E-commerce Insights:Improve Your E-mail Sign-up Process

How can you get more e-mail sign-ups from your site visitors? E-mail sign-up is simple: a few clicks followed by a handful of keystrokes. But the same process of close comparative scrutiny also can improve complex processes, such as cart and check-out.

This article focuses on the e-mail sign-up process at 45 multichannel retailers. For this study, I pulled 45 sites at random, taken from some of the larger merchants in the country. I signed up for e-mail at each using a fresh Gmail account. (For the full methodology and detailed scores and notes for each site, visit www.rimmkaufman.com/e-mail-sign-up-study.) I conducted these tests in June 2006, so some of the sites will have since evolved.