Don’t Scare Potential Subscribers Away

Want people to subscribe to your newsletter? Then don’t put up data collection obstacles.

Every time you ask the reader to register, use a password, answer questions on a survey or provide personal data, you are essentially setting up roadblocks, each of which ahs the potential to make the would-be subscriber decide it’s not worth the trouble. Just as e-commerce sites never put any barrier between the shopper and the sale, don’t prioritize getting a lot of data over getting the one piece of information you need most: Her e-mail address!

You can always gather additional data later on using surveys and feedback forms, once you’ve opened the lines of communication or by appending the data. By asking only for the person’s e-mail address and permission to send them e-mails, you are keeping it simple and not driving away potential business or subscribers.

There are two imperatives to creating an irresistible subscribe form:

1. Provide a compelling reason to sign up. This might be an incentive, such as a money-saving coupon, a free gift or perhaps a gift certificate for another company with which you have a partnership. But whether you have an incentive or not, be sure that you form has strong promotional copy touring the benefits of receiving the newsletter.

2. Design a super-fast sign-up process: Do this in order to quickly capture the e-mail address and only the most basic additional information (we recommend either just e—mail or, at most, one additional field, like Zip code or gender). Close while the prospect is hot.

We worked with a major consumer packaged-goods company whose newsletter was well designed and filled with terrific content. In spite of these good qualities, they couldn’t get anyone to sign up for the newsletter. When we dug into it, we discovered the subscribe form had seventeen required fields! We weren’t surprised that most consumers weren’t willing to go through all of that work just to get e-mail, even if it was from a brand-name marketer. We advised that they just ask for the e-mail address upfront. Within weeks of making the change their sign-up rate skyrocketed, at one point hitting a high of 400% improvement!

As we mentioned earlier, you can always gather more data later, once you have built up a relationship built on trust. For example, when a prospect requests a download of your latest whitepaper, ask for their e-mail address and include a checkbox to subscribe to your newsletter. Later, when the prospect responds with interest in a product demo, you might ask for telephone number, company name and job title. The prospect will be much more likely to provide this information when they have learned more about your company.

One way to entice people to give you more data is to offer an incentive. This works particularly well when the data and incentive are tied together. Remember the marketer with the seventeen fields? Well, what they really wanted was their customers’ mailing addresses. Our suggestion was to offer the incentive of a $1 coupon that would come in the mail. How did it work? For starters, this eliminated the garbage-data problem, because if you didn’t give the correct address, you wouldn’t get the coupon. And while not everyone who signed up for e-mail filled in this second form, many others did. In fact, the postal data supplied under the new offering was much more accurate.

Therefore, always think about why you want a certain piece of data and how you intend to use it. If, for example, you want to do geographical target marketing, but not actually send anything by mail, then ask only for their area code, Zip code or state. This allows you to garget an area for marketing purposes without requiring a high level of trust, since the data is not personally identifiable.

Surveys are also good ways to acquire additional information just for the sake of it. If you have no reason to be gathering data at this time, don’t ask for it. Remember, the more data you own, the more privacy issues you have to content with. In today’s climate, if you really don’t need it or intend to use it, you might not want it.

Matt Blumberg is the driving force behind Return Path, an e-mail performance company. Collaborating with him on this project are his colleagues, e-mail strategists Stephanie A. Miller and Tami Monahan Forman. This article was excerpted from their new book, “Sign Me Up! A Marketer’s Guide to Creating E-mail Newsletters That Build Relationships and Boost Sales (iUniverse Inc., 2005) © 2005 Return Path, Inc. All rights reserved.