I've been having some nice traction lately for things written at the Rockstar blog. But what does every marketing guru tell you?

"It's all in the email list."

I better not lose these visitors. Let's try and make sure they return. So I recently added a footer at the bottom of our blog posts:

And last week was another good week for the blog. On Tuesday alone we had 7800 visitors. Let the emails roll in.

So how many subscribers?

3

Yes 3. For a whopping 0.038% conversion rate. Great job, Nate.

Ok, so a lot of things could be wrong with this effort in collecting email addresses. Maybe the footer could be more eye catching. Maybe I should be offering more value for actually subscribing like an ebook or something. Maybe I could be showing folks an example of what they're signing up for. All valid ideas. But I have a feeling...

People just don't like subscribing to more email newsletters.

I can't even remember the last email newsletter I've subscribed to. But I can remember hitting unsubscribe from a bunch of junk recently I didn't want.

So I went looking around at some of the best marketers and what they do to get subscribers instead of one-off traffic. Like HubSpot.

Dharmesh and crew over at HubSpot always seem to be on the forefront of what's going on in the marketing world. So what's HubSpot doing about blog/newsletter subscriptions? And that's when I noticed something.

Slack!?

That's interesting. Slack did just raise another $400+ million. But what's also interesting is how much of Slack's ethos is to "Kill Email."

Maybe if people really are tired of coughing up their email addresses for newsletters, they'd be more comfortable piping it into something like a Slack Channel.

And if HubSpot's doing it, maybe we all should be trying this out.

So I created a service for anyone to let their visitors "Subscribe with Slack." It's called Subscribing.Rocks

As a newsletter/blog owner, simply login with Slack, add a feed to your blog/newsletter, and Subscribing.Rocks generates a button you can use on your blog or website. Here's what it looks like now on the Rockstar blog:

Your readers (who use Slack) can now click that button to have your new posts automatically pipe into a Slack channel they pick. With posts landing directly where your readers are spending time, it may also increase readership.

What's also great and maybe comforting to users of our service and your subscribers is that we don't gather any personally identifying information when people sign up as a Feed Publisher (other than your blog URL) or as a Subscriber. No emails or names are collected.

Will this improve getting repeat visitors to our blog? I have no idea. But we might as well try at this point. We can only go up from 0.038% :)

See anything you'd like improved in the service, hit me up on Twitter. And you should Subscribe with Slack to our blog! :)

Or get your own "Subscribe with Slack" button at: Subscribing.Rocks.

P.S. If you need any help building software, give us a shout. I’m sure we can help.