Last year, I wrote a few popular blog posts on biographies I’d read. Traffic to the blog increased, so people apparently found them useful. Since then, I’ve been trying to be more intentional with the blog. One area several people pointed to as a weakness was email capture. They said I was getting more people visiting the site, but they weren’t likely to read my new posts or come back to the site—unless I gave them a reason or reminded them. Capturing their email would give me a way to keep a reader I’d acquired engaged with (or at least aware) of my new material.

Email capture wasn’t something I ever thought about when I created this blog. People could enter their email address and be notified of new posts, but email capture wasn’t a priority. I never looked at the stats around how many emails I was capturing.

After hearing the same thing many times, I added a new feature a few months ago. A pop-up asking people to subscribe was added to the bottom of the site. Subscribers are notified of new posts.

The messaging in the pop-up was never really optimized. It was a placeholder to test whether the feature worked correctly. I’ve been learning about copywriting and am eager to put that knowledge to use. Today, I decided to adjust the pop-up message. I made some mistakes and broke some stuff, but it’s updated now.

This will be a process of iteration and experimentation, which is best done with data. So, I began tracking more subscription-related data. I can now experiment and see how effective changes are. I think these small experiments will be fun, and I’ll learn a lot.

If you have thoughts on this pop-up feature or the messaging, I’d love to hear them (criticism welcomed too). Write me at hello(at)jermainebrown.org.