Email Marketing: A Web Design Hole

Email marketing is a top priority for a lot of the popular bloggers at the moment, and it’s also on the minds of bloggers that are just starting out.

I’m currently figuring out if I want to continue running my blog on this site, or launch a new business related site, but nonetheless, I’ve had web design on my mind.

And that brings us back to email marketing.

There’s something huge that so many people are missing out on when it comes to site design.

You can visit the homepage of just about any popular blog today and instantly be hit with some sort of email subscription form. There are pop-up forms, feature box forms, sidebar forms, the Hello Bar and other tactics. These forms aren’t bad and they absolutely serve a purpose – get email subscriptions.

But stop for a second and consider how you normally land on a website.

It’s highly likely that you receive a link in email, click on a link on Twitter, or something along those lines that takes you to a direct post. This means you are completely bypassing the homepage and going directly to the post page.

Take ChrisBrogan.com for example. He just wrote a post titled “Get More Subscribers Today.” If you visit the post you won’t see anything about signing up for his email list.

Doesn’t that seem funny since he’s talking about a new theme that is geared towards getting more subscribers? I like the homepage design of the site and may even use it, but the post page conversion is a glaring omission.

My personal site isn’t currently targeting email subscriptions, but I do on my fashion blog Fashables. There’s a feature box on the homepage, but it disappears when you land on a post page. I have it on the books to create a smaller feature box on subpages, but it just hasn’t been done yet.

By adding a smaller feature box on subpages visitors will get the content they came for, but will also see a larger subscription form under the navigation area. This will be in addition to the sidebar subscription box.

Homepage design is important, but if email marketing is your thing, don’t forget about subpage conversion.