Email Marketing – Acquiring new names
Growing your database is likely to be high on your list when it comes to your email marketing strategy. So how do you get browsers to opt-in to your newsletter?
1. Make sure your signup is visible on site (you may know where it is but do your prospective subscribers?) In my experience the optimum placement for this is on the header of your website, this way is doesn’t matter where they land on your site it will always be on the top of the page.
2. Incentivise – give them a reason to sign up.
3. Keep it short and sweet – only ask for the information you are going to use – Name, email address and email preference HTML or Plain Text (you can always append data at a later stage).
4. Show them an example – manage their expectations, make sure they know what they are going to receive.
5. Link to your privacy policy – if you are not going to sell your data to third parties highlight the fact since it may encourage opt-in.
6. Validation – run validation scripts within the opt-in form to ensure the correct make-up of the email address. After all you want to be able to mail them.
If you are not sure what to do first then test one thing at a time, see if it increases your subscription rate.
Remember… There is no exact science, so test and find out what works best for your site and your browsers.
Hollie Williams, Client Strategy Consultant
November 17th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
One thing to bear in mind when incentivising sign up is the quality of data.
Remember it’s better to have good quality data in lower volumes than a large volume of non responsive data.
If you do incentivise sign up ensure you track it properly – this way you know when the recipients signed up and what the offer was. You can also see if they were truly interested in receiving your communication or whether they just wanted the free gift you were offering.
November 16th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
[...] fact that some were receiving communications that were not of interest to them. With a big push in list growth a while back, the need to manage the relevance of their emails was soon seen as a high [...]