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.
Start the sign-up from the homepage, preferably above the fold. Prospects should be told the benefits of signing up, and be reassured that their e-mails will be kept private. They should be able to reach the e-mail form in, at most, one click, with no confusion, bugs or irrelevant choices. Provide them with clear confirmation of success, thanking them for signing up and offering some immediate benefit. Don’t force them to provide extraneous data. Allow them to specify what content interests them, provide the option of RSS subscription and send a fast e-mail confirmation.
Below are my 11 ingredients for the perfect e-mail sign-up process. You might quibble with any of these points, which is fine. I suggest as a set they have predictive validity: When you score sites on this 11-point scale, you’ll find higher scoring sites have noticeably smoother sign-up processes than lower-scoring sites. The best sites are worthy of study and emulation.
1. Start on the homepage, above the fold. Thirty-seven sites (82 percent) place the sign-up box or link on the homepage above the fold. The rest tend to place it on the bottom. On the sites for Lego, Headsets.com, Carrot Ink, Black Box, Amazon.com and Best Buy, I couldn’t find anything related to e-mail sign-up on the homepage, even after a reasonable search. So I gave up.
2. Explain the benefit of signing up, before the sign-up. Thirty-four sites (76 percent) offer reasons why visitors should share their e-mail addresses. Why doesn’t every site? Whether you use full sentences or just a few words, explain why someone benefits by signing up for your list. Seems obvious, but one in three sites don’t do this.
3. Provide in-line privacy reassurance. Just 11 sites (24 percent) provide privacy reassurance near the sign-up box. A few others offer a link to the privacy policy, but that forces the visitor to click off to a page of legalese and disrupts the sign-up flow. You don’t need many words to reassure. Danskin does it in 10: “Your information is safe with Danskin’s privacy protection. Privacy Policy.” (Then, readers can click on “Privacy Policy” if they want to read the full policy.) Your company handles e-mails appropriately, so remember to tell visitors you do — right next to the sign-up box.
4. Reach the e-mail sign-up box in, at most, one click. Forty sites (91 percent) follow this practice, making this recommendation the most widely adopted practice followed. Many sites place an e-mail box on the homepage itself (zero clicks); others place a link from the homepage to a sign-up page (one click). There’s no need for additional intermediate pages, such as encountered on the sites of Vermont Teddy Bear or PC Mall — two clicks is too long a path for such a simple process.
5. Eliminate bugs and confusion. Your sign-up process has to be clear and functional. Thirty-three sites (73 percent) meet these basic criteria. Only one site, Etronics.com, failed outright. But too many sites complicated this simple process. How? Dresses.com and Danskin call it a “mailing list” rather than an “e-mail list.” Lillian Vernon adds a redundant screen. QVC places “Sign up for e-mail” links on the bottom of every screen, including the e-mail sign-up screen. Each time a user has to think, that brief pause interrupts the flow, increasing the chance of abandonment.
6. Provide a dedicated sign-up process. On 37 sites (82 percent), the e-mail sign-up process only handles e-mail sign-up. This is a good design because it reduces complexity for the visitor. A few sites — probably to save a few lines of code — recycle management screens (“manage your e-mail” or “manage your account”) for e-mail sign-up, which is bad design. When a visitor wants to sign up for e-mail, provide her a dedicated screen to do exactly that. Recycling functionality leads to confusion.
On the Swiss Colony site, for example, after following a link labeled, “Sign up to receive e-mails about specially priced items; sign up now,” the visitor is left wondering why the next screen provides an “I don’t wish to receive e-mail” option.
7. Offer an immediate benefit. Just six sites (13 percent) offer an incentive for signing up, such as entering each new e-mail in a sweepstakes (Gumps, Neiman Marcus, Crutchfield, REI). A few sites offer discount coupons (Zales offers $5 off a purchase over $25; REI provides 10 percent off next order). But Zales mentions the coupon only after the sign-up, so it doesn’t gain any lift in sign-up rates. REI mentions the 10 percent-off offer before the sign-up, then provides the coupon via e-mail, ensuring the consumer enters a valid address.
8. Say “thank you.” Your company benefits when a visitor signs up to receive e-mail from you. Saying “thank you” is polite and appropriate, and 32 sites (71 percent) do. Skipping those two, little words makes your company sound mechanical and rude.
9. Avoid collecting extraneous data. Visitors happily will provide you with data when doing so benefits them, not you. To receive e-mail from you, visitors need to provide you their e-mail addresses. They understand that. When you ask for additional data — or worse, when you require it — and visitors can’t see how providing that information benefits them, you’ll lose sign-ups.
Twenty-eight sites (62 percent) understand this, and request or require minimal data. The remaining sites ask for additional data, increasing user frustration. To get e-mail from PC Mall, one must create an account, which entails filling out 16 fields, of which 11 are required. Neiman Marcus calls for the visitor to provide a last name and a ZIP code. Harry & David requires account creation to sign up for e-mail, and uses unfriendly language if the address isn’t Postal Service-hygienic. Tool King insists that its visitors provide names and ZIP codes (and if the visitor doesn’t, the site generates both an error and a thank-you message — confusing.)
10. Offer choices of content, frequency and channel. Only 11 sites (24 percent) allowed visitors the choice of e-mail list and/or delivery frequency. Cooking.com offers four lists. Williams-Sonoma allows visitors to specify from which companies they’d like to receive e-mail. PetSmart lets visitors join e-mail lists customized for different types of pets (e.g., dog, cat, fish, bird, reptile, small pet).
Among the sites in this study, Barnes and Noble’s Web site is the clear leader in content choice. Bn.com offers 25 e-mail list options, including “Bestsellers,” “Heart to Heart: Our Romance Newsletter,” “Ransom Notes: Our Mystery & Thrillers Newsletter” and a 40 percent-off bulletin. The site also offers “Writer Alerts” on more than 100 specific authors, as well as DVD and music alerts.
Not one of the 45 sites reviewed allows visitors to specify their desired frequency of e-mail messages.
Just two sites (5 percent) offer an RSS option: Home Depot and New Egg. As RSS grows in popularity, retailers should also offer their e-mail content via RSS feeds. Better yet, as RSS is a pull medium, the channel sidesteps the deliverability and spam conundrums of traditional e-mail.
11. Provide fast confirmation. Visitors should receive an e-mail confirmation of their sign-up that same day — preferably within minutes. Only 14 sites (31 percent) met the same-day standard; the majority of sites confirmed the sign-up within a few days.
A fast confirmation ensures the visitor didn’t make an entry mistake, and the fast feedback can reduce the chance that subsequent pieces are flagged as spam. Use a “From:” address that clearly indicates your brand — too many retailers send e-mails from ambiguous addresses like “custserv” (The Company Store), “support” (Cooking.com), “webteam” (B&H Photo Video) or “info” (Diamond.com). The most confusing confirmation came from info@ldproducts.com; the address and the e-mail didn’t identify themselves as being associated with Inkjets.com, where the e-mail sign-up occurred.
Conclusion
Five sites scored 10 or better on this 13-point scale: Barnes & Noble, B&H Photo Video, Cabela’s, Crutchfield and Williams-Sonoma. Visit these leaders. Sign up for their e-mails, and note how their processes compare with yours. You may find small improvements to your sign-up process increase your sign-up rate, helping you grow your e-mail housefile more quickly.
Alan Rimm-Kaufman leads the Rimm-Kaufman Group, an online marketing agency specializing in pay-per-click and shopping comparison engines for leading catalogers. Reach him online at www.rimmkaufman.com.
