Email sign-up web pages have often been overlooked when businesses are looking for ways to improve their interaction with customers and prospects. Your email sign-up web page is just as important as your web site home page in attracting people.

With that in mind we have provided some tips that you can implement right now.

1) Add testimonials to your sign-up page. Most people will read testimonials from people who have already dealt with your business so why not add some of the key testimonials to your sign-up page. If you have positive feedback from your email campaigns add those comments to your sign-up page as well.

2) Show how your email campaigns have benefited your current subscribers. If you have the data add statements such as "Our subscribers on average save $300.00 per year on purchases by taking advantage of discounts offered only to email subscribers." – this is of course if you provide exclusive discount benefits to your email subscribers only. Or if you don’t offer exclusive discounting what about "Our newsletter articles helped subscribers sell their home 30% faster".

3) Display the current subscriber count of your mailing list(s). People always want to feel like they are not missing out on something so if you can say something like "Over 5000 people have benefited from their email subscription with us. Why don’t you join them?" that is a powerful incentive for people to join and not miss out.

4) Use your company branding on your sign-up page. If you have a professional looking web site and use a third party provider to host your sign-up page don’t neglect to have the professionalism extend to your sign-up page as well. There is nothing worse than visiting a professionally crafted web site only to be directed to a dodgy looking text based sign-up page provided by some bulk email marketing service. With Mobilize Mail your sign-up web pages can handle all your web site branding assets such as CSS, images, Flash and JavaScript requirements.

5) Provide detail on what your subscribers are going to receive and the frequency of the emails. No one likes signing up for a to a companies "monthly" newsletter only to be spammed every 7 days by the business and their "partner companies" with useless garbage they did not expect to receive. State the email frequency on the sign-up page such as weekly, fortnightly or monthly and don’t forget to stick to that frequency! Another great idea is to provide a web version link to an existing email message so people can see the type of content and style they will be receiving.

In summary your email sign-up page is an important part of your web site so it should be designed to get the maximum amount of signups by having a professional look and feel and provide incitements such as testimonials or benefits to being on the mailing list.

Click here to learn more about how we can help you with your email marketing…

The survival of magazines is online says eMarketer. 2008 saw many magazines fold and overall revenue from advertising drop by 7.1 percent. While this information is for the American market – it’s hard not to see a similar pattern here in New Zealand. We have more consumer oriented magazines per capita than any other nation. As spending tightens the purchase of magazines follows suit.

ACP Media Magazines

“The shift in print advertising revenues to other media, particularly the Internet, will continue to thin the ranks of publications, and 2009 will be a year of survival for only the fittest publishers.”
Source

With print advertising revenue falling the print magazine market is being hit twofold. Less magazine purchases and less advertising spend. The magazines that are offering an online service will more than likely be the survivors in tough trading times. Consumers can access the magazine website and get the online magazine for a small subscription fee, and the advertisers potentially receive 24 x 7 coverage of their campaigns providing more bang for their buck.

Email marketing ties in nicely with the online magazine, where a template branded in the style of the magazine can deliver a snapshot of the latest articles and news to drive the recipients to the website.

Mobilize Mail provides customised email marketing integration services for automated email content filled messages – click here to read more

Mobilize Mail added an additional feature to your account and it is providing you with more mailing list subscribers.

The new feature is a reminder email sent to the person who did commence but did not complete the subscription process to join your mailing list.

The results of a review conducted by our support team show that up to 80% of subscribers who did not complete the subscription process the first time did complete the process after receiving the second confirmation email. This is fantastic news for you and we are delighted to have this feature working for you even though you were more than likely not aware of its existence.

Two Step Subscription Process

To increase the quality of your subscriber mailing lists Mobilize Mail supports a two-step subscription process also known as “Confirmed opt-in”. This stops unwanted emails such as spam trap emails from entering your mailing lists.

One down side to the two-step subscription process is that a certain percentage of subscribers fail to click the activation link within the confirmation email, which is needed to confirm their subscription to your mailing lists, and is a compliance requirement so you can prove the ‘opt in’ by the person.

The good news is Mobilize Mail provides a service within your account that when configured will resend the confirmation email a second time. The setup takes less than 5 minutes and runs automatically without any more work from you (’set and forget’).

The service is called the “Resend Confirmation Email Service” and is located within the “Subscriber Services” section of your account. The feature provides many configuration options including the number of days after the initial subscription process start to resend the confirmation email.

The service also provides reporting on the number of times the confirmation email was resent and from that the number of completed subscriptions.

The service works!

The Mobilize Mail support team reviewed over 100 client accounts to see how the service helped in increasing the completed subscription rate and on average the review showed of the subscribers who received the second confirmation email 80% confirmed their subscription!

Mobilize Mail’s Smart Landing Pages provide additional email marketing solutions for existing and new customers. This case study presents a real client example of a Quote Submission Form. All Things Finance (client) provides the market with finance solutions. The client’s web site houses an online quote submission form designed and developed by Mobilize Mail.

Customer Needs:

Provide an online quote submission smart landing page that:

1. Allow web site visitors to apply for a loan online.
2. Store the quote submission data in a safe and secure database.
3. Automatically process the submitted quote and send automatic confirmation emails to All Things Finance staff and the person who submitted the quote.
4. Allow for updates and extra features to be added to the online quote form with no impact to the other web site features.

Mobilize Mail Solution:

The online quote form is a Mobilize Mail Smart Landing Page hosted on a Mobilize Mail server. The quote form has the exact same web site branding as the main web site.

Figure 1

The Quote Submission Form provides fields for the web site visitor to complete (Figure 2).

Figure 2

When the form is submitted, the data from the online quote form is added to the client’s Mobilize Mail account. As soon as the information is in the client’s account a number of additional tasks are triggered including sending the client and quote form applicant a confirmation email containing the completed form in a client branded HTML email (Figure 3).

Figure 3

Additional business logic has been applied to the client’s quote form solution for example the quote form displays additional questions to the applicant as a result of a particular response in one data field.

Another email trigger has been set to another data field on the quote form to alert the client when the response is negative.

Benefits of the Online Quote Form Smart Landing Page

A major benefit for pushing the quote data to the client’s Mobilize Mail Account is the enablement of automatic messages (auto-responders) for reminders, renewals, and anniversaries; keeping the Quote Form applicant close to you and your business.

The information captured on an applicant or subscriber can also pre-populate data fields on additional smart landing page solutions e.g. Promotions, Reward Programs, Event Registration & Management.