Triple Your Subscribers Using Co-Registration

Do you have a newsletter you are trying to promote? If so, I bet you're frustrated by the slow of trickle of new subscribers you gain each month. This article will tell you how to double or triple your subscriber rate using a technique called co-registration. Before we get into the "how" of co-registration it's important to understand the difference between pay-per-subscriber services and true co-registration. A pay-per-subscriber service sells you email addresses that it collects from a network of websites across the web. The problem is you never know exactly where the subscribers came from. This tends to result in higher opt-outs rates and poor readership - it also gets quite expensive.

On the other hand, true co-registration is simply an agreement between yourself and another newsletter publisher for cross promotion; and typically this is done without cost to either party. You simply place a description of each other's newsletter on your "thank you for subscribing" web page. Each time a person subscribes to your partner's newsletter, he or she is also given the chance to subscribe to yours at the same time. (There is an example at the end of this article.)

Co-registration sounds like a no-brainer, huh? And I bet you're curious why there aren't more newsletters already doing this. Well, let's be honest. Most newsletters are published by organizations that don't have the time or the technical resources to setup this kind of promotion. You may be in this position yourself. There is now a service that will provide you with both the software and support needed to add co-registration to your proverbial marketing tool-belt. The service is called Co-Reg Complete (http://www.coregcomplete.com). Everything I describe here can be done easily through the Co-Reg Complete web-based application. In fact, you can be running co-reg in just 5 minutes after finishing this article.

Co-Registration 101 - How to Getting Started
Okay. Let's assume you have decided to go ahead and start using co-registration to generate more subscribers. You're going to need three things to get started:

1) You need a way to add partner offers to the "thank you for subscribing" page on your website. If you have a good IT person he or she can do this for you (or you can use Co-Reg Complete).

2) You need partners. This is the 'tricky' bit about co-reg. Finding partners can be time consuming at first. So here are three tips:

Tip #1) The first thing you can do is post a free listing on the Co-Reg Directory (http://www.coregdirectory.com).

Tip #2) Get a pad of paper and jot down any competitors you may have. Your prime competitors may be your best prospects for a co-reg partnership - so seriously consider sending them an email about it.

Tip #3) Find a newsletter with complimentary subject matter to your own. For example, readers of "Mrs. Applebee's Dog-Show Review" are likely to also be interested in "Canine Health Monthly" and vice versa. Try finding them through web directories like Yahoo or Alexa.

3) Last, but not least, to run a co-reg program you need a way to accept email addresses that your partners send you and to send addresses to your partner when a subscriber checks off their newsletter on your website. Co-Reg Complete will do this for you automatically - but you can also do it by hand if, for some reason, that's your thing. You just need to ask your partners for the format they want you use when sending the information to them.

After you complete step 3 you are now an official co-registration guru. Here is a tip for going forward: The power of co-registration lies in the number of partners you enroll. The bottom line is that each partner represents a source of subscribers for your newsletter; the more partners you have, the faster you will gain subscribers.

On that note, our research shows that you can display 8 to 12 partners at a time without a serious drop in co-registration. If you end up with more than 12 partners, you can always rotate their offers, or setup limits on how many subscriptions each one gets. (Again, easy in Co-Reg Complete.)

If you would like to see an example of co-registration looks in action check out the Web Marketing Association's newsletter (www.webmarketingassociation.org). If you subscribe, you'll see a great example of a co-registration page. Best of luck promoting your newsletter, and don't forget to give some serious thought to Co-Reg Complete. Creating an account will save you a lot of time, and they have some great tips in their monthly newsletter.