Email Marketing Ideas and Optimization

List growth begins with making it easy and compelling for visitors to your website to opt-in to your email program.

Successful email signup forms employ a set of common elements.  Use this checklist to audit your signup  process to see if you are missing ways to maximize the number of people opting-in to your email program from your website.

Not every process needs all of these elements.  Depending on your design and objectives, use the ones that work for you.  Take a moment to look around at your peers and competition's sites and see which elements they use and how they are implemented.

Placement - Where is your signup form?  Is it easy to find?  You are working hard to get traffic to your website, investing in SEO and PPC, so maximize that investment by using email to create an ongoing dialog with your visitors.  Why wait for them to remember to return?  If they're interested in your website, convert that interest into an email subscription by putting the signup on the page.
• Homepage (and all interior pages)
• Link to signup landing page from all pages
• DHTML pop-overs (not always appropriate)

Form Design - The email signup form must compete for real estate on your pages with other important content areas.  Maximize the value by making it easy and compelling to opt-in with good form design.
• Minimal required fields
• Clear call to action
• “Opt-in” i.e. box is not pre-checked

Value Proposition - Provide a reason for people to subscribe.  Can be one line or a whole paragraph.  (You can expand this on a dedicated signup landing page.)
• Extrinsic (reward) or intrinsic (content)
• Subscriber has a compelling reason to sign up (“WIIFM”)

Privacy Assurance
• Overcomes psychological barrier of fear of giving personal info
• Link to policy and/or wording: “we will not share your information…”

Sequence and User Flow - What happens after the subscriber clicks the button?  Optimize this process by providing a continuous path of next actions.  Make sure you don't dead end the process with a generic "thank you" page just because that's the easy way out.
• Follow up pages (thank you page) for additional data collection
• Two-step process for additional demographic info and preferences

Welcome Email!! - This one is worth two exclamation points.  A triggered welcome email is becoming table stakes for all email programs.  Subscribers expect you to acknowledge them and provide some instant gratification - give them what they signed up for:  sample issue, deals, a coupon, exclusive info, etc.  It's amazing how marketers will try so hard (invest time and money) to get someone to come to the website and sign up for email, then respond with the equivalent of "Yeahhhh, we'll get back to you later…"
• ExactTarget provides multiple ways to send a triggered email, the new Welcome Email feature make it very easy to send a nicely formatted HTML or text email confirmation/welcome to new subscribers.



Links for further information:
Marketing Experiments - Email Optimization Wednesday, 28 January 2009

ClickZ How to Improve Your Process for Acquiring E-mail Subscribers By Stefan Pollard, ClickZ, Jan 27, 2010

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Jay Miller
Marketing Solutions Consultant