The email opt-in or subscribe form on your website is crucial when you are building up your database, and can help your marketing efforts at a later stage.
The information you can capture here on customer preferences can help make your email marketing more effective and relevant to consumers.
Here are some tips on how:
Make the sign-up page / link easy to find
Including a link to email opt-in on every page is a good idea. Don't make customers search for it.
M&S has a link to subscribe on every page, though it is at the bottom so perhaps could be more prominent:
Don't ask for too much information
While it is important to get some useful information from subscribers to help make your emails more relevant to customers, be careful not to make the form too long.
Make customers fill in too many details and some will simply give up on the idea. M&S has the right idea, with just a few fields to fill in:
Make sure you get enough information
While you shouldn't annoy subscribers by asking for too much information, it's important to get the right information to help you to target your emails.
Next, while it displays the email sign up option prominently, asks for no details apart from the email address, so it is missing the chance to get some valuable data from subscribers:
Explain the benefits of subscribing
Give customers a reason to take the time to enter their details and sign up for emails. This may be discounts on their shopping, being the first to find out about new products, and so on.
Find out preferred frequency
Subscribers can get annoyed when they receive too many emails, and may start to simply ignore emails, unsubscribe, or mark them as spam.
To avoid this, you can ask customers how often they want to receive marketing emails and newsletters so you can find the correct frequency for each customer.
Send a welcome message
Once people have signed up, it's a good idea to send them an email to confirm the subscription and ask them to add your address to their email safe sender list, to avoid your emails going straight to the spam folder.
Related research:
Email Marketing Briefing - March 2008
Email Marketing Industry Census 2008
Related stories:
Beyond opens and clicks: why it’s time for new email metrics
Putting customers in charge of your communications
Reader comments (2)
3:48AM on 30th May 2008
Great article! If you are looking to do email marketing the right way you need to work with some of the big email marketing agency's. Here's a list of the big three opt-in email list rental companies...
1) iDeutsche
2) Viralytics Media
3) RazorFish
4:23PM on 21st May 2010
I tend to subscribe to lists and newsletters where the webmaster has done a good job in motivating me to sign up to his info feeds, be it RSS, articles or comments. I've tried using a variety of widgets (Aweber pop-ups) but have decided the best way to get my reader's attention is using the new Instant SlideUp v2 tool and since its so easy to sync it with Mail Chimp, Aweber, Direct Response and the other major email marketing systems, it makes it easy to test and measure its effectiveness.
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