How to Use Social Media to Boost Email Subscribers in WordPress

During our 16+ years of blogging and email marketing, we’ve learned a few tricks of the trade. One of them is using social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to get more email subscribers, fast.

Growing your email list can feel like a huge challenge. In order to convince visitors to share their email addresses you will need to win their trust and provide compelling content.

Luckily, using social media can help you attract new subscribers. With social media marketing, you can reach a wider audience, engage with potential subscribers in real time, and create irresistible content that encourages users to join your email list.

This marketing approach not only broadens your reach but also builds stronger connections with your audience. Essentially, it’s easier to convert followers into subscribers.

In this article, we’ll explain why integrating email and social media is crucial for every business. We’ll also show you how to use social media to boost your WordPress site email subscribers.

Why Use Social Media to Grow Your Email List?

While social media offers a fantastic opportunity to boost brand awareness and engage with your audience, platforms like Facebook severely limit your reach.

Studies show that only 5.9% of your Facebook followers will see your updates. Similarly, your tweets have a fleeting lifespan, quickly disappearing as newer content pushes them down.

On the other hand, nothing beats email marketing when it comes to engagement.

Email gives you direct access to your subscribers and generates a high return on investment. Each dollar spent on email marketing generates $44 in return, while social media marketing returns are just $2 for every dollar spent.

This doesn’t mean you should give up on social media. However, it strongly suggests that you should focus on building an email list for a significantly higher ROI and achieving your long-term marketing goals.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at how you can leverage your social media profiles to get even more email subscribers.

What Do You Need to Start Building Your Email List?

You need three things to start building your email list:

• A WordPress website or blog
• An email marketing service
• Lead generation software

You can set up all three things without learning any specialist technical skills. If you don’t already have a website or blog yet, then see our step-by-step guide on how to start a blog.

An email marketing service helps you collect email addresses, manage your email lists, and send out emails. More importantly, it helps you comply with email spam laws, significantly reducing the chance of your emails landing in spam folders.

We recommend Constant Contact, one of the largest and most popular email marketing services. We have tested it thoroughly to learn about all its features, which you can see in our detailed Constant Contact review.

Lastly, using lead generation software like OptinMonster is the most effective way to convert website visitors and social media followers into email subscribers.

We’re enthusiastic users ourselves; in fact, our case study demonstrates how we increased our email subscribers by 600% with OptinMonster, largely due to its powerful exit-intent technology.

Once your website, email newsletter platform, and lead generation software are in place, you can use social media to build your email list with the following techniques:

1. Collect Email Addresses From Your Facebook Page

If you manage a successful Facebook page, you likely have many fans who haven’t yet visited your website. A simple yet effective way to convert these fans into subscribers is by adding a prominent link directly to an email signup form.

Luckily, Facebook lets you easily add action buttons for business pages. These buttons are prominently displayed on top of your cover image, ensuring they are visible without users needing to scroll.

To add a signup button, visit your Facebook page and select ‘Add an Action Button’ from the sidebar or three-dot drop-down menu near the top of the page.

You will be shown a list of action button options. Simply select the ‘Sign up’ option and then click the ‘Next’ button.

Finally, you’ll need to provide the URL for the email signup form on your website. This is where users will be directed when they click the ‘Sign Up’ button.

Make sure you click the ‘Save’ button to add the new button. Now, visitors to your Facebook page will see a prominent call to action button, making it easy for them to join your email list.

2. Use Facebook Retargeting/Remarketing Pixel

Have you noticed that after you visit a website, you often start seeing their ads on Facebook? This is called retargeting or remarketing.

Those websites use Facebook’s retargeting technology, commonly known as Facebook Pixel.

The retargeting pixel is invisible on your website. It simply places a browser cookie on your visitors’ devices, allowing Facebook to recognize them. After they leave your site and browse Facebook, they will then see ads specifically targeted to them.

You can follow our step-by-step guide on how to add a Facebook pixel in WordPress to get started with Facebook ads. Then, check out these tips for optimizing your Facebook ads for conversions.

3. Use Facebook Ads to Promote Pages With Special Offers

People are often hesitant to share their email addresses. However, they often become much more willing when you offer them something valuable in return.

These special offers, given in exchange for email addresses, are known as lead magnets.

Common lead magnets include eBooks, cheat sheets, templates, reports, coupons, and more. The more targeted your offer is towards a specific audience, the more email addresses you’ll typically get.

You can easily create professional lead magnets using a tool like Beacon. Beacon is one of the best lead magnet tools on the market. It comes with ready-made templates and a drag-and-drop builder for quickly creating eBooks, checklists, workbooks, and more.

Once your lead magnet is ready, you can create a landing page or blog post on your website to feature it. Then, you can use an OptinMonster campaign to effectively capture email addresses.

Then, just create a Facebook ad for your free special offer that links to your landing page. This technique is even more powerful when combined with Facebook retargeting because you’re advertising to people who have already shown interest in your offer.

4. Promote Old Posts With Targeted Optins

If you’ve been blogging for a while, you likely have a wealth of content your newer followers haven’t discovered.

Sharing old posts on social media not only boosts engagement on your profiles but also drives more traffic back to your website.

You can automate this process using the ClickSocial plugin. For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to automatically share your old WordPress posts.

Then, you can use targeted optins that only appear to visitors who click on those older posts. You can use content upgrades, special offers, free downloads, and more.

5. Use Pinterest Boards for Lead Generation

Pinterest is another powerful social media platform that can boost your email subscriptions. Similar to Facebook and Twitter, you can offer your Pinterest followers content upgrades, coupons, and discounts.

You can also offer free downloads like eBooks, PDFs, audio, or video content. To further entice visitors to subscribe the moment they land on your site, consider displaying a welcome gate.

6. Ask Influencers to Share Links to Your Special Offers

Don’t limit sharing your special offers to just your own social profiles. Ask your friends, family, and followers to share them too.

Go a step further by reaching out to influential users you’re connected with. Politely ask if they can help spread the word. People are often happy to assist; sometimes, all you have to do is ask!

When influencers recommend your offer, it gains more credibility. This helps users feel more comfortable trusting you with their information. In fact, 61% of users say they trust reviews from reputable influencers just as much as a recommendation from friends and family.

7. Run a Giveaway or Competition

Giveaways are the perfect way to generate buzz and interest. Promoting contests and giveaways on social media lets you reach a wider audience and get more people to visit your website.

You can even make subscribing to your email newsletter a requirement for entry.

The good news is that it’s easy to create a social media giveaway using RafflePress.

It’s the best WordPress giveaway plugin and comes with ready-made giveaway templates for Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and more.

At WPBeginner, we run annual birthday giveaways and other contests using RafflePress.

This helps us increase subscribers and double our traffic and conversions.

For details about the plugin, you can see our extensive RafflePress review. Then, you can learn how to run a social media contest to grow your site by following our detailed guide.

8. Host X (Twitter) Chats

You can host discussions on X (formerly Twitter) centered around particular topics in your niche. For instance, chatting about an app can attract potential customers seeking answers or support.

These chats can potentially reach a wider audience beyond your current followers. People interested in a chat topic might discover your profile and engage with your content.

You can use a unique hashtag to identify your chats. For example, Semrush uses #SEMRUSHCHAT to categorize their discussions.

Semrush invites industry experts to answer audience questions during their Twitter chats. This attracts a knowledgeable audience and positions them as a thought leader, encouraging participants to subscribe to their email list for more expert content.

9. Run Lead Generation Ads

With most brands actively using social media, it can be tough to stand out. But if you want to convert followers into email subscribers, then running lead-generation ads is an easy way to start growing your list.

Notice how this company runs ads to promote Python classes. Users who click the ‘Sign up’ button are directed to a landing page that collects email addresses.

Whether you use Facebook, X/Twitter, or Instagram, social media retargeting can help encourage users to share their email addresses.

You can use retargeting ads to reach users who have shown interest in your brand but haven’t subscribed yet.

10. Create CTA Cards on YouTube

If your YouTube channel gets lots of views, then you can convert those viewers into email subscribers by adding hyperlinked end cards to your videos. These are clickable elements that appear during the last few seconds of your video.

These CTA cards can direct viewers to a new destination, like a sign-up page for your email list. This is an easy way to capture interested viewers right when they’re most engaged.

You can add cards and other information to your YouTube video as part of the upload process.

Plus, with a plugin like Smash Balloon’s Feed for YouTube Pro, you can easily embed your YouTube feed directly on your website. This will broaden your video’s reach.

11. Share Newsletter Previews on Your Profile

Another great way to convince people to subscribe to your newsletter is to offer a preview. Simply share a highlight from your newsletter on social media, then direct users to your sign-up page.

The Laudes Foundation uses video teasers on Facebook every month to generate buzz about their newsletter.

By giving users a taste of your content, you’ll entice them to sign up and keep coming back for more.

12. Use Virtual Events to Collect Emails

Does your business host virtual events such as webinars, workshops, and product demonstrations? Then, you can easily build your email list by requiring participants to provide their email addresses for entry.

Facebook allows you to promote events and get found in local searches. When creating an event, just make sure to collect sign-ups on your website rather than using Facebook RSVP. This ensures you maintain control over the data collected.

Notice how Alicia Keys promotes her events: she encourages followers to “tag a friend” to boost engagement. After the event, her landing page cleverly switched to a sign-up page, allowing people to register in order to rewatch the session.

This is an excellent strategy for any small business hosting webinars, virtual classes, or online meetups.

13. Write Strong Calls to Action

Many businesses struggle with turning social media followers into email subscribers. They share great content but fail to guide their audience to the next step. This is where a strong call to action (CTA) can make all the difference.

Here are a few tips for writing strong CTAs:

• Keep it short and sweet
• Use power words like ‘sign up’ or ‘join’
• Highlight the benefits of subscribing

Let’s take a look at this post by Gustwines. They clearly explain how to sign up for their email list while promoting an incentive: subscribers get early access.

14. Provide Social Media Customer Service

People spend countless hours on social media and use these platforms to reach out to brands, share experiences, and seek support. Providing excellent customer service over social media is crucial for increasing brand loyalty and trust.

That’s why you should include action buttons like ‘Send Email’ on your social media profiles. This makes it simple for customers to contact you and ensures they don’t miss any important messages.

Quick and empathetic responses show that you care about your customers. This builds loyalty and can turn casual followers into loyal customers and brand advocates.

15. Create a Customer Loyalty Program

Not every brand can afford to work with influencers, and you may not even need to. You can turn your loyal customers into brand ambassadors with a customer loyalty program that rewards them for promoting your mailing list.

To keep the process fun and engaging, you can use gamified leaderboards and monthly contests. Offering perks like discounts, exclusive content, and early access to new products can also encourage your customers to share their unique referral links on social media and with friends.

Here’s a great example from La Croix. They maintain a branded look and host branded merchandise giveaways in exchange for the best user-generated content.

Frequently Asked Questions: FAQs

Integrating social media with your email marketing can feel a bit overwhelming, whether you’re just starting out or you’re a seasoned pro. We get it! That’s why we’ve put together this section to tackle all your burning questions and offer simple solutions to common concerns.

Why should I combine social media with email marketing?

By bringing together social media and email marketing, you can:

• Reach a Wider Audience: Expand your reach and get your message in front of more people.
• Turn Followers into Subscribers: Convert your engaged social media audience into loyal email subscribers, building a valuable asset for your business.
• Maximize Engagement: Get more clicks, opens, and interactions across all your platforms.
• Amplify Your Marketing Efforts: Each platform strengthens the other, working together to deliver impressive results and a great return on your investment.

How can I track the effectiveness of my email campaigns?

You can easily track key metrics using a tool like MonsterInsights. It integrates directly into WordPress, making it simple to see how your campaigns are performing so you can make them even better.

What lead generation tools are best for beginners?

If you’re just starting out, then we recommend WPForms. It’s a really easy-to-use drag-and-drop form builder that helps you create custom email signup forms without needing to write any code.

There you have it! We hope this article helped you learn how to use social media to increase email subscribers in WordPress. Next, you may also want to see our list of the best social media plugins for WordPress and our beginner’s guide on how to build an email list in WordPress for more tips.

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