Best Practices: Why Your Website Must Encourage Email Sign-Ups

All email marketers want more subscribers. Subscribers spend money. If visitors come to your website for one reason or another, they should be encouraged to register to receive your emails. If thousands come to your site and fail to register, you don’t have a very good website.

The value of an email subscriber varies widely from one company to another. The same subscriber can be worth $4 to a retail store and $240 to a rental car company. Both can be measured using lifetime value. Both companies want more email subscribers. How do you get them? There are many ways, but most involve registering visitors who come to your site so they can receive your emails. Here we have a significant problem.

A Website Scoring System
In the past two years, I developed a scoring system for websites. The system determines how effectively the site welcomes and encourages visitors to sign up. It is amazing how many sites end up with a low score—this means because of the way the site is arranged, many visitors come and go without signing up.

The scoring system contains eight sections:

Section Possible Points
Location of the invitation to register 10
Contents of the sign-up sheet 15
Profile and preferences 15
Forward to a friend 3
Welcome email 11
Use of cookies 3
Rewards and incentives 3
Unsubscribe Line 6

The maximum number of points a site could receive was 66. We scored 122 websites. The majority scored in the 15 to 33 point range. Four sites received less than 4 points, and only four scored higher than 35 points. The highest score received (by only one site) was 47 points.

The e-mail marketing staffs at the 122 companies ranked understood the scoring system, and those with low scores understood that changes needed to happen to increase registrations. But, in many cases they could not get the changes made. Why?

Why Changes Don’t Happen
The answer is an interesting one. For historical reasons, in many companies, the staff that is responsible for the website is different from the staff that sends out the emails. Each has their own budget and goals.

The email marketing staff is interested in boosting revenue from email blasts. The website management group is also interested in increasing revenue from the site, but it may also have other objectives.

Websites often fall under the purview of the advertising department, since, when websites were first created, they were conceived as a way to wave the flag, and represent the brand. Often websites fall under a committee representing different parts of the company. The advertising folks want to present an image of their brand. They use focus groups to get public reaction to the appearance of their site. Putting a box saying “Register here to get 10% off on your next order” does not fit into their high level picture of what their brand stands for. They may fight efforts to change the site to encourage registration.

Budget Problems
Even when the website folks are willing to make the needed modifications, there is often a budget problem. Who provides the money for changing the site to make it more registration friendly? The email marketing staff has an annual budget based on the number of emails they plan to send out. Say that there are 2 million subscribers who will get two emails per week. At an overall cost of $4.50 per thousand, that is an annual budget of $936,000. There is no extra slush fund. If it costs, for example, $30,000 to make changes on the website, who has the budget for that? Even worse, if the money is found and it results in adding, say, 1 million new subscribers, where is the e-mail marketing staff going to get the extra $468,000 to send emails to these new people? They will have to go back to the CFO, who may have already allocated all the money he has available for email marketing this year.

Needed: a CMO
Email marketing is often an overlooked stepchild in the marketing operation. Emails produce sales not only in the email shopping carts, but also encourage subscribers to visit stores, order from the catalog, or go to the website. In most companies, the CMO is interested in boosting sales through all media. Thus, the CMO must recognize the need to coordinate the budgets to make websites and email marketing work together.

Arthur Middleton Hughes ([email protected]) is vice president of The Database Marketing Institute. His new book from McGraw-Hill, “Strategic Database Marketing 4th Edition,” is due out this summer.