Leaping over the email subscribe hurdle

Ideas for boosting your email subscribers

Wouldn't it be great if every visitor to your website purchased from you? That's clearly a dream world.

There are many reasons website visitors don't buy; not yet ready to purchase, researching product choices, planning to buy in the future, unsure whether to trust you, currently comparing products, comparing suppliers, need to confer with other family members before buying, getting an idea of budget for a future purchase and so on.

The next best thing to getting a purchase is getting an email address with opt-in permission, a lead.

Being given the privilege to keep the conversation going through email is your chance to tilt the odds in your favour of them coming back to you and purchasing in the future. However, getting an email address is easier said than done.

I recently completed a benchmark study 'Leaping over the subscribe hurdle'. This study researched the top 100 UK online retailers. It's available as a free download from Emailvision. I've picked out a couple of report highlights here.

The biggest mistake you can make in getting email permission is to not even ask for it, in the research I found a healthy 95% of top brands did ask. However of the 95% that did, 14% of them required you to register for an online account in order to receive marketing emails. Nobody is going to create an account just to allow a brand to email them so this removes any email benefit of extending the conversation until a new customer is ready to purchase.

The second biggest mistake is to give insufficient prominence and placement to the option for potential customers to sign-up.This heatmap shows the placement of a signup form on the webpage across the brands studied.

Placing signup high up on the home page and making the form run of site is best. However, it doesn't need to be a question of 'should I put the signup form top or bottom of the page?'. Both are fine and will deliver more subscribers.

The report contains a lot more insight, such as how to improve data quality, what data top retailers require during signup and what is optional. The study includes:

• Best practice signup process examples
• Analysis and statistics of how the top retailers perform
• Tips and advice to optimise the number of sign-ups

Download the complete 24 page report free - there's no barrier page.

Want to learn more about boosting email subscribers?

Hear Smart Insights Expert commentators @tawatson @kathpay and @DaveChaffey speak at the @DMA_UK Email+ event 17 July - Details: bit.ly/KB89jF