Top Ways to Improve Your Email Marketing - Page 5/10

3. The Opt-in Form

The point of course of the actual form is to obtain the right balance of information that you need to send, personalize, segment and optimize your email program for each subscriber.

- Don’t Ask for Too Much Information – Your email opt-in form is not the place to qualify prospects or make them jump through hoops. Don’t ask for information that you cannot use for email delivery and personalization/segmentation. If you are concerned that you may have too many fields, consider denoting some of them as optional.
- Don’t Ask for Too Little Information – By the same token, plan for the future. While only asking for someone’s email address makes the sign-up process extremely quick, you have not obtained information that will help you deliver more relevant emails to your subscribers. This includes format preference, name and other preferences/demographics key to your program.
- Address Validation – To ensure that subscribers enter their email address correctly, include a script that checks for syntax errors upon submission. Additionally, consider a secondary box that requires them to re-enter their address. This will minimize invalid addresses due to input errors.
- Form Fields:– the minimum: a. First Name b. Last Name and c. Email address
- Format Preference (HTML or Text) – In addition to providing options of whether to receive HTML or text, consider including a note such as the following: Text is recommended if you use Eudora Light, Eudora Pro 3 and below,Lotus Notes versions below R5 or AOL 5.0 and under.
- Form Fields – optional:- a. Secondary Email Address - Since approximately a third of your list will change their email address every year, consider asking for a secondary email address. Then when their primary address bounces you can send a follow-up email to the secondary address.
- Frequency – Many sophisticated etailers and publishers give subscribers the choice of how often they wish to receive emails, i.e., daily, weekly, monthly.
- Demographics (gender, age, location, etc.)
- Interests/Preferences (topic, rock vs. jazz, etc.)

4. Other Opt-in Pages

In addition to your actual email opt-in form pages, there are other means on your Web site of gaining new subscribers, including:

- Download/Registration Pages – Always include an email subscription check box as part of your registration (download white papers, membership, demo request, etc.) forms. This approach can generate a subscription conversion rate of 50 percent or more.
- Purchase/Shopping Cart Pages – Be sure to include product/shopping preferences in your shopping cart form and a clear opt-in check box for your email. Lyris recommends that you NOT use pre-checked boxes. If you choose to use this approach, however, the CAN-SPAM Act requires that you include a notice of advertisement in the email.

A Good First Impression Equals Stronger Opt-In Relationship

Congratulations! You’ve initiated an opt-in – hopefully even double opt-in – process for your list. That’s great, and you should feel good because you have done the right thing both for your brand as well as for your subscribers and those that you didn’t indiscriminately subscribe to your list. What now?

Now that you’ve these new subscribers on board, your first task is to begin to engage them – and quick! By bringing them into the fold, letting them know you appreciate their interest, you’re demonstrating that you value them and want to respect their needs and they desire to hear from you.

As with old-line direct marketing, the best addresses on your mailing list are the newest ones, the owners of which are more likely to open and respond to your email messages than even those who have been on your list for just three months.