Recently, I signed up at an online retailer as an experiment into their email practices. After finding the spot on their site to subscribe, I was taken to a login screen, where I had to create and account, with my full name and postal address. I wasn’t asked my email preferences or any profiling information, but I had to create an account in order to get their emails. Ok. So beyond the frustration of setting up an account (it was a single opt in), I never received a “thank you” email for signing up to their site.
1 week went by. Nothing.
9 days went by. Nothing. So I logged back into their site to see if I indeed went thru their process right and low and behold, everything was fine.
Day 10. First email from them.
Here is what is wrong. I SIGNED UP TO GET EMAIL. THEY ARE A MAJOR ONLINE RETAILER….and I had to wait 10 days to get an email?! Heck at one of their competitors, I signed up and within 2 days I received their latest pitch. In addition, on their competitors site, I was able to set my preferences and chose from a variety of options to receive some other emails. At another competitor, I was just asked for my email address and was given the option to creating an account and was able to chose my preference of HTML or TEXT. I got a fairly decent “thank you” and am still waiting for my email. (I just did it today…just to see)
THE POINT IS: If you are a retailer trying to sell me stuff, make it easy, ask for my preferences (and not my postal), send me a decent “thank you email” and send me email (heck even if its last weeks mailing) to get my whet my appetite. Start our relationship showing that you care and not leave me hanging for 10 days, hell I almost forgot about you.
Technorati Tags:
email, retailers, email marketing, sign up, accounts, online shopping, profiling, behavior targeting, department stores
John Gillett 3:39 pm on March 5, 2008 Permalink |
Thanks for the link to the landing site tips!
I agree that the best way to test a landing page is to experience what the user does, but this may be tough if you are a meber of the development team.
Have someone from accounting test the landing page, or a colleague from another company.
The key is making it very easy for visitors to know what they are supposed to do, a few reminders of the benefits they’ll reap, and a clear path to the call-to-action.
Michael D Price 4:04 am on April 15, 2008 Permalink |
That is exactly right. However, with the huge number of unconfirmed email address’s I have been noticing other email marketers complaining about recently, your landing page should be instructions on exactly how to confirm their email address, and or how to add you to thier whitelist.
THe problem is most marketers are using static thankyou pages, and not taking full advantage that they have the subscribers email address already, wither by means of a ookie, or the forward vars that most autoresponders provide.
With this information you can create a dynamic landing page that shows the subscriber exactly what they must do to confirm their email address and add you to their whitelist.
But not many people are doing this.
I know that right after building my whitelist wiz script and putting it to use my email confirmation rates increased significantly!!
Now my lists are between 85 – 90% confirmed!
This is a must do action for anyone in the email marketing game.
Michael D Price
http://whitelistwiz.com