social media, then Pablo, by Buffer, is a good choice. After all, Buffer is one of the best social media management tools on the market.  It makes it easy to combine beautiful images with text, and it includes filters. You can add your own logo, too.

6. Pixlr

Pixlr is another useful free content creation tool. It’s available in three flavors:

• A quick tool for adding fun filters
• Pixlr Express, which offers AI-powered photo editing
• The full Pixlr Editor, which has many of the same functions as professional image editing software like Photoshop

The premium versions are ad-free and offer upgrades such as AI credits.

7. Quotes Cover

You don’t have to log in or sign up to use Quotes Cover. This free digital content creation tool lets you easily create quote graphics online. And you can use their designs as a starting point, making the process pretty quick.

While Quotes Cover is a pretty basic web application, it can come in handy if you need to create a quote graphic in seconds.

8. Snappa

The next on our list of free content marketing tools is Snappa. This web app is a full-featured drag and drop image editor, which lets you add and edit effects with a slider. You can upload your own graphics and save designs in folders.

9. Stencil

Stencil streamlines content creation for social media. This fast, simple app lets you easily combine photos, icons, and more to create your own images. And it includes image templates and quote graphic templates, too.

Video Creation Tools

Our next selection of free visual content creation tools is all about video. Here are a few examples of video-making software that will help you ramp up your content marketing.

10. Animaker

Want to get the effect of a studio-created animated video without the hefty price tag? That’s what Animaker offers. You can create multiple video types including explainer videos, whiteboard videos, and even infographic videos. Note that the free version only allows you to create videos up to 2 minutes in length.

11. iMovie

If you’re using iOS or MacOS, then iMovie is likely one of the best free video tools you can use. This app makes it easy to create and share videos, and to make Hollywood-style video trailers.

12. Lumen5

Lumen5 is one of the more interesting visual content creation tools on our list. That’s because it uses artificial intelligence to let you create a video from text. Enter a URL and the software will create videos to match, including photos and music. This is definitely one to keep an eye on.

The free version lets you create up to 5 videos a month, and they will have a watermark. But it’s a great choice for beginners without a budget.

13. RawShorts

RawShorts is a drag and drop video editor designed to make it easy to create animated and explainer videos. It includes tons of free templates, which users can select and customize. And it’s easy to add other media, transitions, and audio to your video creation.

14. Soapbox

Wistia is a video marketing platform that offers a lot of tools and features. It lets you create and share videos in your browser window through your webcam or via screen recording. No technical skills required!

Tools to Use11 Best Instagram Video Editing Tools Compared (Free and Paid)

Animation Tools

Want to make short animations to liven up your content marketing? These free animation tools will help.

15. Google Photos

Google Photos has a built-in Assistant that works with the photos you upload to automatically create short movies and animations. If you want more control, you can also create them yourself from within the cross-platform app. You simply select up to 49 of your photos, click the + icon, and select Animation.

16. Powtoon

Powtoon bridges the gap between videos and presentations, making it easy to create appealing visual content in only a few minutes. These are an excellent way to get attention and engage your audience.

17. Renderforest

If you’re looking for a way to create cute animated videos fast, RenderForest is a good option. This cloud-based animation and video maker helps you quickly make intro videos, explainer videos, presentations, infographics, and much more. They have multiple cartoon templates that you can customize to your needs.

Infographic Creation Tools

Next, it’s time to look at tools for infographics, which are one of the most engaging visual content formats.

18. Infogram

If you’re looking for interactive visual content creation tools, Infogram is worth a try. In the free version, you get access to templates for infographics, charts, maps, and more. You’ll be limited to 10 projects with their free infographic tool. To make more, you’ll need to upgrade.

19. Venngage

Venngage makes it easy to create infographics via a three-step process. First, choose a template, then add elements, and finally, customize your design. Some functionality is reduced in the free plan, but there’s still a lot to love, with its easy interface and sharp design templates.

20. Visme

If you want to get started with infographics, Visme has a lot to offer. It includes several templates, charts and widgets that you can use to create your infographic. Unfortunately, you need a premium plan to actually download your image. The free version only lets you share a link to your infographic.

Note: Canva, which he discussed earlier, also has dozens of free infographic templates that you can customize with your data.

Screen Capture Tools

Do you want to create tutorials or guides related to technology? A free screen capture tool is a great way to illustrate steps for your audience. Here are some worth checking out.

21. Zight (formerly CloudApp)

Zight is an excellent too  for creating screenshots, screen recordings, and animated GIFs. It’s available as an app or as a Chrome extension. It’s simple to use and allows unlimited screenshots, even in the free version. However, you’re limited to 25 drops per month.

22. Awesome Screenshot

Awesome Screenshot is a browser extension available for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari that lets you quickly capture web pages and add annotations. You can store, organize, and share images, too. The free version allows you up to 100 screenshots and 20 recordings per month.

23. Firefox Screenshots

Recent versions of the Firefox web browser include the built-in Firefox Screenshots tool. This lets you take a photo of a part of the screen, the visible screen area, or the whole web page with just a couple of clicks. You get online storage for images, too.

24. Kap

If you need a digital content creation tool for MacOS, then Kap could be useful. It’s an open-source screen recorder that’s fast, functional, and easy to use.

25. Nimbus Capture

Nimbus Capture is another browser screenshot tool that allows you to capture and edit screenshots. It works with Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.

26. Windows Snipping Tool

The Snipping Tool built into Windows is another easy way to create screenshots. You can use different types of screen captures and can highlight, annotate, and remove URLs from snips.

Meme Creation Tools

Whether they’re cat pictures or screenshots from movies, it’s hard to imagine the web without memes, so here are some free meme creation tools to help you create your own.

27. iMeme

iMeme is image editing software specifically designed for memes. It includes 50 common memes, or you can use your own photos. You can also customize the text. There’s just one downside: there’s no built-in sharing. You’ll have to download your newly created meme and share it manually.

28. Make a Meme

With Make a Meme, you can upload an image, add text via the onscreen input boxes, and then press a button to create your meme. If you’re happy with the meme preview, it’s then easy to share from the preview page.

29. Meme Buddy

Meme Buddy is an online meme generator with a difference: it lets you make a meme by voice via an integration with Google Assistant. You can choose images, add text, translate memes, and much more, all without having to touch a keyboard.

GIF Creation Tools

A little bit of animation is great for getting visitors’ attention, so it doesn’t hurt to add GIFs to your digital content creation mix. Here are some free GIF creation tools to help you get started.

30. Ezgif

Want to create a GIF fast? With Ezgif you can upload a series of images and it’ll create the GIF for you. You can adjust the order of uploaded images, change the GIF size, and tweak animation settings, too. In fact, this is the tool I use to create GIFs here at OptinMonster.

31. Giphy

Giphy is one of the best-known GIF platforms for social media. It integrates with multiple apps to help people find the right GIF to share. But it also includes an online GIF creator. Just upload a photo or a video, set your animation speed, and add some decorative effects, and then your GIF is ready to upload and share.

32. Imgflip

Like other online meme generators, Imgflip works with existing memes or lets you upload your own image. Once that’s done, you can easily add text to the top, bottom, or both to create your meme.

Presentation Creation Tools

Whether you’re presenting at a conference or during a webinar, a slideshow is an important visual guide. Here are a few free presentation tools that make slideshows a snap.

33. Google Slides

If you’re already using other Google services, then Google Slides is a useful part of the suite. It allows you to quickly create visually appealing presentations using pre-made templates. You can also use Slides to work with imported PowerPoint presentations or to export your creations to PowerPoint. Best of all, you never lose your work since everything auto-saves.

34. Emaze

Emaze is an online presentation tool, with templates for design, business, and education in a variety of categories. Just choose a template and start editing, and you’ll soon have an attractive presentation. You can also create other visual content, as well as websites, with this software. The free version limits you to 5 projects per month

35. Prezi

Prezi offers presentation design for non-designers, letting you get started quickly with templates relating to different niches. This fast content creation software also makes it easy to change how you navigate through a presentation based on your audience. And it provides stats on audience interaction. The free version has some limitations, but it’s a great start.

36. SlideDog

SlideDog lets you create and play presentations and media playlists. Presentations are interactive, and you can livestream and share content. SlideDog integrates with all common presentation and media software. The free version does lack a feature important features, such as dual screen/presenter view and the ability to use your mobile device to control your presentation.

37. Slides

Slides is a browser-based presentation tool that offers a live presentation mode. It includes vertical slides and lets you create private slide decks by default. And it includes the ability to embed presentations and to get data on viewer activity.

38. Sway

Sway is an online presentation tool from Microsoft that lets you create presentations from existing templates or documents. It’ll also help you get started by gathering resources related to your chosen topic.

Improve Your Marketing With Visual Content

That’s it! With these visual content creation tools, you have everything you need to grab visitors’ attention.

Want to learn more about creating great content? Check out these resources:

• The Ultimate Content Marketing Toolbox: 55 Tools You Need to Know
• 15 Visual Content Creation Tips to Start Using NOW
• 29 Impressive Content Marketing Examples

But don’t stop at creating great content! Use your videos, presentations, memes, GIFs, and more to improve your OptinMonster marketing campaigns.

OptinMonster customer Sportique doubled conversions by using an edited image as part of an optin form and combining it with OptinMonster’s exit-intent technology to get visitors’ attention just before they clicked away from the site.

Check out OptinMonster’s other features, and see how you too could combine our software with the content you create to convert more abandoning visitors into subscribers.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also want to read this post, How to Use Popup Animation Effects for Eye-Catching Promotions.

Sign up for OptinMonster today to start creating visually stunning campaigns that convert!

SEO (search engine optimization) is constantly evolving, especially with Google’s frequent algorithm updates. On-page SEO remains a critical part of getting seen online, but best practices are shifting quickly.

As a content writer at OptinMonster, I carefully track which on-page SEO tactics will drive the most traffic to our site and apply those strategies every day. I’ve condensed what I’ve learned into this guide to the most important on-page strategies.

In this article, I’ll share an on-page SEO checklist full of tactics that we currently use at OptinMonster to optimize our own WordPress posts. With these tips, you’ll be better prepared to meet current SEO standards and improve your search rankings.

• What Is On-Page SEO?
• On-Page SEO Checklist (10 Steps for Higher Rankings)
• Make On-Page SEO Easy with All in One SEO

What Is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing individual web pages, so they’ll rank higher in search engines and earn more relevant traffic. This optimization involves tweaking both the content and the HTML source code of a page.

On-page optimization includes improving elements such as content quality, SEO keywords, titles, URLs, subheadings, and more.

Effective on-page SEO ensures that your website is easy to read and understand by search engines. When you engage in on-page optimization, your pages will rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). Not only that, but your pages will also have greater appeal to users, so they’ll be more likely to click your links in their search results.

On-page SEO is one of the major categories of SEO ranking factors, along with off-page SEO, technical SEO, and content SEO.

Imagine your webpage as a brick-and-mortar store. On-page SEO is like choosing the name of your store, putting up clear signage, organizing your products neatly, and ensuring everything is easily accessible.

In other words, on-page tactics are like the efforts you make on and within your store to make everything easy to understand. These practices help customers find what they’re looking for and have a pleasant experience. With SEO, however, those “customers” are search engines and users.

On-Page SEO Checklist (10 Steps for Higher Rankings)

Creating a fail-proof on-page SEO strategy is essential for boosting your website’s visibility and driving organic traffic. Here’s a comprehensive checklist to ensure each page on your site is fully optimized.

1. Write High-Quality, Helpful Content
2. Optimize for Keywords
3. Create Compelling Title Tags
4. Write Engaging Meta Descriptions
5. Use a Simple URL
6. Optimize Internal Linking
7. Improve Content Readability
8. Enhance Mobile Friendliness
9. Add Image Alt Text
10. Use Schema Markup

1. Write High-Quality, Helpful Content

Your content is the heart of your website. It’s what engages users, provides value, and keeps them coming back.

High-quality content should be:

• Relevant: Ensure your content addresses the needs and interests of your target audience.
• Informative: Provide in-depth information that answers questions and solves problems.
• Engaging: Use a conversational tone, compelling visuals, and interactive elements to keep readers hooked.

The quality of your content is also absolutely central to your SEO efforts. Google’s most recent algorithm updates have largely focused on prioritizing webpages the search engine sees as most helpful to users.

If you want your webpages to rank in Google, your content needs to be people-first. Focus more on creating genuinely helpful posts and pages rather than stuffing in as many keywords as you can.

You’ll also need to keep in mind Google’s E-E-A-T ranking factors. E-E-A-T stands for:

• Expertise: Show that the content is created by someone with expertise in the subject matter. For instance, you can highlight the author’s credentials and experience. For instance, in the introduction of this post, I mentioned how on-page SEO is a central part of my job.
• Experience: Share firsthand experiences and insights. Personal anecdotes or case studies can add depth and authenticity to your content.
• Authoritativeness: Establish your site as an authority in your field. This can be achieved through backlinks from reputable sites and mentions in industry publications. The best way to earn this authoritativeness is by consistently writing excellent content.
• Trustworthiness: Build trust with your audience by providing accurate, up-to-date information and being transparent about your sources.

On-page SEO requires quality over quantity. It’s better to have a few pieces of outstanding, regularly updated content than many mediocre ones.

2. Optimize for Keywords

While keyword stuffing is an outdated SEO tactic, keyword optimization is still absolutely vital. Keywords let you target your content to the information that people are searching for.

Effective keyword optimization includes:

• Research: Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, LowFruits, or Semrush to find relevant keywords with good search volume and low competition.
• Placement: Naturally integrate keywords into your title, meta description, headings, and throughout the content. Avoid keyword stuffing as it can lead to penalties.
• Variations: Include long-tail keywords and related terms to capture more search traffic and answer various queries.

By strategically using keywords, you help search engines understand your content and improve your chances of ranking higher.

3. Create Compelling Title Tags

Your title tag is one of the most critical on-page SEO elements because it’s what appears as the clickable headline in search results.

Here’s an example of a title tag that I used for one of my blog posts for OptinMonster.

This title, plus other on-page SEO tactics, has made this article one of the most successful posts on our blog.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind when writing your title tag:

• Include Primary Keywords: Place your main keyword phrase near the beginning of the title to catch users’ attention.
• Be Descriptive: Clearly describe what the page is about in a way that entices users to click.
• Focus on Benefits: Tell readers exactly what they’ll gain by reading your content.
• Keep It Short: Aim for 50-60 characters to ensure your title isn’t cut off in SERPs.

A well-crafted title tag is a vital part of your on-page optimization efforts. A great title can improve your search rankings, significantly increase your click-through rate (CTR), and drive more traffic to your site.

4. Write Engaging Meta Descriptions

While meta descriptions don’t directly impact rankings, they play a crucial role in attracting clicks. And a higher CTR likely will improve your rankings over time.

An effective meta description should:

• Summarize the Content: Provide a brief overview of what users can expect from the page.
• Include Keywords: Incorporate your primary keyword to align with users’ search queries.
• Be Persuasive: Use a compelling call-to-action or a question to encourage users to click.
• Be the right length: Aim for a meta description length of around 150-160 characters to ensure it will be displayed fully.

Keep in mind that there’s no guarantee Google will display your meta description, but if Google does display it, a convincing description can boost your CTR.

5. Use a Simple URL

A clean and concise URL is important for both user experience and SEO. Your URLs should:

• Be Descriptive: Use words that clearly describe the content of the page.
• Include Keywords: Incorporate your main keyword to enhance relevance.
• Be Short: Keep URLs as brief as possible while still conveying meaning. Avoid unnecessary words or characters. For example, a URL like www.yoursite.com/seo-checklist is much better than www.yoursite.com/12345-p=seo-checklist.

6. Optimize Internal Linking

Internal linking is when you link to other pages and posts on your website. It’s essential for helping search engines understand your website’s structure.

For example, I recently added these links to one of my blog posts, where I included a list of some of OptinMonster’s top features:

Here are a few guidelines for internal links:

• Use Descriptive Anchor Text: Anchor text is the text that you use for your hyperlink. Ensure your anchor text is relevant to the linked page and includes keywords when appropriate.
• Link to Relevant Pages: Connect your content with other relevant pages on your site to provide additional value to users.
• Avoid Overstuffing: Use internal links naturally and only where it makes sense. Too many links can be overwhelming.

These links do more than help search engines understand your website. Relevant internal links also encourage visitors to stay on your website longer, which signals to search engines that you’re providing helpful content.

7. Improve Content Readability

Readable and scannable content keeps users engaged and reduces bounce rates, which can positively impact your rankings.

• Use Short Paragraphs: Break your content into short, digestible paragraphs.
• Incorporate Bullet Points and Lists: These make information easy to scan.
• Use Subheadings: Organize content with clear subheadings to guide readers through your post.

If you scroll through this post, you’ll notice that I’m incorporating all of these tactics.

This on-page SEO tactic is all about making your content easy to read and scan on the web. That’s why you should also consider the grade-level of your writing. I often use the free Hemingway Editor to determine my posts’ grade level and identify sentences that are hard to read.

8. Enhance Mobile Friendliness

Did you know that Google predominantly uses the mobile version of websites when determining search rankings?

That’s because the market share for mobile devices has far surpassed desktop:

To make your content appealing to Google and to mobile users, you should:

• Use a Responsive or Mobile-First Design: Ensure your website adjusts smoothly to different screen sizes.
• Optimize Page Speed: Mobile users expect fast-loading pages, so make sure you compress all images that might slow down loading. Tools like BrowserStack let you check your speed on different devices.

9. Optimize Image Alt Text

Alt text helps search engines understand what your images show and improves accessibility for users with screen readers.

• Be Descriptive: Write alt text that clearly describes the image. What would a reader need to know if they couldn’t see that image?
• Include Keywords: Incorporate relevant keywords naturally, without overstuffing.
• Keep It Relevant: Ensure the alt text is pertinent to the content of the page and what’s in the image. Again, don’t just stuff keywords in that don’t make sense.

In addition to improving your overall SEO, alt text can help your images show up in Google Image search results.

10. Use Schema Markup

The final tip in our on-page SEO checklist is a bit more advanced. Schema markup is a type of code that you add to your website to help search engines better understand the different content elements of your page. These elements include:

• Products
• Star Ratings
• Reviews
• FAQs
• Recipes
• Events

With a schema markup, Google can use these elements to create rich results, like this one:

Schema markup is also called structured data, and you can use Google Structured Data Markup Helper to generate the code for your markup.

By focusing on these on-page SEO elements, you can significantly improve your website’s visibility and performance in search engine results.

Make On-Page SEO Easy with All in One SEO

You may have noticed that it will take some time to go through our on-page SEO checklist for every web page.

Thankfully, there are SEO tools that can speed up the process if you have a WordPress website

My favorite is All in One SEO.

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the best SEO WordPress plugin to help you improve your website search rankings.

I especially love the TruSEO feature, which makes it super easy to optimize every single post and page on your website, even for beginners.

Before we get started, I want to remind you that user experience is still the most important ranking factor. Don’t force yourself to follow suggestions from AIOSEO or any other SEO tool if the suggestion doesn’t improve the quality of the content. For example, don’t overuse keywords if it makes the post sound unnatural. In fact, keyword stuffing can get you penalized by Google.

Step 1: Install All in One SEO

First, you need to sign up for an All in One SEO plan. There’s a free version available on WordPress.org, but if you want an edge over your competitors with advanced SEO modules, smart schema markup, and other advanced features, we recommend choosing a paid plan.

Once you’ve purchased your AIOSEO subscription, log into your AIOSEO account. Download your plugin file and copy your license key.

Next, log into your WordPress site and click on Plugins » Add New.

Choose the plugin file you downloaded earlier and click Install Now.

After WordPress uploads and installs the plugin, click Activate.

Next, go to All in One SEO » General Settings and enter your license key.

Now you’re ready to use AIOSEO for your on-page SEO checklist!

Bonus: You may also want to set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console to help with other parts of your WordPress SEO strategy. For now, we’ll stick with what you can do with All in One SEO.

Step 2: Check Your Basic SEO

Create a new post or page in WordPress or open one that you’d like to optimize. Add your content if you haven’t already.

Underneath the block editor where you added your content, you’ll see a section called AIOSEO Settings.

Scroll down until you see the field where you can add a meta description. The meta description tells searchers what the page is about. It should be 160 characters maximum. There’s a character counter on the bottom right corner of the meta description field.

Now, keep scrolling until you see a section labeled Page Analysis. The first tab we’ll look at is Basic SEO.

You’ll see whether your meta description and content are the right length. Again, your meta description should be no more than 160 characters. You also don’t want it to be too short. You’ll see an indicator here if you need to add or remove characters.

The general standard for content length is at lease 300 words. But remember, content quality is still the most important factor. Only make the page or post as long as it needs to be. If that’s less than 300 words, feel free to ignore this indicator.

AIOSEO also checks whether you’ve included internal and external links.

Step 3: Add a Focus Keyphrase

Next, you need to add a focus keyphrase for this page. This is the target keyword that you want this page to rank for.

We don’t have space for an in-depth review of keyword strategy here, but check out our ultimate guide to keyword research for keyword research tools and strategies you can use.

One quick tip is to use long-tail keywords whenever possible. These are longer phrases that users search for, often when they’re ready to make a purchase.

There may be less search volume for these long-tail search terms, but the user intent to purchase is often very high. So even if you don’t get as much traffic as you would for a highly competitive keyword, the users who do click through are more likely to purchase.

Latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords that relate to your keyword can also be a good option if the keywords you want are very hard to rank for.

To add your focus keyphrase, scroll up to the Focus Keyphrase section. Enter your keyphrase into the field and click Add Focus Keyphrase.

A new checklist will appear along with a keyphrase score out of 100. If your keyphrase score is low, don’t worry! I’ll optimize each of these items in the next few steps.

Step 4: Optimize SEO Title Tag

First, let’s optimize the SEO title.

The SEO title is what appears in the search results. It doesn’t have to be the same as the post or page title in WordPress, though it often is. You can see your current SEO title and meta description in the snippet preview.

The SEO post title defaults to the WordPress post title plus the site title. You can change it in the Post Title field.

Remember, the SEO post title has 1 job: to convince users to click on your search result instead of someone else’s. Make sure your focus keyphrase is included in the SEO title. If possible, include the phrase near the beginning of your title so users see it quickly. The phrase must exactly match the focus keyphrase you set in the last step.

You can get some extra help with your title with the Headline Analyzer feature of All in One SEO. To use the Headline Analyzer, click the SEO Headline Analyzer button in the top right of the editor screen. Note: the Headline Analyzer only works if you’re using the default Block Editor in WordPress.

The Headline Analyzer will give your headline a score based on factors such as:

• Word balance between common, uncommon, emotional, and power words
• Sentiment that is positive, negative, or neutral
• Headline type from either how-to, list, question, or general
• Character count above 35 characters
• Word count above 6 words but not too long
• Beginning & ending words since most readers only look at the first and last 3 words of a headline

You can preview how the headline will look in search to make sure words don’t get cut short.

If you scroll back up to the top of the SEO Headline Analyzer box, you can try a new headline and see how it compares to your previous one.

Step 5: Revise Your Meta Description

Now let’s go back and improve your meta description.

Include the exact focus keyphrase in your meta description. This will signal to searchers that your page has the information they want.

The meta description is a great place to emphasize search intent. If someone is searching for the phrase “challenge funnel,” their primary goal could be:

• Learn what a challenge funnel is
• Make a challenge funnel
• Pick a challenge funnel software

Your post may not cover all of those but that’s okay. You just need to make sure your content and headline clearly match a specific intent.

Step 6: Set the URL

Make sure you have an SEO-friendly URL. The URL or web address of your page should be short and descriptive. Compare these 2 URLs:

• https://optinmonster.com/how-to-create-an-online-challenge-funnel/
• https://help.clickfunnels.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409678093847-Challenge-Funnels

The first one is easier to read and gives more information about what the page will include.

Shorter URLs won’t get cut off in search results. Keeping your URLs short also means search engine crawlers won’t need as much time to crawl your sitemap.

In most cases, you can easily include your focus keyphrase as the URL slug. This is another indicator to users that your page has information they want, which will increase your clickthrough rates (CTR).

To change your page URL, click on the gear icon in the upper right corner of the page editor. Look for the permalink settings and change the URL slug. You’ll need to use dashes instead of spaces since spaces are not allowed in URLs.

Step 7: Check Keyword Density

Now you can scroll back down to the Focus Keyphrase section under the block editor and check your keyphrase usage again.

I’ve already added the focus keyphrase to the meta description, SEO title, and URL.

Now let’s make sure to use keywords in the first paragraph, some of the headings and subheadings, the alt text of images, and the content itself.

Again, don’t force the keyphrase anywhere that doesn’t sound natural or if it will confuse the reader.

Step 8: Review Readability

Finally, you can review your overall page readability.

Scroll down to Page Analysis and click the Readability tab. All in One SEO looks for:

• Images and videos in content
• Paragraph lengths of under 120 words
• Passive voice use of under 20%
• Transition words in over 25% of sentences
• Consecutive sentences starting with different words
• Subheadings every 300 words or less

As always, these are suggestions made by software, not laws governing how you must write your content. You know your audience and your business best, so always write quality content for people first, not robots.

Use This On-Page SEO Checklist to Skyrocket Traffic

Whether you decide to use AIOSEO or just follow our checklist yourself, these on-page SEO factors can help you improve your search rankings and drive more traffic to your site.

Want to learn more about SEO? Check out these resources:

• SEO Beginner’s Guide: Learn the Basics & Most Important Tips
• Cracking the Code: Unveiling 10 Powerful SEO Ranking Factors
• What is White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO: How to NOT Do SEO

Once you’ve started driving more traffic to your website, it’s time to convert those website visitors into subscribers and customers. With OptinMonster, you can use popups, floating bars, and other onsite marketing campaigns to show your best offers to the right people at the right time.

With a well-designed popup, you can offer an incentive for website visitors to sign up for promotional texts from you. Then, you’ll have a strong SMS list to promote your sales, new products, and other offers.

By the end of this article, you’ll learn exactly how to use popups to get mobile phone numbers for your SMS marketing campaigns.

• Why Should You Collect Phone Numbers on Your Website?
• How to Collect Phone Numbers With Popups

Why Should You Collect Phone Numbers on Your Website?

The #1 reason you should collect phone numbers on your website is to engage in SMS marketing. SMS marketing is a strategy that allows businesses to send messages to customers via text. Businesses can send text messages to prospects and customers to increase brand awareness, boost engagement, and generate sales.

If you’re new to SMS marketing or want to improve your strategy, check out our guide below!

If you want a successful SMS marketing strategy, you need to build an SMS list full of engaged leads.

OptinMonster is the best lead generation tool for your website. Whether you want to collect phone numbers or build an email list, OptinMonster makes it easy to do so.

You can use our popups, floating bars, and other onsite campaigns to offer enticing incentives in exchange for visitors’ phone numbers or email addresses.

OptinMonster includes tons of different targeting options, so you can personalize your offer based on the user’s intent, the source traffic, geographical location, and so on.

Using OptinMonster, Biddyco tripled their conversions in just 30 days!

And it’s just so easy to use. You can create stunning popups in minutes, without any coding or design experience.

Now, we’ll build a popup in OptinMonster that collects phone numbers on your website.

How to Collect Phone Numbers With Popups

Before I dive into my step-by-step instructions, here’s a video overview of the process:

Today, we’re going to create this campaign to show you how to collect phone numbers with a popup:

We’ll build our popup based on these popup best practices:

• Offer a valuable incentive
• Create a clear call to action (CTA)
• Use eye-catching design

Let’s get started.

Step 1: Create a Campaign to Collect Phone Numbers

After you’ve signed up for OptinMonster, log into your OptinMonster dashboard and choose Create New Campaign.

With OptinMonster’s 700+ pre-built templates, there’s no need to design a popup from scratch. So in the Create New Campaign box, I’m going to click Templates.

I’ll make sure the templates are filtered by the Popup campaign type, which should be the default. You’ll see a search box where you can search for particular types of templates.

There are lots of ways to filter and search through our templates based on type, season/holiday, goal, and more. I know the exact template I want to use for my phone number popup, so I’ll search for Tech Discount and then click Use Template on the search result of the same name.

After selecting the template, I’ll give my new campaign a name and click Start Building

Step 2: Design a Popup to Collect Phone Numbers

Now, you’ll be in the campaign builder, where you can customize your popup. The Tech Discount template has space for an image, an attention-grabbing headline, and our offer. As you’ll see in a moment, we’ll be able to add a phone number field in seconds.

In our drag-and-drop builder, you have absolute freedom to customize the design. These options give you the power to create popups that reflect your brand and speak to your customers.

That said, we won’t go into too much detail about customizing every aspect of your campaign. There are too many options to cover in just one post.

If you’re just getting started with OptinMonster, check out this guide on how to create and design your first OptinMonster campaign.

For today’s tutorial, you only need to know the basic principles of customizing your template.

By default, many of our templates are 2-step optins that start with a Yes/No view. There are many benefits to 2-step optins. However, I want the popup I’m creating today to immediately show the text fields for entering an email address and phone number.

To do that, click the arrow by the Yes/No tab at the bottom of the page and click Disable Yes/No View.

Then click the Optin tab at the bottom to start editing.

OptinMonster campaigns are built with design elements called blocks. To change an element, all you need to do is click on the block in your editor. Then, you’ll see the editing tools appear on the left side of the editor.

If you want to change the image, click on the image in the campaign, and you’ll see the image settings in the editing panel on the left:

Click on the image in the left panel to upload any image you’d like to replace it. You can also search our Unsplash integration to find stock images to use.

Once you’ve selected the image you want, it will now show up in your campaign.

Editing text is even easier. When you click into a text box, you can change the text within the box itself. Highlight some text, and a formatting toolbar will also display.

After changing the image and text, I’m going to add a phone number field.

Click on the email field in the campaign to open the field settings in the left panel.

Scroll down and click Add New Field.

In the Add New Field window, select Phone to add a phone number field to your popup campaign.

Now, I’ll change the text in the button. With the email and phone number field box still selected, scroll down in the left panel until you see Submit Button. Click the pencil icon to expand your options. Change the text in the Button Text field.

Note: I’m leaving the button color as-is, but you can change it under the Advanced tab.

Let’s change the background color of our popup so it looks better with the photo we’ve chosen. Click the background of your popup campaign, and you’ll see View Styling settings in the left panel.

Change the style from Gradient to Solid. Then, click the color square beside Background Color to change the color.

Now, the Optin view of your popup is ready to go! We’ll just need to take a moment to edit the Success View. That’s what your visitors will see after they submit their email address and phone number.

Click the Success tab at the bottom of the screen to view the Success View.

Then, just follow the same steps as before to edit the image and text.

Step 3: Set Your Display Rules

Next, you’ll need to decide where and when you want to display your campaign.

OptinMonster offers several ways to display your campaigns. Our targeting rules are designed to show the right offer to the right person at the right time.

Our targeting rules let you display campaigns based on:

• Exit-Intent Technology®: show your popup just as a visitor is leaving your site
• Referrer detection: show messages based on where the visitor is coming from, like a referral website
• Page-level targeting: campaigns based on the specific page
• Geolocation targeting: based on the visitor’s location
• Scroll triggers: appear after the visitor has scrolled down a certain section of the page
• InactivitySensor : shown when visitors have been inactive

We’re going to keep it simple for our phone number popup and focus on Exit-Intent®. Our popup will show up anytime a visitor starts to exit our website.

Click the Display Rules tab at the top of the screen.

By default, you’ll see 2 display rules:

1. Time on page is at least 5 seconds
2. Current URL path is any page

We’ll leave #2 as is, but we’re going to edit the first rule.

Click the dropdown arrow beside time on page. Then select Exit Intent®.

You’ll be able to select the level of sensitivity for the exit intention, and I’m going to leave mine at Medium.

With your campaign designed and your display rules now set, click Save.

Step 4: Integrating With an SMS Marketing Tool

Before you publish your campaign, you’ll need to integrate OptinMonster with the platform you use for email and SMS marketing.

Select the Integrations tab at the top of the screen and then click Add a New Integration.

Then, search for your software, select it, and follow the integration instructions.

You’ll need the API key from your email and SMS platform in order to complete your integration.

Save your campaign.

Step 5. Publish Your Phone Number Popup Campaign

All that you need to do now is Publish your campaign.

Click the Publish tab at the top of the page. Under Publish Status, select Publish.

That’s it! You’re on your way to collecting phone numbers using a popup on your website.

For more practical strategies to build your subscriber list, we recommend checking out the following articles:

• 63 Lead Magnets to Increase Subscribers 
• 11+ Website Popup Examples to Help You Boost Conversions
• Opt-in Page Perfection: Examples & Tools to Boost Conversions

Ready to create popups to get more subscribers for your SMS and email marketing? Get your OptinMonster account today.

A well-crafted digital marketing plan helps you set clear objectives, understand your target audience, optimize resources, and measure success effectively. Without a plan, your marketing efforts can become disjointed and ineffective, making it challenging to compete with all the brands vying for online users’ attention.

In this post, I’ll discuss the steps for developing a robust digital marketing plan full of clear, actionable strategies so you can ensure that your marketing efforts are structured, efficient, and impactful.

• What Is Digital Marketing?
• How to Create a Digital Marketing Plan
  • 1. Set Clear Goals
  • 2. Build Solid Customer Avatars
  • 3. Take Inventory of Your Digital Assets
  • 4. Develop New Digital Assets & Decide on Distribution Channels
  • 5. Track Your Metrics & Adjust

What Is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is the process of promoting a brand, company, service, or product via the internet. It includes the use of all online marketing channels, including:

• Search engines
• Social media
• Digital Video Platforms
• Websites
• Paid online ads
• Email

A strong digital marketing plan helps you grow your business by building brand awareness, driving traffic, generating leads, and making sales.

How to Create a Digital Marketing Plan (Step-by-Step)

Before you can create a digital marketing plan, you’ll need to think about why you’re doing it. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

• What results do I want?
• How will I achieve these results?
• How will I measure the results?
• What tools will I need?

Once you’ve explored these questions, you can start following these steps:

1. Set Clear Digital Marketing Goal

One of the most important steps in digital marketing planning is goal setting, so you can fully understand your business objectives.

Do you want to boost brand awareness? Are you looking to add followers on social media? Or do you want to grow your email list?

One of the most popular methods of goal setting is S.M.A.R.T. Smart goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Most goal-setting methods are going to encourage setting goals that meet these same criteria.

Let’s take a look at some digital marketing plan examples for setting attainable and measurable goals.

Increase Brand Awareness

If your goal is to increase brand awareness, you might set up your goal tracking like this:

Goal: Increase website traffic

Metric: 500 new weekly organic site visitors by the end of Q4 2024

Marketing Tactics:

• Create high-quality blog content
• Increase blog posting to 4 days per week
• Optimize posts and pages for search engine rankings
• Use social media marketing to engage with customers and direct them to the site
• Increase guest post contributions to other high-quality publications

Increase Social Media Reach

What if you want to increase your social media reach? In that case, your setup would look similar, but your wording would change. And, of course, your tactics will be a lot different.

Goal: Increase the number of followers on Facebook

Metric: 200 new Facebook followers by the end of Q4 2024

Marketing Tactics:

• Post valuable content on Facebook that appeals to your target market
• Increase Facebook postings from 1 to 2 times per day
• Continue responding to all questions or comments from visitors
• Use Facebook Live feature at least once per month
• Boost 5 posts through Facebook ads

Grow Your Email List

For growing your email list, you may use something like this:

Goal: Increase the number of email subscribers

Metric: 750 new email subscribers by the end of Q4 2024

Marketing Tactics:

• Create 5 new targeted OptinMonster email signup popups
• Offer lead magnets in each popup
• Use Page-Level Targeting to precisely target your lead magnets
• Use Exit-Intent® popups to capture email address before visitors leave your site
• Test your onsite digital campaigns using A/B split test

If you want to use these tactics to grow your email list, sign up for OptinMonster today!

2. Build Solid Customer Avatars

Before you can sell anything, you need to have a clear idea of who you’re selling to.

The customer avatar, a fictional character that represents your ideal customer, can help with this. Customer avatars, also known as buyer personas, tell us a lot about the prospect. For instance, you can pinpoint demographics, such as age, education level, and occupation.

Customer avatars even include the products they’ve purchased and places they’ve visited. They answers questions like:

• Who are they?
• What do they like to do for fun?
• Where do they like to shop?
• What are their habits?

You can also dive further into a customer persona to include psychographics. This includes consumers’ attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological criteria. Just like demographics, psychographics helps you build a customer avatar of what your ideal prospect looks like.

Check out this example of a customer avatar template from Hubspot:

Here’s another example from Digital Marketer:

This information will play an important part in developing your overall digital marketing plan. The more detailed your customer avatar, the better you can customize your digital marketing strategy.

Now that you have your customers sorted out, let’s talk about your digital assets.

3. Take Inventory of Your Current Digital Assets

A digital asset has 3 main characteristics:

• It’s stored digital
• It provides value to your company
• It’s searchable and discoverable

When considering your available digital assets as a part of your strategy, you’ll start by taking inventory of your current digital assets. These can be anything from your blog content to paid ads, or even the exposure earned through word-of-mouth.

Digital assets can be owned, earned, or paid. You’ll need to inventory each type and decide which new assets you need for your digital marketing plan.

Owned Digital Assets

Any digital property that you can control and that is unique to your brand is considered an owned digital asset. A common example is your website, but it can also be things like:

• Social media profiles
• Blog content
• Case studies
• Original imagery and infographics
• Digital videos
• Email marketing

Even some of your off-site content, such as posts on Medium or content on GitHub, can be considered an owned digital asset.

It’s important to track owned media so you can get a full understanding of the buzz around your brand. This also gives you an idea of how that impacts your marketing efforts.

You can track social media directly in the analytics of the social media platform you’re using. There are also amazing tools like MonsterInsights that you can use with Google Analytics to get the info you need to track the ROI of your owned media.

Earned Digital Assets

Next, analyze your earned media assets. Earned media is any attention that you’ve earned but not paid for. You can earn media assets a number of ways including the customer service you’ve provided or through the influence of your SEO efforts.

Here are a few examples of earned digital assets:

• Guest posts
• PR
• Customer experience
• Word-of-mouth
• Press mentions
• Reviews

Other examples include user-generated videos and social media mentions. These can be from content writers, journalists, reporters, or even customers.

GoPro has a number of digital marketing examples that include earned digital assets. One of their more popular earned media assets includes YouTube videos made by customers with GoPro’s products.

Every time someone posts a cool video from their GoPro, the company gets a new earned digital asset.

GoPro encourages the practice by offering prizes for this user-generated content in their GoPro Awards. They also share many of the winning videos on their own YouTube channel.

Here’s an example of one award-winner, a spooky Halloween video created by Lukasz Lewenda.

Lukasz shot 100% of the video using GoPro.

Just like we mentioned about owned media, it’s also important to track your earned media. Depending on the type of earned media you’re tracking, there are different tools that can help.

Again, you really can’t go wrong with MonsterInsights and Google Analytics. But, you can also set up simple Google Alerts or Walk Talker Alerts that can notify you anytime your brand is mentioned online.

Here’s an alert preview for “go pro” using Google Alerts:

Track and analyze your earned media so you can include it into your overall marketing plan.

Paid Digital Assets

Finally, you’ll want to look at all of your paid assets. Typically, paid media serves as a promotion method to boost your exposure. You can find this anywhere exposure is paid for like:

• Google Ads
• Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
• Social media ads
• Native ads
• Online video ads

In terms of tracking, a tool like Semrush can track both organic and paid traffic (such as pay-per-click).

4. Develop New Digital Assets & Decide on Distribution Channels for Your Digital Marketing Plan

Now, you can analyze your goals, customer avatars, and digital assets to decide what’s next. Here are some questions to answer with your marketing team:

• What digital marketing channels do your customer avatars use?
• Which of your existing digital assets be repurposed on these channels?
• What new digital assets do you need to develop?
• What marketing budget will your plan require?
• What time, staff, and resources will your plan require?
• Are you able to accomplish your original goals within the timeline you set? Or should you change it?

Once you answer these questions, you’ll be ready to implement your digital marketing strategy and start working toward your goals.

5. Track Your Metrics & Adjust Your Digital Marketing Strategy Accordingly

In the goal-setting section, I mentioned how important it is for your goals to be measurable. Here’s where that becomes important.

Throughout the time period that you’ve set for your plan, you should monitor your goal metric to see if you’re on-track.

If your goal is to add 750 new email subscribers in 6 months, you’d need to average 125 signups a month. If you only get 50 in your first month, then you probably need to adjust your digital marketing strategy or ramp up your efforts.

For instance, maybe you were using an OptinMonster popup to offer 5% off in exchange for the shopper’s email address.

If this popup isn’t getting enough subscribers, you could try increasing the coupon to 10% off or offering free shipping instead.

In short, you should continually monitor and optimize your online marketing plans based on how your metrics are performing.

FAQs

How can I improve conversion rates in my digital marketing plan?
To improve your conversion rates, use techniques such as A/B testing, improving website usability, and creating compelling calls-to-action (CTAs). These tactics will encourage more users to take desired actions, such as purchasing a product or signing up for a newsletter.

What role does search engine optimization (SEO) play in my digital marketing strategy?
SEO is crucial for increasing your website’s visibility on search engines, driving organic traffic, and enhancing your brand’s online presence. Incorporating SEO best practices, like keyword optimization and quality content creation, ensures your digital marketing strategy reaches the right audience.

How can a small business benefit from a digital marketing plan?
A well-crafted digital marketing plan helps small businesses compete with larger companies by reaching a broader audience online. It helps in building brand awareness, generating leads, and converting those leads into customers, often at a lower cost compared to traditional marketing methods.

Boost Your Business With a Killer Digital Marketing Strategy

Now you have a solid digital marketing strategy framework for your business:

1. Set clear goals
2. Build solid customer avatars
3. Inventory your digital assets
4. Develop new digital Assets and decide on distribution channels
5. Track your metrics and adjust

Want to learn more about developing an online marketing strategy? Here are some resources to help:

• 8 Digital Marketing Best Practices
• The Ultimate Beginner’s Content Marketing Guide
• 45 Best Digital Marketing Tools to Boost Your Business
• Video Marketing Tips to Skyrocket Traffic and Conversions

If your digital marketing plan includes email marketing, OptinMonster is the best way to build a high-quality email list full of engaged subscribers. You can also use our onsite marketing campaigns to keep people on your site longer, offer incentives to buy, recommend products, and more!

In my 15 years of sending promotional emails, I’ve seen just how important it is to clean your list regularly. And here at OptinMonster, email scrubbing is essential to maintaining our list of over 235,000 subscribers.

In this article, I’ll discuss the importance of email list cleaning, also known as email scrubbing. I’ll explain how to clean email lists with a few basic steps and show you how to keep your list clean by verifying new leads.

• What Is Email Scrubbing?
• Importance of Keeping a Clean Email List
• How to Clean Email Lists (6 Steps)
• Alternative: Use an Email List Cleaning Service
• Keep Your List Clean With Verified Email Signups

What Is Email Scrubbing?

Email scrubbing is the process of removing unengaged subscribers and invalid addresses from your email list. With a clean email list, you can optimize your email marketing to be more efficient and more successful.

Here are the types of contacts that you want to target when cleaning an email list:

• Invalid email addresses: These often occur due to typos or because an account or domain has expired.
• Disposable email addresses: Some users will create a temporary email address to register to your site or sign up for a lead magnet.
• Duplicate contacts: This is when there are multiple instances of the same email address on your list.
• Inactive subscribers: You should regularly remove contacts who haven’t opened any of your emails and don’t respond to a re-engagement campaign.

This cleaning/scrubbing process is a vital part of email list hygiene. When you regularly scrub your email list, you eliminate subscribers who will never actually see your emails anyway.

Importance of Keeping a Clean Email List

It may feel like a bummer to delete email subscribers that you worked hard to get. But if those addresses aren’t leading to engagement, then your subscriber number is just a vanity metric. On the other hand, the benefits of email list cleaning are very real, which is why I recommend scrubbing your email list at least twice a year.

Here are some of the top benefits of cleaning your email list:

Better (& More Accurate) Engagement Metrics

As an email marketer, you spend a lot of time and energy measuring the success of your email campaigns. However, if you’ve never cleaned your list, then your metrics won’t be very accurate.

The good news? Your metrics are probably actually higher than you think!

Email open rates, click-through rates (CTR), and other conversion rates are calculated as a percentage of the total number of emails sent.

If invalid and inactive subscribers make up 20% of your list, then these metrics will be artificially low.

Cleaning your email list means you’re sending emails only to those who are interested. And who are real people! This improves your open and CTR percentages.

By cleaning our own email list here at OptinMonster, we’ve achieved phenomenal open rates for our campaigns.

When you remove contacts that never open your emails, you’ll see your metrics improve, too.

Fewer Spam Complaints

Cleaning your email list also reduces your number of spam complaints. Some subscribers mark your emails as spam because they don’t remember signing up, even if they actually did.

Email service providers (ESPs) like Gmail, Yahoo, and others log spam complaints. If there are too many, they’ll start sending your emails straight to the spam folder, skipping the inbox. And they’ll do that for everyone on your list, not just the people who reported you.

Regular email scrubbing helps you identify those uninterested contacts before they resort to marking your messages as spam.

Decrease in Bounced Emails

Sometimes, emails bounce, which means they never reach the intended recipient. Bounces can be caused by full inboxes, changed email addresses, or a technical error.

There are 2 basic types of email bounces:

• Hard bounces: These are permanent delivery failures, such as an invalid address. These addresses can be immediately scrubbed.
• Soft bounces: These are temporary problems, such as a downed server or a full inbox. These addresses may still be valid.

Too many bounces have a similar effect as spam complaints: they signal to ESPs that you may be a spammer.

If you remove bounced email addresses when you clean your email list, the number and percentage of bounces will go down the next time you send.

Through email scrubbing, we’re able to keep our bounce rate under 1% here at OptinMonster.

Improved Sender Reputation & Email Deliverability

Email list cleaning helps you improve all of the above metrics. The sum result of all that improvement? A better sender reputation and improved email deliverability.

Your sender reputation is how trustworthy email servers think you are. And your email deliverability is the percentage of your emails that make it into recipients’ inboxes. A good sender reputation makes it much more likely that your messages will be accepted by email servers and get through their spam filters.

In other words, when you keep a clean list, more of your subscribers will actually see your emails.

Reduced Cost

Email marketing services often charge according to the number of emails you send, the number of subscribers you have, or both.

That means there’s a real financial incentive to clean up your email list. Every invalid or unengaged subscriber who stays on your list costs you money.

Remove them using email scrubbing, and your email marketing’s return on investment (ROI) will improve.

How to Clean Email Lists (6 Steps)

Next, I’m going to share the most important steps in the email list cleaning process. Most of these steps only take a few minutes to accomplish, with the exception of sending re-engagement emails to inactive contacts.

The exact way to accomplish these steps will vary depending on your email marketing platform. For this tutorial, I’ll show you how to clean a list in Constant Contact. The steps for most software will be similar.

1. Remove Hard Bounces and Invalid Addresses
2. Monitor and Clean Up Soft Bounces
3. Eliminate Duplicate Entries
4. Identify Inactive Subscribers Through Email Segmentation
5. Send a Re-Engagement Campaign (and Remove Those Who Don’t Engage)
6. Set Up a Regular Email Scrubbing Schedule

1. Remove Hard Bounces and Invalid Addresses

First things first: You should delete or correct any email addresses that have hard bounced, as those are permanent failures. In your email marketing platform, you should be able to view the bounced emails for every email campaign you send.

In the Constant Contact dashboard, you first click Reporting:

Scroll down until you see your list of email campaigns. Find the most recent campaign that you sent to the list you want to clean.

Click on the number under the Bounces column. (Note that it’s 0 here because this was a test email I sent. Yours should have a number.)

Click on the All Types dropdown menu. Above the faint gray line, you’ll see the categories of hard bounces. Constant Contact even provides a Recommended for removal type, which contains emails that the platform believe are permanently invalid.

Scan through these hard bounce email addresses to identify any obvious typos. For instance, if an email includes “gnail.com” instead of “gmail.com,” you can correct that typo.

For the rest of the addresses, you can remove them from your email list.

2. Monitor and Clean Up Soft Bounces

Go back to the All Types dropdown menu. The categories below the gray line are soft bounces.

Remember, these soft bounces may only be temporary, so you should not just automatically delete them. However, if these bounces start to build up, you should start monitoring them. If an address consistently soft-bounces for 1-3 months, depending on your email frequency, then you should remove it from your list.

3. Eliminate Duplicate Entries

This step is one that you likely won’t need to take. Most email marketing services, including Constant Contact, prevent duplicate email addresses from being entered. However, if you notice that some duplicates have gotten through, you’ll want to delete those duplicates.

Why? Because they’re adding to your subscriber count, and because you run the risk of annoying subscribers if they receive the same email multiple times.

In Constant Contact, you’ll need to export your email list into a spreadsheet, sort it by email name, and search for duplicates in the spreadsheet. Then, in the Constact Contact dashboard, you can search your contacts for those duplicated emails and delete them.

Since you probably won’t need to complete this step, I won’t go into exact instructions here, but you’ll be able to find instructions in your email software’s documentation. Here’s Constant Contact’s guide for deleting duplicates.

4. Identify Inactive Subscribers Through Email Segmentation

If you’ve gone through the first 3 steps, your list should now only have valid email addresses. But your email scrubbing process isn’t over yet.

Next, you need to clean your email list of subscribers who aren’t opening any of your emails. First, you need identify your inactive subscribers by creating an email segment.

Note: In Constant Contact, you’ll need the Standard or Pro plan in order to complete these steps.

In your Constant Contact dashboard, click Contacts and then Segments.

You’ll notice that Constant Contact has pre-built segments for “Most engaged,” “Somewhat engaged,” and “Least engaged” subscribers. These pre-built segments are extremely handy for precisely targeting your email marketing.

However, for email list cleaning, we’ll want to click Create Segment.

Here, you’ll need to type in a Segment Name. I chose “Inactive Subscribers,” but you should make yours more precise by including the date and the length of inactivity you’re targeting.

Under Add a block, open the Choose a criteria block dropdown and select Contact Activity.

Next, select Did not open in the dropdown menu.

More dropdown menus will appear as you make your selections. Choose any email and in the last. In the last dropdown, you’ll select how long it’s been since the subscriber has opened one of your emails. I suggest choosing either 180 days or 1 year.

Feel free to add any other criteria blocks to your segment. For instance, you could only include members from specific email lists. Constant Contact integrates with Shopify, so you can also add an eCommerce block to only include subscribers who haven’t purchased in the past year.

Once you’ve completed your criteria, Save your segment.

You could go ahead and delete these contacts now. However, I strongly suggest that you try to re-engage them first.

5. Send a Re-Engagement Campaign (and Remove Those Who Don’t Engage)

Before removing inactive subscribers, try to re-engage them with a targeted campaign. Send at least 1 personalized email asking if they still want to receive your content.

Here’s an example of a re-engagement email from Canva.

This message was the final email in a re-engagement series, where contacts were unsubscribed unless they clicked the link in the email.

I suggest sending out 2-4 emails in your re-engagement campaign.

1. First, send an email pointing out that they haven’t opened an email in a while. Take the opportunity to remind them of what you offer. Your subject line can include phrases like “We miss you,” “Let’s reconnect,” or “Are you still interested.” Include a link to manage their email preferences.
2. Send out an incentive like a coupon code or free content.
3. If you’ve offered an incentive, send a “Last Chance” email.
4. If they haven’t opened any of these emails, send a goodbye email letting them know that you won’t be emailing them anymore. Be sure to include a link to resubscribe.

You can use an email automation flow to schedule this email series, or you can manually send each one. I suggest running your segment again each time, so you’re only sending to subscribers who didn’t open your last email.

Of course, if this sounds like more work than you have time for, just send emails #1 and #4. Simply email your inactive subscribers to ask if they still want to hear from you. If they don’t open that email, send the goodbye message with the link to resubscribe.

Then, you can confidently clean those contacts from your list.

6. Set Up a Regular Email Scrubbing Schedule

Once you’ve completed these steps, you’ll have a clean email list full of engaged, high-quality subscribers. But just like your kitchen, no email list stays clean forever.

I recommend scrubbing your emails every 6 months. Set calendar reminders and keep these steps handy, so you can come back to them twice a year.

Of course, you should also monitor your email engagement metrics year-round. If you have a significant dip in opens and clicks, you might want to schedule another cleaning.

Alternative: Use an Email List Cleaning Service

As you can see, most of the steps to cleaning an email list are pretty simple. However, there are several email list cleaning services that can do a lot of the work for you. These work well for companies with large email lists, who don’t have the time to manually clean their email lists.

Email scrubbing services include features like:

• Email list validation
• Fixing typos in email addresses
• Bulk email list verification
• Checking for emails from disposable email address providers
• Blocking fake email addresses

Note that these services do not clean inactive subscribers, so you’ll still need to use email segments to scrub those contacts. But these email list cleaning tools can still save you a lot of time.

Email Verification Services

Some email scrubbing services to try include:

• BriteVerify
• Data Validation
• ListWise
• MailBox Validator
• Quick Email Verification

Keep Your Email List Clean With Lead Verification

Once you’ve scrubbed your list, what are the best ways to keep your email list clean?

1. Prevent invalid email addresses from getting on your list in the first place by verifying every new email signup.
2. Attract subscribers who are highly interested in your brand.
3. Consider using double opt-ins to confirm all subscribers. And always send a welcome email.

You can do all of this and more with OptinMonster!

OptinMonster is the best lead-generation software available. You can use our lightbox popups, floating bars, inline forms, and other onsite campaigns to get more subscribers on your email list.

Lead Verification with OptinMonster’s TruLead®

Our TruLead® add-on is a lead verification tool that automatically filters out “bad emails” such as spambots, disposable email addresses, and invalid or undeliverable addresses.

Learn how it works in this video:

With TruLead®, you can stop bad emails in their tracks before they’re ever added to your list.

Use Precise Targeting to Capture High-Quality Leads

You want your email list to be full of subscribers who are excited to hear from you. OptinMonster can help you achieve that goal by showing the right offers to the right people at the right time.

Here are a few of the targeting and triggering rules we offer:

• Page-Level Targeting: Show tailored campaigns based on the content or products the visitor is browsing
• Timed Display Controls: Only show your signup form after the visitor has spent a certain amount of time on your page.
• Onsite Retargeting®: Target returning visitors with special deals or messages.
• Exit-Intent® Technology: Show an enticing offer to capture your visitors’ email addresses before they leave your site.

By precisely targeting your campaigns, you’ll get leads who are primed to open your emails and engage with your brand.

Send Double Opt-ins & Welcome Emails Through OptinMonster Integrations

OptinMonster integrates seamlessly with all major email marketing platforms. You can use your email platform’s settings to send one or both of the following to each person who signs up through your OptinMonster campaigns:

1. A confirmation email the subscriber must click before being added to your list. This is known as a double opt-in. Your list might grow more slowly with double opt-ins, but you’ll have a more engaged list. Learn more about the pros and cons of double opt-ins.
2. A welcome email to each new subscriber, thanking them for signing up and letting them know what to expect. Welcome emails help people remember that they did actually subscribe and ensure there are no surprises. Learn more about writing welcome emails.

These strategies both help prevent subscribers from becoming inactive, so you won’t have as many emails to clean.

With OptinMonster, you can easily maintain your list as you go. While you should still scrub your emails a couple times a year, it will be faster and easier because you have a strong list to start with.

A Clean Email List Is a Successful Email List

With these tips and steps at your disposal, you’re ready to set up an email scrubbing schedule that will keep your email marketing going strong.

Want to learn more ways to optimize your email strategy? Check out these resources:

• How to Create a Winning Email Marketing Strategy
• 14 Common Email Marketing Mistakes You Need to Avoid
• eCommerce Email Marketing: Email Types, Examples, & Tips
• 40+ Email Marketing Statistics You Need to Know

Are you ready to start turning your website visitors into engaged subscribers and customers? Sign up for OptinMonster today, with our 14-day, 100% money-back guarantee!

(in marketing) an innovation, service, or feature intended to make a company or product attractive to customers.

Oxford Languages

A great value proposition instantly shows your worth to potential leads and encourages them to buy from you. 

In this article, I will teach you, using my years of experience, how to write a value proposition that will make you stand out from the competition and boost your conversion rates.

I’ll also share 9 of the best value proposition examples I’ve found to inspire you and templates to get you going.

Let’s get started!

• What Is a Value Proposition?
• How to Write a Value Proposition
• 9+ Value Proposition Examples
• 4 Value Proposition Templates

What Is a Value Proposition?

A value proposition is a fancy way of describing a company’s unique benefit to its customers. It’s a concise statement that explains why someone should choose the company’s product or service over the competition.

Here’s what a good value proposition typically covers:

• The problem it solves: What pain point or need does the product or service address?
• The benefits it delivers: How does it make the customer’s life better or easier?
• What makes it different: Why should someone choose this company over others?

Think of it as an elevator pitch for a company’s value. It should be clear and compelling and convince customers that this business is the best solution for their needs.

How to Write a Value Proposition: A Step-by-Step Breakdown

Here’s a detailed breakdown of each step to help you write a value proposition that converts:

Step 1: Know Your Ideal Customer Like Your Best Friend

• Demographics: Age, gender, income, location, occupation, etc.
• Behaviors: How do they shop? What information do they consume? What are their online habits?
• Challenges: What are their biggest pain points? What keeps them up at night? Are they struggling with time management? Budget constraints? Lack of expertise?

Action Plan:

1. Conduct market research: Surveys, polls, and focus groups can provide valuable insights into your target audience.
2. Analyze customer data: Look at your existing customer base to understand their demographics and buying behavior.
3. Talk to your sales team: They’re on the frontline, interacting with potential customers daily. They can provide invaluable insights into customer needs and challenges.

Step 2: Deep Dive into Their Problems

Think of your ideal customer’s life as a puzzle. Your value proposition should be the missing piece that completes the picture. Here’s what you need to uncover:

• Functional Needs: What tasks are they trying to accomplish? What are the specific functions they need your product or service to perform?
• Emotional Needs: How do they want to feel when using your product or service? Do they want to feel empowered? Secure? More productive?

Action Plan:

1. Create customer personas: Develop detailed profiles that represent your ideal customer, including their goals, frustrations, and motivations.
2. Conduct customer interviews: Talk to potential customers directly to understand their challenges in detail.

Step 3: Showcase Your Solution as the Hero

Now that you understand the villain (your customer’s problem), it’s time to introduce the hero (your product or service). Here’s how to position your offering as the ultimate solution:

• Focus on Benefits, Not Features: Don’t just list features; explain how those features translate into tangible benefits for the customer.
• Quantify the Impact (if possible): Can you put a number on the results you deliver? For example, “Increase sales by 20% in 3 months.”
• Address Emotional Needs: Show how your product or service helps them achieve their desired emotional state.

Action Plan:

1. List all the features of your product or service.
2. For each feature, brainstorm the benefits it delivers.
3. Consider how you can quantify the benefits with data or testimonials.

Step 4: Become the Chosen One: Differentiation is Key

The market is crowded. What makes you stand out? Here’s how to differentiate your value proposition and convince customers you’re the one:

• Unique Selling Proposition (USP): What makes your product or service fundamentally different from the competition? Do you have a proprietary technology? Unmatched customer service? A focus on sustainability?
• Competitive Advantage: How does your USP translate into a clear advantage for the customer?

Action Plan:

1. Research your competitors: Analyze their value propositions and identify any gaps you can fill.
2. Highlight your USP: Clearly communicate what sets you apart.

Step 5: Craft Your Compelling Statement

By now, you’ve identified your ideal customer, understood their problems, and positioned your product or service as the solution. The final step is to craft a concise and compelling statement that captures your value proposition. Here are three popular templates to help you brainstorm:

Template 1: The Steve Blank Method

This method emphasizes benefits over features, focusing on a simple sentence that connects the target market’s pain points to your solution.

Formula: “We help (X – Target Customer) do (Y – Desired Outcome) by doing (Z – Your Unique Solution).”

Example: “We help (busy professionals) do (learn a new language in a fun and convenient way) by doing (providing bite-sized lessons and gamified learning through our mobile app)” (This could be a value proposition for Duolingo).

Template 2: The Geoff Moore Method

This template is more specific, identifying the industry category alongside the benefits customers value.

Formula: “For [Target Customer] who [Needs or Wants X], our [Product/Service] is a [Category of Industry] that [Benefits].”

Example: “For [small businesses] who [want to grow their email list and engage with customers], our [Mailchimp] is an [email marketing platform] that [offers easy-to-use tools and free plans].”

Template 3: The Harvard Business School Method

This method focuses on core questions to ensure your value proposition is clear and differentiated.

Questions to Consider:

• What is my brand offering?
• What job does the customer hire my brand to do?
• What companies and products compete with my brand to do this job for the customer?
• What sets my brand apart from competitors?

By answering these questions, you can craft a value proposition that highlights your unique strengths and the value you deliver to customers.

Remember: Regardless of the template you choose, keep your value proposition concise, clear, and benefit-oriented. It should resonate with your target audience and make them say, “Yes, that’s exactly what I need!”

By following these steps and putting your customer at the center, you can craft a value proposition that cuts through the noise and positions your product or service for success.

9+ Value Proposition Examples (Drive Conversions On Your Website!)

For our list of value proposition examples, we’re going to look at the homepages of a few popular websites. Not every website features its value proposition on its front page. However, it’s an excellent way to showcase your value for every new website visitor, as these examples show.

We’ll look at the heading, text, and visual element of each example and discuss why they work. Since these propositions are all on website homepages, we’ll also look at each example’s call to action (CTA). After all, once you’ve convinced a website visitor of your value, you want them to be able to easily take the next step.

Let’s dive in!

1. Uber: “Go Anywhere With Uber”

About Uber:

• Product: Well-known ride-share service.
• Target market: People who need low-cost, on-demand transportation.
• Primary benefit: Eliminates the frustrations of travel.

About the Value Proposition:

• Heading: “Go anywhere with Uber.”
• Description Text: “Request a ride, hop in, and go.”
• Visual Element: A colorful illustration of a professional woman getting out of a car in a city.
• CTA: Text fields to enter your pick-up and destination locations and a button that says “See prices.”

What makes this value proposition work? Uber emphasizes the ubiquity of their service by saying they can take you anywhere. They also focus on the ease of using Uber with their “Request a ride, hop in, and go” text. They double-down on that ease by letting you start your ride request right there on the homepage.

Because Uber is such a well-known company, they don’t need to explain who they are. Therefore, they can keep their text extremely short.

2. Skillshare: “Explore Your Creativity With Thousands of Hands-on Classes”

About Skillshare:

• Product: Online classes and lessons.
• Target market: Artists, entrepreneurs, and creative minds.
• Primary benefit: The ability to learn via bite-sized lessons.

About the Value Proposition: 

• Heading: “Explore your creativity with thousands of hands‑on classes.”
• Description Text: A subheading that says “Get 7 free days of Skillshare.”
• Visual Element: A collage of colorful photos showing people cooking, drawing, knitting, taking photos, and more.
• CTA: Skillshare offers multiple ways to create an account and begin a free trial. There are buttons for logging in through Facebook, Google, and Apple accounts. There’s also an option to sign up with an email address.

What makes this value proposition work? This homepage focuses completely on highlighting their free trial. If you are extremely confident in the quality of your product, this strategy is very smart! Skillshare obviously believes that once a visitor tries their classes, they’ll want to subscribe.

Skillshare also shows value through their visual element. Look how much fun those folks are having! And look how great their projects look. Skillshare is showing visitors that they can have the same experience by taking their classes.

NoteWant to make your own online course? Check out this article on the best learning management system (LMS) plugins to build a virtual class. Then follow that up with our 12 ways to promote your online course.

3. LegalShield: “Affordable Legal Help Does Exist”

About LegalShield:

• Product: Affordable, prepaid monthly plans for legal services such as estate planning, family law, and small business plans.
• Target market: Individuals, small businesses, and entrepreneurs.
• Primary benefit: Prepaid legal protection you can trust to be there whenever you need it.

About the Value Proposition:

• Heading: “Affordable Legal Help Does Exist.”
• Description Text: “Hire a lawyer the smart way, not the hard way.”
• Visual Element: A photo of a smiling woman with a cell phone at her ear.
• CTA: A bold button that says “Get started”.

What makes this value proposition work? Every part of this proposition is designed to give visitors a feeling of relief. LegalShield emphasizes that their services are affordable and easy to use. The photo of the woman on the phone implies that legal help will always be just a call away with one of their plans.

4. Tortuga Backpacks: “Pack Everything You Need Without Checking a Bag”

About Tortuga:

• Product: Travel backpacks and accessories
• Target market: Young travelers and weekend road trippers.
• Primary benefit: The ability to travel light.

About the Value Proposition:

• Heading: “Pack everything you need without checking a bag.”
• Description Text: The preheader text says, “Over 3,000 5-star reviews.”
• Visual Element: A photo of a man wearing a backpack while exploring a city.
• CTA: A bright green button that says “Take the Bag Quiz.”

What makes this value proposition work? In that one-sentence heading, Tortuga communicates that their backpacks will save you money and hassle on every trip. They also leverage the power of social proof by pointing out that they have 3,000 5-star reviews.

5. Dollar Shave Club: “If Santa Shaved He’d Probably Use One of These”

About Dollar Shave Club:

• Product: Subscription-based razors and shaving products. They also offer one-time bundle purchases.
• Target market: Cost-conscious millennial males who want to look great with less hassle. And in this instance, anyone who’s doing holiday shopping for that target market.
• Primary benefit: A high-quality shave that’s convenient and low-priced.

About the Value Proposition:

• Heading: “If Santa Shaved He’d Probably Use One of These”
• Description Text: “Shop our holiday gifts, including new handles and new additions to our electric line!” At the bottom, they give more important information:
  • “Free shipping for orders $18+”
  • “30-day money back guarantee”
  • “Order for 12/15 for holiday delivery”
• Visual Element: A slideshow of illustrations depicting their products in the North Pole.
• CTA: A “Get Gifting” button, which leads to a list of their top gift recommendations.

What makes this value proposition work? This proposition has 2 huge things going for it: its humor and its focus on holiday shopping. Dollar Shave Club also immediately answers the most important questions for holiday shoppers: shipping cost, return policy, and shipping time.

Behind the silly joke about Santa shaving, they present real value here: When you shop with us, you can quickly order high-quality gifts, without hassle or worry.

6. Constant Contact: “Take Your Marketing From Meh to Marvelous”

About Constant Contact:

• Product: An email service provider (ESP) focused on email marketing.
• Target market: Business owners and digital marketers.
• Primary benefit: Provides an email marketing solution to grow your business.

About the Value Proposition:

• Heading: “Take your marketing from meh to marvelous.”
• Description Text: “Give your email and digital marketing a glow up with our easy-to-use tools.”
• Visual Element: A photo of a woman using a laptop. Colorful graphics are added to indicate that she is sending marketing emails and monitoring their success.
• CTA: An email optin field with a button that says “Sign up free.”

What makes this value proposition work? This proposition promises to transform your marketing, and it does so in casual, approachable language. Constant Contact makes success feel even more attainable by mentioning that their tools are easy to use. They also offer a no-risk free trial that doesn’t require entering a credit card.

Every aspect of their value proposition and CTA is designed to remove any barrier to giving Constant Contact a try.

7. WPForms: “Smarter Forms and Surveys”

About WPForms:

• Product: A WordPress plugin for building forms on your website.
• Target market: Owners of WordPress websites.
• Primary benefit: Builds online forms to capture leads, take orders, receive payments, get feedback, and much more.

About the Value Proposition:

• Heading: “Drag & Drop WordPress Form Builder”
• Description Text: “Join 6,000,000+ Professionals Who Build Smarter Forms and Surveys with WPForms”
• Visual Element: The visual element here is a row of labeled icons listing WPForms’ top uses and features:
  • Contact Forms
  • Payment Forms
  • Survey Forms
  • Newsletter Forms
  • Registration Forms
  • Over 1,200 Templates
• CTA: A large button that says “Get WPForms Now.”

What makes this value proposition work? Every aspect of this proposition showcases the versatility and ease of use of WPForms. Website owners know that “drag & drop” and “over 1200 templates” mean they can create forms without any coding or advanced design skills. The text uses social proof by stating that over 6 million professionals already use the plugin. And the labeled icons give a quick preview of the many uses of the software. Icons like these are common in SaaS value propositions.

8. Ooma: “Sophisticated Communication Solutions Made Simple”

About Ooma:

• Product: VoIP phone service.
• Target market: Business owners and residential users.
• Primary benefit: Provides internet-based phone service for businesses of all sizes. They also offer home phone and security systems.

About the Value Proposition:

• Heading: “Sophisticated Communication Solutions Made Simple”
• Description Text: The text under “Business” reads “Phone, video, and messaging solutions customizable for any size business.” The text under “Residential” reads “Home phone service and smart security solutions that keep you connected from anywhere.”
• Visual Element: Side-by-side photographs. The 1st is a person using Ooma phone services at a work desk. The 2nd is a couple lounging on a couch, with an Ooma phone system near them
• CTA: Visitors can click to get more information about Ooma’s products for Business or Residential. There is also a footer floating bar with links and phone numbers for customer support, for sales reps, and to request a quote. There’s even a chat box to get quick answers.

What makes this value proposition work? Ooma’s proposition offers high-tech communications products that are easy to use. They also make it very clear that they have products for both businesses and individuals. That’s a lot of information in just a few words! Plus, they offer multiple easy ways for interested users to contact them.

9. Shopify: “Making Commerce Better for Everyone”

About Shopify:

• Product: An eCommerce website builder.
• Target market: Business owners and entrepreneurs.
• Primary benefit: Allows people to build eCommerce websites to sell their products online.

About the Value Proposition:

• Heading: “Making Commerce Better for Everyone”
• Description Text: “Shopify is supporting the next generation of entrepreneurs, the world’s biggest brands, and everyone in between.”
• Visual Element: A people-heavy background video, which is a preview for a longer video.
• CTA: This proposition offers 2 CTAS. The “Start Free Trial” button is perfect for visitors who are ready to get started. The “Watch the Shopify story” button helps move new visitors further along the sales funnel.

What makes this value proposition work? The emphasis here is that anyone can create a website to start selling online.

This is very appealing to non-technical business owners who want a simple solution for selling online FAST.

BONUS – OptinMonster: “Convert and Monetize Your Website Traffic”

Of course, we have to share our own homepage’s value proposition! At OptinMonster, we’re experts at lead generation, A/B testing, and revenue building. So you know that every aspect of our proposition has been thoroughly analyzed and optimized.

About OptinMonster:

• Product: The world’s #1 lead generation software. We help you easily create website popups to grow your email list and improve conversion rates.
• Target market: Business owners, digital marketers, bloggers, entrepreneurs, and startups.
• Primary benefit: Helps people grow their email list, boost conversions, and drive direct sales.

About the Value Proposition:

• Heading: “Convert and Monetize Your Website Traffic.”
• Description Text: “Instantly grow your email list, get more leads, and increase sales with the #1 most powerful conversion optimization toolkit in the world.”
• Visual Element: A row of labeled icons highlighting various features:
  • Lightbox Popups
  • Floating Bars
  • Scroll Boxes
  • Gamified Wheels
  • Page Level Targeting
  • Exit Intent Detection
  • Geolocation Targeting
  • 100+ Templates
• CTA: A green button that says “Get OptinMonster Now“

What makes this value proposition unique? We pack a lot of information in our heading and description text. We focus on what our product can help you achieve: more conversions, more sales, and a bigger email list.

Whereas many lead generation tools focus on growing your list, OptinMonster’s strong value proposition goes one step further: converting and monetizing your site’s traffic.

This CAN be done through growing your list, but our tools can also be used to:

• Reduce cart abandonment
• Upsell/cross-sell products
• Distribute coupon codes for more sales
• Redirect users to popular posts (to boost SEO)
• Increase webinar registrations
• And so much more…

We also use power words such as “instantly” and “powerful.” These words are evocative, but they’re also accurate. Our software is easy and quick to set up, gets results quickly, and has more powerful features than our competitors.

Learn more about OptinMonster’s extensive features.

Now that we’ve seen some compelling value proposition examples, let’s take a look at some templates to help you entice potential customers with your company’s products.

4 Effective Value Proposition Templates

What if you get stuck trying to write the copy for your value proposition? Don’t worry! Here are a few templates to help. You don’t have to use these templates word-for-word, but they are great starting points. Many of these have been around for a few years, but their lessons haven’t aged.

1. Geoffrey Moore’s Value Positioning Statement

In Geoffrey Moore‘s seminal book, Crossing the Chasm, he suggests the following template for writing your value proposition.

For [target customer] who [statement of the need or opportunity], our [product/service name] is [product category] that [statement of benefit].

Example: “For busy parents who don’t have time for meal planning, [name of meal box company] is a meal delivery service that’s easy, affordable, and picky-eater-friendly.”

You would most likely use this template for your description text.

2. Steve Blank’s XYZ

Here is perhaps the most straightforward value proposition template from Steve Blank.

We help [X] to [Y] by [Z].

Example: “We help small businesses succeed by saving them time and money.”

Depending on the length of your sentence, this template can help with your headline or description text.

3. Venture Hacks’ High-Concept Pitch

Our next value proposition template is from Venture Hacks. It helps you leverage businesses that already exist in your industry to craft your unique value proposition.

[Proven industry example] for/of [new domain].

Examples:

• “Netflix for video games.”
• “The Amazon of Pet Supplies.”
• “eBay for Glass Collectors”

This template can help you craft a short, simple, and effective headline for your value proposition.

4. Dave McClure’s Elevator Ride

Dave McClure’s has a frequently cited value proposition template that suggests a 3-step checklist for writing your unique value proposition.

• Short, simple, memorable; what, how, why.
• 3 keywords or phrases
• KISS. That means “keep it simple, stupid.” In other words, don’t use specialized jargon.

Example: “OptinMonster is the easy, effective way to get more subscribers and sales.”

Since the Elevator Ride is more of a checklist than a specific template, it can help you with all aspects of your value proposition.

Transform Your Business With a Killer Value Proposition

That’s it! Now you can use these steps, examples, and templates to craft the perfect value proposition for your company.

Want to learn more ways to increase conversions and sales? Check out these articles:

• 18 Proven Ways to Increase Your Conversion Rate Throughout Your Sales Funnel
• Case Study: How Kennedy Blue Increased Sales by 50% by Overcoming Sales Objections With Popups

Once you have a value proposition that stands out from the competition, you need to optimize more of your website. As visitors browse your pages, show them your most enticing offers at just the right time.

OptinMonster is the perfect tool to build on your great value proposition. With our software, you can create beautiful and compelling popups in minutes. Our extensive targeting and triggering tools give you full control over who sees your offers and when.

Newsletters are a specific subset of email marketing. They’re usually sent at regular intervals, and they focus on delivering interesting content, rather than simply promoting products or services.

But how do you start an email newsletter that will help you reach your nonprofit’s goals?

I worked in nonprofit email marketing for over 15 years. During that time, I built nonprofit newsletters from scratch and revamped existing ones. I used these newsletters to promote the organization’s mission, build goodwill, promote events, and solicit memberships and donations.

In this article, I’ll explain why all nonprofits, even small ones, need an email newsletter. I’ll also share some effective nonprofit newsletter examples, steps for starting a newsletter, and a few tips and best practices.

• Why Your Nonprofit Needs an Email Newsletter
• 4 Nonprofit Newsletter Examples
• How to Start a Nonprofit Newsletter (6 Steps)
• Nonprofit Newsletter Tips & Best Practices

Why Your Nonprofit Needs an Email Newsletter

If you’re overwhelmed by the idea of starting a newsletter for your small nonprofit, I get it. Small organizations are cash-strapped, which means they’re also people-strapped and time-strapped. In any given week while I worked for nonprofits, I might update our website, write a grant, plan and run events, manage multiple social media channels, design a brochure, and send out email campaigns.

That constant multitasking is probably why 73% of nonprofits don’t have a defined email marketing strategy, according to a 2022-2023 report from the Tapp Network and TechSoup.

If your nonprofit is small, you may question whether you’ll get enough return on investment (ROI) for the personnel time that email newsletters require.

So, is a nonprofit newsletter worth the time and effort? The answer is a resounding yes.

In fact, smaller organizations can actually see the biggest impact from email. Here are some impressive numbers from Neon One’s 2023 Nonprofit Email Report:

• The average small nonprofit raises $6.15 per email contact, compared to $0.88 for large organizations.
• Small nonprofits have an average email open rate 45.7%, compared to 27.64% for large nonprofits.
• Small nonprofits see a phenomenal click-through rate (CTR) of 10.24%, compared to an average of 2.91% for large nonprofits.

What does this mean for your nonprofit? Not only can an email newsletter directly help you fundraise, but it can also hugely improve awareness of your mission, as your email recipients open your newsletters, click links to your website, and share the information they learn with their friends and family.

Here are just a few of the goals you can accomplish with a nonprofit newsletter:

• Increase Awareness: Keep supporters informed about your mission, programs, and achievements.
• Engage Donors: Build relationships with donors by sharing success stories and showing the impact of their contributions.
• Further Your Mission: Some newsletters directly target the nonprofit’s beneficiaries and provide resources and information about services.
• Strengthen Community: Foster a sense of belonging and community among supporters and stakeholders.
• Promote Fundraising Efforts: Share info about donation drives and events to generate funds.
• Recruit Volunteers: Attract and retain volunteers by highlighting opportunities and sharing volunteer stories.
• Boost Transparency: Show accountability by sharing financial reports, progress updates, and future plans.
• Drive Website Traffic: Encourage readers to visit your website for more information, resources, and involvement opportunities.

With all of these benefits, your nonprofit should definitely start a newsletter or work on optimizing the one you already have.

4 Nonprofit Newsletter Examples

Before I start exploring specific tips and steps, I want to share a few examples of nonprofit newsletters that I find particularly effective. The first 2 examples are from large international organizations, but the last 2 are from smaller local nonprofits. You’ll see that while the emails from smaller organizations are a bit simpler, they are no less effective in achieving their goals.

1. Welcome Email from Heifer International

I recently signed up for the email newsletter from Heifer International (HI), a nonprofit that seeks to end hunger and poverty worldwide. Within minutes, I received this welcome email:

The subject line “Welcome to the Family!” sets the tone for this new relationship by showing that HI sees their subscribers as important parts of their mission. The email then links to a survey where subscribers can choose which HI programs they want to receive emails about.

Key takeaways: You should always send a welcome email to new subscribers. You can use that email to thank them for their interest in your organization and give them an idea of what they can expect.

If your nonprofit newsletter is new or you have a small email list, you may not be ready to offer multiple content options for subscribers, as HI does here. However, a survey can still help you learn what type of content will interest your readers.

2. Personal Impact Story from Women for Women International

Women for Women International regularly sends out “Sister Spotlight” emails that share how the organization has transformed 1 woman’s life. Here’s an example:

As the subscribers scroll, they get to read more about Grace’s story:

The email goes on to include more photos of Grace, more of her story, and a Donate button.

Key takeaways: Whenever possible, make your nonprofit newsletters personal. Share specific stories about the impact your mission has had on real people. Include photos and the words of the person you’ve helped. Over time, these types of emails will drive donors, advocates, and volunteers to action, as your subscribers see real-life examples of your nonprofit’s work.

3. Monthly Events Email from Florence-Lauderdale Public Library

Next, I’ll share a nonprofit newsletter that I created for the public library I used to work for.

In addition to our full email list, I set up email segments for subscribers who wanted updates on specific departments, such as our children’s department. These segmented subscribers received a monthly newsletter to keep them informed of the coming month’s events.

Here’s an example of an October newsletter that I sent to subscribers of our children’s department emails:

The email features bright colors and photos, matching the style and branding we had established for our children’s department. Below this main header, I included an image that linked to a printable PDF of the October event calendar. I also added a text list of the month’s events, categorized by age range.

Key Takeaways: Our children’s events were consistently well-attended, and this regular, monthly email newsletter contributed to that success. Parents knew that at the end of each month, they would get an email with the next month’s programs. If you want to build a following for your nonprofit newsletter or for your nonprofit itself, consistency is key.

4. Weekly Update Newsletter from tnAchieves

This nonprofit newsletter is from tnAchieves, an organization that offers scholarship support and mentorship for high school seniors and college students in Tennessee. Their email list is mostly the students they serve, their parents, and their teachers, so they send out weekly updates about important opportunities and deadlines.

The footer of the email features a reminder section with important upcoming deadlines, all of which include links for more information:

Key Takeaways: Know your nonprofit newsletter’s audience and tailor your messages to their needs. Here, tnAchieves focuses entirely on what students need to know: opportunities for college financial aid and important upcoming deadlines. They also make themselves easily available for questions and assistance. In fact, the email mentions twice that you can simply reply to the email with any questions.

How to Start a Nonprofit Newsletter (6 Steps)

If you already have a nonprofit newsletter and just want to improve it, feel free skip ahead to the tips & best practices section.

Hopefully, the examples above have inspired some great nonprofit newsletter ideas for your own organization. If you’ve never sent out an email newsletter, don’t worry. Below are the 6 basic steps for learning how to start a newsletter for a nonprofit organization:

Step 1. Choose an Email Marketing Service

In order to manage a subscriber list and send out bulk emails, you’ll need to use an email marketing platform. If you want suggestions, check out our article, 7 Best Nonprofit Email Marketing Software (Compared).

The best platforms will include a drag-and-drop email builder, easy-to-use templates, reports on each email’s performance, and more helpful features.

My top recommendation for beginners is Constant Contact. Their plans start at $12 a month for up to 500 contacts. They also offer a 60-day free trial, so you can make sure it’s the right choice for you.

If you need to start with a free plan, then I suggest you go with Brevo (formerly Sendinblue). Their free plan allows you to send up to 300 emails per day. When you outgrow that limit, their paid plans start at $9 a month for up to 5,000 emails per month.

Step 2. Collect Email Addresses

Your nonprofit can’t send out a newsletter if you don’t have an email list. Get your list started by asking for emails from your main stakeholders, such as:

• Existing donors
• Volunteers
• Event attendees
• Partnering organizations and businesses
• People you serve
• Social media followers

Make sure you have permission to add these addresses to your newsletter list. Getting explicit permission is always the best practice, and it’s actually the law in many countries.

Your website is another powerful tool for building your email list, especially if you use OptinMonster.

OptinMonster is the best software available for turning your website visitors into email subscribers. You can use our popups, floating bars, inline forms, and more to encourage visitors to subscribe to your nonprofit’s newsletter.

Our nonprofit customers see huge success by using our software. For instance, the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) used OptinMonster to display popups like this one for their Bird of the Week newsletter:

With OptinMonster, ABC doubled their email list and increased their onsite lead generation from under 100 emails per month to over 1500.

Step 3. Decide on Your Nonprofit Newsletter’s Content

Next, you need to decide what information and stories your newsletters should include. Your content will depend on your mission, goals, and audience. It’ll also depend on how much time you have to create your content.

Here are a few examples of the types of content you might include in your nonprofit newsletter:

• Impact Stories: Highlight stories of individuals or communities positively affected by your nonprofit’s work.
• Volunteer Spotlights: Feature dedicated volunteers and their contributions.
• Upcoming Events: Announce fundraising events, workshops, and community activities.
• Program Updates: Share progress and updates on ongoing projects or initiatives.
• Donor Recognition: Acknowledge and thank major donors or sponsors.
• Calls to Action: Encourage readers to donate, volunteer, or participate in events.
• Educational Content: Provide articles or tips related to your nonprofit’s mission.
• Behind-the-Scenes Stories: Offer a glimpse into daily operations or introduce staff members.
• Success Metrics: Share statistics and achievements to demonstrate impact.
• Resources and Tools: Provide useful resources or tools for supporters and the people you serve.

You may choose 1 or 2 of these to include in every newsletter, or you could cycle through different types of content. Start with what you’re comfortable with and have time to do well. You can always adjust your approach down the road.

If you’re unsure of what your stakeholders want to hear about, ask them! Surveys and feedback forms are always a great way to better understand your audience.

Step 4: Determine the Schedule for Your Nonprofit Newsletter

Next, you’ll need to decide how often you’ll email your subscribers. If you’re worried about having enough time for email marketing, I recommend starting with a monthly newsletter.

Set a day of the month that your newsletter will always go out. Then, determine how long it will take you to gather the information and create the newsletter. That way, you can mark your calendar for the day you need to start preparing, and you’ll never miss a newsletter deadline.

Step 5. Find or Create a Template

Here’s some good news: You don’t have to design your nonprofit newsletter from scratch each time. In fact, you don’t have to design it from scratch at all.

All major email marketing platforms offer templates you can use as a jumping-off point. Constant Contact, for instance, offers over 200.

You just need to find the newsletter template that most closely matches the content you want to deliver. Then, customize it with your logo and brand colors.

Once you have a template ready, you can just change the images, text, and links each time to write your newsletter.

Step 6. Monitor & Adjust

Once you start sending your nonprofit newsletters, it’s time to track your success. Your email marketing platform will offer reports and analytics for each email. You can use these reports to monitor how many people open your emails, click on your links, and unsubscribe from each email.

By paying attention to these email metrics, you can determine what your audience responds best to and then adjust your newsletter strategy accordingly.

Nonprofit Newsletter Tips & Best Practices

I’ve compiled these tips & best practices from my 15 years of writing, optimizing, and researching nonprofit email newsletters.

Whether you’re starting a brand new newsletter or improving one you already have, you can use these tips to better connect with your subscribers.

1. Write Enticing and Recognizable Subject Lines

Your email subject line is the first thing recipients see, so make it count. Neon One’s report found that nonprofit subject lines perform best when they include positive emotions, such as:

• Relief – Include words like “recovery” or “help”
• Gratitude – Thank subscribers for their support and generosity.
• Pride – Highlight your accomplishments with phrases like “1500 dogs rescued this year.”
• Excitement – Don’t be afraid to use exclamation points. Just don’t use them every time.
• Optimism – Include words like “change,” “hope,” and “future.”

Since you’re sending this newsletter on a regular schedule, you should also consider always starting your subject line the same way. That way, your subscribers can easily recognize it in their inbox.

For instance, I shared an example of a Women for Women International newsletter that shares impact stories. They start each subject line for these impact emails with “Sister Spotlight,” and they include sparkle emojis to highlight the phrase even more.

This designation helps these specific newsletters stand out from any of their other marketing emails.

Similarly, if your newsletter always includes the next month’s events or opportunities, that should be clear in your subject line, so subscribers don’t overlook your latest updates.

Bonus Tip: As you continue to hone your nonprofit newsletter, you can use your email marketing software to A/B test your subject lines. Services like Constant Contact let you A/B test with just a few clicks.

With A/B testing, you create 2 variants of your subject line. Each variant is sent to a small percentage of the email list. Your email platform tracks which subject line performs better and then sends that version to your full list.

By A/B testing your subject lines, you’ll improve the performance of that particular email and gradually learn what your target audience responds best to.

2. Experiment with Your Sender Name

It seems obvious to just use your organization name as your sender name. And in fact, there’s nothing wrong with doing that. However, sometimes it’s good for your messages to come from a specific person.

Here are some types of sender names you can try:

• Use the name of your head honcho: We’re not a nonprofit, but here at OptinMonster, we’ve had great success using “Angie at OptinMonster” as our email sender name. Angie is our general manager, and using her name shows that our company is made of real people who want to help our customers.
• Use the name of someone your subscriber knows: For the library newsletter I shared earlier, I used “Ms. Jessica at FLPL” as the sender name. As our children’s librarian, Jessica was the person kids and parents talked to when they checked out books or attended a storytime. By using her name, the emails felt like direct invitations from a friend.
• Use the name of someone you’ve helped: Are you sharing an individual’s impact story? Consider using their name as your sender name, especially if the email is written in their own words. For instance, the “Sister Spotlight” email I just discussed could have used “Grace for Women for Women International.”

3. Add & Optimize Preview Text

Your email marketing software will let you write your own preview text. That’s the short snippet that appears under the subject line in your email inbox.

Here’s an example of how preview text appears in a mobile inbox:

Your preview text is your chance to explain why subscribers should open your nonprofit newsletter.

Neon One found that the following preview text words had the most positive impact on nonprofit open rates:

• Together
• Hear
• Video
• Deadline

Need one more reason to add preview text? Neon One also discovered that fundraising emails that included preview text raised 53.85% more donations than those that didn’t.

4. Include Evocative Images

Your organization works every day to help people, animals, or an important cause. And your subscribers signed up for your nonprofit newsletter because they believe in the work you do.

You can strengthen that connection even further by featuring photos of your work in action.

Here’s an email from Habitat for Humanity. It includes a large photo of a woman named Xochitl in her Habitat-built home.

Here are some ideas for photos you can include in your nonprofit newsletters:

• People or animals you’ve helped
• Staff and volunteers working in the field
• Featured donors
• People enjoying events you’ve hosted
• Before-and-after images (e.g. community clean-up projects)
• Infographics illustrating your impact

5. Make Your Nonprofit Newsletter Scannable

Like all content on the internet, your email newsletters should be easy to scan quickly. If you’ve chosen a well-designed template, this goal should be easy to accomplish.

If you’re designing an email yourself, or heavily editing your template, these are some guidelines to follow:

• Use headings: Break up your text with headings so readers can easily find the info they’re looking for.
• Keep paragraphs short: No one wants to read a dense wall of text in an email, so keep your paragraphs brief.
• Use white space: Make sure you include some white space between each element of your email.
• Include photos and graphics: Break up your text with visuals that catch the reader’s eye.
• Use bulleted lists: Lists are another way to break up paragraphs and make text more scannable.
• Use bold text for emphasis: Bolding key phrases and sentences can make your paragraphs easier to scan.

6. Include a Clear Call to Action

Every newsletter should include at least one clear call to action (CTA) for your readers. That action can be:

• To donate
• To visit a specific page on your website
• To follow you on social media
• To take a survey

For more on CTAs, see our guide: What Is a Call to Action + 31 CTA Examples.

While every email should include a CTA, my next tip focuses on being cautious with your donation CTAs.

7. Don’t Ask for Donations TOO Often

If your organization depends on funds from donors, you’ll likely include a “Donate” CTA button in every newsletter. In fact, it’s a good idea to always offer an opportunity to give at the bottom of your emails, so potential donors have easy access.

However, don’t ask for donations too prominently or too frequently in every single email.

Your main goal for a nonprofit newsletter is to tell the story of your organization. In other words, your newsletter should show why your subscribers should want to donate to your cause.

After you’ve sent out a few impact-focused newsletters, THEN you can send your “big ask,” the email that focuses specifically on soliciting donations. Often, you’ll send your “big ask” email during a specific fundraising campaign or for a day like Giving Tuesday.

By the time your subscribers get your “big ask” message, they’ll be excited to donate to an organization that does so much good work. And you’ll avoid exhausting your supporters with too many requests for money.

8. Stick to Your Newsletter Schedule (& Inform Subscribers of that Schedule)

Earlier, I pointed out that choosing a newsletter schedule is a key step in developing a nonprofit newsletter. Now, it’s important to stick to that schedule.

Consistency is key to keeping subscribers engaged, and it builds trust with your organization. If you stray too much from your schedule, your nonprofit will appear unorganized.

On the other hand, adhering to your newsletter schedule demonstrates professionalism, dependability, and a strong commitment to your subscribers.

You should also always let your subscribers know how often you’ll email them. You can inform them of your newsletter frequency on your email sigup form or in your welcome email. If you need to change that frequency, simply notify them in one of your emails.

9. Never Neglect Your Email List

Once you’ve built a decent subscriber base, you may be tempted to just coast on that email list. However, you should always look for more ways to:

1. Discover supporters and potential supporters
2. Collect their contact information
3. Add them to your email list so you can maintain and grow their support

What exactly does this effort look like? It’ll vary depending on your type of organization. But anytime you’re engaging with stakeholders, you should offer the chance to sign up for your newsletter. That might mean including a sign-in sheet at events with a checkbox to subscribe. It can also mean sharing your newsletters on social media and including a CTA to sign up.

And if your website receives significant traffic, you should definitely ask visitors to sign up for your newsletter.

People visiting your website have already shown a high level of interest in your organization, and OptinMonster can help you convert them into subscribers and donors.

I wish I had known about OptinMonster when I worked in nonprofit marketing, especially during times when my subscriber number was stagnant. I didn’t have access to an experienced web developer, but I could have created email signup popups in just a few minutes with OptinMonster’s 700+ templates and easy drag-and-drop builder.

Want to give it a try? Sign up for OptinMonster today, with our 14-day, 100% money-back guarantee.

Tell Your Story With Nonprofit Newsletters

With an email newsletter, your nonprofit can engage your stakeholders, share your success stories, and encourage more people to support your organization.

If you want to continue to learn more about email marketing, here are some resources to help. While they’re not specifically geared toward nonprofits, the information will still help you send better emails:

• 17 Genius Tips for Better Email Copywriting
• Best Time to Send Emails: Insights from Top Studies
• What Is Email Segmentation? 50 Proven Ways to Segment Email Lists
• What Is Email Automation? A Beginner’s Guide

And if you’re ready to build an email list full of engaged subscribers, sign up for OptinMonster today!

Many businesses start an email newsletter because they’ve been told email marketing has the best ROI among digital marketing channels.

But they don’t actually know how to make money from email marketing newsletters. They end up producing content that doesn’t lead to sales or profit. Or they give up because it’s too much work for too little reward.

Good news! Email marketing doesn’t have to be a slog. Once you know how to make money from email marketing, you’ll want to write newsletters all the time.

I’ve worked in email marketing for 15 years, and in this article, I’ll share 13 ways to make money from your email newsletter.

Are you ready? Let’s get started!

How Do Newsletters Make Money?

Email newsletters can make money in 3 basic ways:

1. As part of a larger sales funnel
2. By charging for the content itself
3. By monetizing your audience or access to your audience

Email newsletters are a bit like blog content. You own the channel, and you can create whatever content you want. The only difference is that email is sent directly to subscribers who have chosen to hear from you, while blog posts rely on search and referral traffic.

Because of this similarity, many of the ways to make money from a blog apply to email newsletters, as well.

In the next section, I’ll go over strategies from each of the above categories.

Top 13 Ways to Monetize Your Newsletter

In this section, I’ll first go over how to use email newsletters as part of your sales funnel. I emphasize these strategies first because you don’t need a large email list to run a profitable sales funnel.

Monetizing your content or audience generally requires more subscribers to make any meaningful revenue, but it’s certainly possible even with a smaller list. So, we’ll also go over how to make money with your email marketing content itself.

Here’s a table of contents to help you find what you’re looking for:

• Newsletters for eCommerce Sales Funnels
• Newsletters for Small Business Sales Funnels
• Newsletters for Nonprofit Sales Funnels
• How to Make Money From Any Email Newsletter
• FAQ About How To Make Money From Email Marketing Newsletters

How to Monetize Newsletters for eCommerce Sales Funnels

You can achieve a high conversion rate with eCommerce email newsletters because customers are already looking to buy when they subscribe to your list. Here are 3 ways to use email marketing in your eCommerce sales funnel:

1. Upsell, Downsell, Cross-sell

When it comes to email marketing in eCommerce, upsells, downsells, and cross-sells are your best friends.

These terms all sound a bit similar, so let’s clarify what they mean:

• Upsell: You promote a product that’s more expensive than what your customers have already purchased in the past, such as an upgrade or extension.
• Downsell: You promote a product that costs less than what the customer currently has in their cart but didn’t purchase. This is a great way to recover carts that would be abandoned because of price.
• Cross-sell: You promote related products regardless of pricing. They may be products that complement items the customer is already purchasing or items you think they’d also like

If you’re able to track your customer’s purchase history or abandoned carts, sending these newsletters should be a breeze. You’ll simply write a few emails for your most popular products and send them to your audience through email automation.

For even better results, make sure you segment your audience, too. This is where you organize your contact list by different subscriber traits, such as location, demographics, or purchase history.

Did you know that you can also display targeted promotional campaigns on your website with OptinMonster?

OptinMonster is the best lead generation tool for growing your list and bringing customers into your sales funnel.

It allows anyone to quickly and easily create stunning optin campaigns in minutes.

By “optin campaigns,” we simply mean things you’re already familiar with, like popups, floating bars, fullscreen welcome mats, and more.

Best of all, you can even use OptinMonster’s OnSite Follow Up Campaigns to highlight new products, recommend products to customers who have opted in for a coupon, or to present a low-cost offer immediately after they opt in.

2. Send Seasonal Promotions

Another way to make money with your email newsletters is to promote your seasonal offers. This would be for major holidays like:

• Halloween
• Black Friday
• Winter holidays
• Valentine’s Day
• Labor Day
• And more…

Or you can simply run specials that are unique to your store. For example, you may sell a seasonal or weather-dependent product like blankets. You could run a promotion the week of the first frost. You also could do a mid-summer clearance to move inventory from the previous season, and boost sales during the slow season.

Regardless, you can easily send these offers to your mailing list to increase your site’s bottom line.

You can also create matching campaigns on your website with OptinMonster. Most people need to see an offer multiple times before they decide.

With OptinMonster’s targeting rules, you can show your email subscribers special seasonal offers. This is an easy way to build a personalized customer experience that can lead to more conversions.

3. Start a VIP Program

A subscriber-exclusive VIP program is a great way to build your list and generate more sales. You can create a special optin form using OptinMonster’s drag-and-drop builder. To make it a true VIP experience, this optin can be shown only to past customers or visitors who have been to your site several times already.

Then, you can send special promotions and updates to this list. These customers will be the most eager to hear from you, so you can hope for a higher conversion rate from your VIP list.

Newsletters for Small Business Sales Funnels

If you run a small business that isn’t eCommerce-based, you might be wondering how you can monetize your newsletters.

The good news is that email marketing is great for building relationships that lead to client inquiries and referrals. Even if a subscriber doesn’t hire you directly, they might recommend you to someone if you’ve delivered enough value in your email newsletter.

Here are 3 ways to market your small business in your email newsletter:

4. Fill Openings In Your Calendar

Unbooked slots are terrible for service providers because you’re often paying your overhead expenses whether you have a client or not. You can use your email newsletter to fill slots in your calendar, sometimes with very short notice.

Your email list is likely filled with past clients or at least visitors who are big enough fans to hand over their email addresses. That’s why sending an email may be more effective than other marketing when it comes to filling last-minute slots.

You can also use your newsletter to book your calendar out farther in advance. For example, if you know you’ll be going on parental leave or extended vacation, you can offer your remaining slots to your email list. This will help create both a sense of urgency and exclusivity, both of which can boost your bookings.

5. Promote Digital Products

Contrary to what you may hear on the Internet, digital products don’t just sell themselves once you create them. Just like eCommerce products, digital products need promotion and marketing, too. Your newsletter is a great place to do that.

It doesn’t need to be a direct sales pitch, although it can be if you’re launching a new or limited-time seasonal product. Occasional mentions can reap big rewards over time.

Remember: your subscribers opted in to learn from your expertise. If you have a digital product that can help them, send out a free email about the same topic. Include a soft pitch for your product and a link where subscribers can buy.

As with eCommerce, you can set up corresponding campaigns for your digital products using OptinMonster.

6. Sell Workshops and Group Programs

Email newsletters are a great way to drive registrations to workshops or group programs.

Your subscriber list is essentially a group of your biggest fans, so they’re likely to be interested in face-to-face opportunities. If you’ve been delivering helpful content in your newsletters, this is especially true.

Workshops and group programs can be more affordable for your subscribers who can’t afford to work with you individually, and emails are a perfect way to promote them. Alternatively, you can email out a chance to win 1 free consultation or session, which can build interest for your paid services.

You can also use free workshops as a list builder, like in the popup example below. OptinMonster integrates seamlessly with WPForms so you can easily show popup registration forms on your website and manage your registrations.

Alternatively, you can simply add fields directly into your OptinMonster campaign with our drag-and-drop builder.

Newsletters for Nonprofit Donor Funnels

Just because an organization is a nonprofit doesn’t mean it doesn’t need money to operate. You can use your nonprofit email marketing newsletter as a way to raise awareness, fundraise, and recruit volunteers.

7. Share Impact Stories

Your nonprofit newsletter is a great place to share how your organization is making a difference.

Every newsletter is an opportunity to highlight someone who benefits from your work and to ask for donations to help you continue in your mission. Here’s a great example from Habitat for Humanity:

8. Create a Recurring Givers Program

Another way to monetize your nonprofit newsletter is to create a special community for recurring givers.

It’s similar to a VIP program for eCommerce, but instead of sending coupons and promotions, you can send exclusive updates or invitations to special donor events. Here’s an example from Celebrate EDU

9. Recruit Volunteers

Nonprofits need volunteers as much as they need funds. Plus, volunteers often become donors, and some grant funding is contingent upon volunteer service hours. Growing your volunteer force can help your nonprofit’s bottom line.

Your nonprofit email marketing newsletter is a great place to remind supporters that they can give their time as well as their money.

On your site, you can use OptinMonster to build a list of potential volunteers. Then, you can send out profiles and testimonials from current volunteers, volunteer training dates, and special or ongoing volunteer opportunities.

How to Make Money From Any Email Newsletter

Our final 4 newsletter monetization tips can be applied to any industry or business model. You can even make the newsletter itself your primary product, just like with blogging. You’ll need to grow a much bigger audience to make a full-time living from it, but with the right tools and strategies, you can do it!

10. Paid Subscriptions

One of the most straightforward ways to make money from email marketing newsletters is to sell subscriptions.

That’s right, just like print magazines and newspapers! (Remember those?)

In its simplest form, here’s how newsletter subscriptions work:

• You create content for your newsletter.
• Subscribers pay to access it.

That’s it! Many creators use a limited freemium model to grow their lists. Free subscribers get a preview or less frequent newsletters. Premium subscribers, on the other hand, get full or more frequent newsletters.

You can use services like Substack or Patreon to sell subscriptions to your newsletter, but you’ll have to pay monthly fees based on your number of subscribers, plus any regular payment processing fees.

We prefer to use a self-hosted option like WPForms to create a recurring payment form that is then linked to your email service provider (ESP). You can learn how to create a recurring payment form and how to create a newsletter signup form.

Another option is to use a membership plugin to create a paid newsletter in WordPress.

Resource: 5 Best WordPress Newsletter Plugins in 2023 for More Engagement

11. Email Courses

A variation on paid subscriptions is paid email courses.

Rather than selling ongoing new content, you sell a pre-made online course delivered by email. In your course, you teach something specific in bite-sized pieces.

This is a great way to deliver online course content without paying for a separate course platform.

Email courses also make great lead magnets if you decide to offer one for free.

12. Sponsorship

Just like blog posts and podcast episodes, email newsletters can be sponsored. This essentially means that a brand pays you to mention their company or product in your email newsletter.

This can be a small blurb at the end of your email similar to a classified ad in the newspaper, or it can be a more prominent feature near the top of your newsletter.

Either way, you want to be transparent about what content is sponsored by whom. You also want to respect your subscribers. They subscribed to hear from you about your area of expertise, not your sponsors. Always make sure your sponsored content aligns with your own content.

13. Affiliate Links

An easy way to monetize your email newsletter is through affiliate marketing. Here’s how it works:

• You promote affiliate products in your newsletter and on your site
• Your audience buys those products from your unique affiliate links
• You get a commission from those sales

It really is that simple!

But remember, the goal isn’t to SPAM your audience.

Writing over-the-top sales pitches for all your affiliate products and sending out 5 emails a day is a great way to get flagged for spam and kill your deliverability rates.

Instead, think of affiliate recommendations like making suggestions to your friends. Only promote products you actually use and love. It shouldn’t be the core of your email marketing strategy.

You can use OptinMonster to promote your affiliates on your website and encourage subscriber signups.

In fact, Human Food Bar was able to grow their email list and generate $17,000+ in affiliate sales with OptinMonster:

If you’re serious about affiliate marketing, Pretty Links is a great tool to help you manage your affiliate links in your newsletters and on your website. Pretty Links shortens long, ugly affiliate links into clean, memorable, speakable, totally shareable links.

For a more in-depth look, check out this helpful resource: How to Make Money While You Sleep With Affiliate Marketing.

FAQ About How To Make Money From Email Marketing Newsletters

How Much Money Can You Make with Email Marketing?

The sky is truly the limit when it comes to your ROI on email marketing. In general, you’ll get out what you put in. Create high-quality content and respect your subscribers, and they’ll reward you. Spam your list with too many affiliate links or promotional material, and you’ll lose subscribers and credibility.

That being said, for most small businesses, using email newsletters as part of your existing sales funnel will make more money more quickly than placing affiliate links or sponsored content in your newsletters.

How Many Subscribers Do You Need To Monetize a Newsletter?

Many people think you need a huge list to make money from an email newsletter, but that’s not always true. A small but targeted and engaged email list is nearly always more profitable than a large, unorganized list.

There are no hard and fast rules for how many subscribers you need to monetize. But in general, here are the strategies in order of how many subscribers you’d need to see a decent ROI, from least to most subscribers:

1. Booking clients from your email list: Depending on how much your services cost, you may only need a few people from your list to hire you in order to be profitable.
2. Promoting your own products: This will vary depending on how much your products cost, but you’ll keep all the money from product sales so you need to make fewer sales compared to affiliate link sales.
3. Selling subscriptions or email courses: Most customers won’t want to pay a lot for a paid newsletter or email course, but at least when selling your own content, you’ll keep all profits.
4. Sponsorships: You can make decent money from sponsored content without thousands of subscribers, but you’ll need to spend time building a highly engaged list before brands will want to work with you.
5. Affiliate links: You’ll only earn a small commission on any sales, so you’ll need a lot of active subscribers clicking on and purchasing through your affiliate links before you see any significant ROI.

Make sure you set up Google Analytics email tracking so you can see which newsletter topics or formats get the most conversions.

How Do I Get More Email Subscribers?

We’re so glad you asked! We could talk about list-building all day, but here’s short answer to how to get more subscribers:

1. Offer a persuasive lead magnet for subscribers to join your newsletter
2. Create engaging optin forms and share them widely
3. Deliver valuable newsletter content to your subscribers

Build Your Email List & Monetize Your Newsletter!

With these 13 tips, you now know how to monetize your newsletter and earn a profit from your email marketing efforts, no matter what business model or stage you’re in!

Want to learn even more about email newsletters? Here are a few resources:

• Email Newsletter Design Examples & 13 Pro Design Tips
• 29 Awesome Newsletter Ideas That Will Keep Subscribers Engaged
• 10 Inspiring Email Newsletter Signup Examples that Convert

You can only make money from your newsletters if you have subscribers, and OptinMonster is the best way to build an email list full of highly engaged subscribers.