How to make a subscription on the site? Step-by-step instruction

Very often on this or that site you can see a field for entering information, which is called a "subscription form". Administrators of the resource strongly encourage users to enter their data (in particular, the e-mail address), after which various letters with information about certain materials, promotions, news of this resource begin to arrive at the mailbox specified in this form. Have you noticed this?

All this is a form of work with website visitors and participants of various Internet communities. It assumes a certain "response" in the form of collecting the database of people who visit your resource, as well as the ability to send information about your site to those who left a mailing address.

If you have a resource, and you would like to know how to make a subscription on the site, this article will be useful to you. In it, we'll look at the basics of creating subscriptions, mailing lists: what it is and why it is used.

What is subscription and distribution?

So, let's start with the definitions. Subscription is the user's voluntary consent to receive information letters from the person of the resource. In such letters (and they are sent by e-mail), the administration of the site, as already noted, can publish news of the portal, some actions (if it is an online store), information about competitions (for example, those that are conducted on the blog) . After subscribing, the person leaves his address and, in fact, gives a sign that he is ready to read the letter sent to him from this or that site. Subscription is organized at the expense of a special form. It is placed in a prominent place on the Internet; This form can have a different appearance, but the essence of it is always the same - to collect the address of the mail and send it to the server. Sometimes the newsletter subscription for the site also contains the "Name" field.

Newsletter is a form of notification of users through e-mail, which is expressed in a mass mailing of letters. As already mentioned, it can be news, stocks, novelties and so on. The mailing is conducted in order, first, to notify users about something, and secondly - to draw their attention to this or that event, and to the resource as a whole, recalling its existence.

In fact, the newsletter follows the subscription: the site administrator (with the help of special tools) sends out information about his site to the e-mail addresses collected using the form. So the subscription to the news of the site works.

Why is this necessary?

Subscription is an effective marketing tool that can increase the popularity of the site, attract new users to it. With its help, you can "gather" the attention of those who signed earlier, and also increase the audience at the expense of new visitors, simply by publishing interesting materials.

Another form of subscription for the site allows you to create a core of loyal, loyal customers, who are guaranteed to be interested in your updates. With the help of such people it is possible, for example, to organize sales of their information products or even real goods with delivery by mail. Examples of successful business, built solely on subscriptions and mass mailings, held among regular visitors, are quite a lot among both Western and domestic bloggers and webmasters. Monetization of the list of signed users is limited only by your imagination.

Ways to organize a subscription to the newsletter

If you already have a resource, and you are interested in the possibility to create your own database of contact data for loyal users, then you are probably interested in how to subscribe to the site. We talk about the possible methods of its creation and methods of application.

So, if you are talking about collecting email addresses, then you, in fact, have two ways - creating your own and using someone else's site to work with the subscription. The first option is, of course, more difficult from the implementation point of view, but it gives more opportunities for visual settings of the subscription form. The second one can be set up to work within a few minutes after the launch of the site. This is done easily and simply. However, as a rule, resources that provide such services make restrictions on the appearance of the form for subscription.

Scheme of the subscription form

Let's start with a description of how to make a subscription on the site. This, of course, is a bit difficult for beginners. In addition, your hosting should support the work of PHP scripts.

The scheme of the operation of such a subscription is very simple: an HTML form is inserted into the site page to collect information that transfers data to the script. He, in turn, fulfills a condition that ends with the recording of the user's address in a text file or sending his data to another service (depending on the administrator's wishes). The most difficult in this bundle can be called the work of the PHP script, since the HTML form is extremely simple, but the script may have some problems, for example, an incorrectly installed encoding. If you do not have basic programming skills, we recommend that you ask someone to help with this issue.

However, the plus of working with your own form is the fact that once you set it up, you can forget about it and just collect user data in automatic mode.

Looking for services to create a subscription

Services that deal with the provision of services for compiling a database of users using subscriptions, as well as mailing to the collected addresses, are well known, so they do not need to be searched. This is SmartResponder and GoogleFeedBurner. Still there are small projects that teach how to make a subscription on a website, but whether to use them or not is for you to decide, their activities can be called secondary.

Those projects that are mentioned above, are engaged in the following: the first allows to competently maintain a list of users' email addresses and send messages to them with a certain periodicity (fee). The second one has a slightly different direction: with its help you can collect the necessary addresses, but you can send them notifications with the news from your blog. Thus, the first service is rather an advertising tool, while the second is the ability to "feed" subscribers with fresh content.

Create a subscription form yourself

In fact, it is much more useful and interesting to develop your own mechanism for processing data received from users. If you describe this process step by step, it looks like this:

• Step 1 . Create a PHP-script for processing the received data (name and address of the user's mail) and put it in the root of your site. If you do not know the programming language - we recommend that you contact the freelancer, you will be given a decision for a symbolic fee.
• Step 2 . It is necessary to integrate the script with the HTML page. This is done simply: you need only basic knowledge of the HTML markup language and a little bit of zeal. In order for everything to work out, you need to create a form (form tag), arrange it visually (CSS for help) and connect to the script: write the post (post) to your PHP file.
• Step 3 . It includes setting up the data processing script. In it, in addition to the code itself, you need to write down information about which file the received information will be sent to. In fact, the subscription script for the site is ready. Make it real for a couple of hours for a beginner, and for half an hour (and faster) - in the event that you have a similar experience.

Newsletter on the database

Further only you decide what to do with the received mail addresses. You can use them to publish updates on the site, you can as addresses to send marketing proposals. Do not forget that for the user subscription - access to the site, which he may have already forgotten. Do not spam links to your visitors resource - otherwise they will just drop you in the "black list" of mail!

Recommendations for compiling the mailing list

As to how the mailing is done, I would like to give the following advice. First, publish only the most interesting and useful material. Secondly, regularly conduct some kind of interactive activities (actions, competitions), with which you can attract new users. Thirdly, do not forget to create an instruction on how to disable the subscription to the site. Let your customers unsubscribe from your updates and do not intrude.