Getting Parents to Opt-in to Your Child Care Email List

With so many opt-in email lists out there, you need to create a hook to capture parents’ email addresses who visit your website. It needs to have something special or different. It could be something you offer inside every newsletter issue, like parenting tips, tuition discounts, or similar offers. Or the hook could be a unique incentive that website visitors can take advantage of immediately when they sign up.

Here are three ideas you can use for your child care website or use as inspiration to get you thinking a little outside of the box:

— Build an Optin Email List By Giving Subscribers a Free, Tangible Gift —

Instead of offering a free ebook or article like most everybody else, promise to give your visitors something they can hold in their hands if they give you their contact information.

For example, you could say, “Subscribe today and get our favorite education toy mailed to you via First Class.” The signup form would include inputting the child’s age so you could mail an appropriate age education toy.

– Build an Opt-in Email list to your child care eNewsletter –

The signup information would indicate that tuition/registration discount coupons are included in each eNewsletter.

— Build an Opt-in Email List Through a Contest or Sweepstakes —

Hold a free contest or sweepstakes at your website where they must give their contact information, including their email address, to enter. Make the prize something that parents of young children will be interested in receiving. For stance, free tickets for the children’s museum, local ballpark, science center, or other local childrens’ attractions. Otherwise, they’ll never want to enter.

If you already have an eNewsletter up and running, you could offer free automatic entry for new subscribers. For example, you could say, “Subscribe to our free eNewsletter and get automatic entry into our contest.” You’ll also want to include current subscribers retroactively.

You can announce the winner(s) at the end and send any new contest announcements or special events announcements. Or you can make this an ongoing contest, where you give away the same thing to one (or more) lucky parents every month. That way, you’ll entice many subscriber parents to stay on your list. You can follow up with tips, articles, news, new program announcements, or just an announcement of each monthly winner(s).

Hopefully, now we’ve inspired you to take some action or encouraged your ideas with these tips. Any idea, the more popular it gets, requires you to think outside the box now and then to be effective. Building an opt-in email list is no different. And with newsletters and eNewsletters saturating the internet today, you need to offer something a little different to make parents want to sign up for yours.