Removing Obstacles to Email Sign Up Conversion

Removing Obstacles to Email Sign Up ConversionWe try to stay on target here on the blog, giving our readers valuable insight into the world of marketing on the internet. Sometimes inspiration can come from odd places, though – in this case, I was staring at my office decorations when things started to fall into place. More on that in a moment.

Email marketing starts with building your list, so converting website visitors into subscribers is of prime importance. We, as marketers on the internet, want our signup process to be as streamlined as possible.

Too often, however, we end up sabotaging ourselves, unwittingly introducing obstacles to new subscriptions. Today, I wanted to discuss some places to look for these “subscriber pitfalls” on your own website.

Meet ThinkGeek

If you’re not familiar with ThinkGeek, you’re in for a treat. Here in the AWeber HQ, we try to keep ourselves grounded and have a good time while we work – in aid of that, many of us have ThinkGeek purchases littering our desks or offices.

For photos of AWeber team members’ ThinkGeek decorations, head over to our Facebook page.

My personal favorite have been the set of PixelBlocks I picked up. Think of them as pixel-by-pixel Legos:

Yes, that’s Mega Man facing off against a Goomba. Amazing, I know. So, why show you this (other than to boast about my 8-bit recreations)?

The point is, ThinkGeek has it together. They’re a smart, tech savvy company, selling to smart, tech savvy people. Even so, they still dropped the ball.

What Did They Do?

The easiest way to explain what’s going wrong over at ThinkGeek’s site is to go try and sign up for their newsletter. Feel free to give it a shot yourself, or just follow along with me here.

First, on pretty much every page of their site, there is a button I can click, in a very visible box that says “SIGN UP.” The positioning is a good start – in fact, if this were actually a form where I could sign up without doing anything else, this would be pretty much perfect.

However, it’s a button which takes me somewhere else. Not ideal, as this means an extra click between me and the newsletter. Oh well, no one’s perfect, right? Now, what happens when we hit that button?

This is the point where I knew something was seriously wrong. I clicked a button to sign up for a newsletter – and was taken to a page where I can click a button to sign up for a newsletter.

Keep in mind, I still haven’t had anywhere to place my email address – I’ll still have to fill out some kind of form after I click this second button!

The question you should be asking yourself at this point is, “How much worse could it get?” Let’s find out.

And this is when I knew I had to make a blog post. In order to sign up for the email newsletter, I have to create an account on ThinkGeek’s website. Let me state, for the record, that I can purchase a product from ThinkGeek without creating an account.

Not only is joining the mailing list more difficult than making a purchase, but also, there are six required fields in this form, several of which have nothing to do with my request for a newsletter.

Make Signing Up Easy

ThinkGeek’s mistake here, essentially, is that they hide the subscription form behind several clicks AND a membership! Each extra click is a chance for the potential subscriber to not continue, and asking them to fill out a membership application will definitely exclude some people.

What ThinkGeek could, and in our opinion should be doing is replacing that button with a simple sign up form. It doesn’t have to take up a lot of space, either. For example:

This is a shot of HARD’s (they produce music festivals and the like) homepage. It actually looks great, and the signup form is right at the top – very easily accessible, and only one click is required for me to fill that form out.

It’s important to note, though, that obstacles to subscription can creep into almost any signup process. Placement of the web form is only one thing that can go wrong.

Don’t Leave Room for Error

HARD is another company we like, and we’ve been working with them recently regarding their email campaign. One of the things that came up while we were talking with the people behind HARD’s website was the fact that the words “Your Email” weren’t disappearing when someone started to type in their email addresses.

As you might guess, this ruined some otherwise valid submissions, and was costing HARD subscribers. This is the kind of thing that you want to look out for in your own forms – relatively innocuous problems like this can be disastrous to subscribers who just don’t think to delete that text themselves.

Luckily, with AWeber’s new web form generator, you can just check a box to have this “prompt text” automatically removed – you can learn more about this in our knowledge base.

Without Using the Web Form Generator

When we were working with HARD, they already had the raw HTML for their web form on the site, so we suggested a minor change to that field, rather than having them get brand new HTML from their account. Just to share the process with you, they just changed:

From this:

<input type="text" name="from" size="9" value="Your Email"/>

To this:

<input type="text" name="from" size="9" value="Your Email" onfocus=" if (this.value == 'Your Email') { this.value = ''; }" onblur="if (this.value== '') { this.value='Your Email';} "/>

Note that you can use the example above to modify your own forms – even if you didn’t create them in AWeber! Of course you might want to show this to your designer, just to make sure that everything will gel nicely with your existing form.

The Moral

When it comes to your subscription process, just keep in mind Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. The important thing is to try to keep the number of things that can go wrong to a minimum!

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14 Comments

  1. Joan Stewart

    When a sign-up form asks for more than just my name and email, my patience decreases one notch every time they ask me for one more mandatory piece of information like a zip code.

    More and more forms are asking for mobile phone numbers, but they need to explain how often they will send text updates.

    11/11/2010 2:15 pm
  2. Jason Bedunah

    I shouldn’t be amazed by this because I see it all the time, yet I am amazed! I have to wonder what the person is thinking by asking for so much information?

    In any case, they have already changed the form to have an email field. That was fast! I bet they are either subscribers to Awebers blog, had a customer email them or someone there is using FiltrBox to catch mentions of their company name.

    Their responsiveness to this issue puts them back in a positive light with me. Now, I wonder if they would send Aweber a before/after on Newsletter sign-ups as a ‘thank you.’?

    11/11/2010 3:48 pm
  3. Poppie

    Yes Joan, I feel the same way!
    Conversely, I feel a bit “miffed” when they only want my e-mail details & not my name!!!

    You can really tell the pro’s a mile off and the one’s terrified of losing you, yet their methods to “entrap” you, really make you flee at lightening speed!

    Why is it that some people feel that when they get you to their site, you’ll be willing to divulge all on your first encounter?

    Thanks Guys…

    11/11/2010 4:34 pm
  4. Annie

    My preference is for single optin and email address only.
    So often there is a need to optin for something within the site anyway. As for names, some are obviously false and some foreign.
    Hi There! covers all.

    My pet hate is asking for my phone number. I put XXXXX, if the site won’t take that, I’m off!

    11/11/2010 5:38 pm
  5. Si

    You guys authoring this blog should be proud. This is such a top quality blog :) . You may believe that this is to be expected, but actually very rarely do companies ‘do what they sell’. For instance, we don’t see Microsoft boast about how easy their employees find it using Windows 7 at work, nor do we see the Mc Donalds CEO tucking into a McChicken sandwich.

    The effort you lot put into your blog really is a seal of quality upon your product.

    11/11/2010 6:31 pm
  6. Met Rivers

    I have not taken advantage of the wealth of valuable information provided here at Aweber. It’s great to have access to such content at the click of a few buttons. I must confess, I was overlooking this source for a long time.
    Thanks Aweber, You Rock!

    11/11/2010 7:01 pm
  7. Gidon

    HARD’s problem is mine. I sent my "techie" this post and it will be solved soon!

    11/12/2010 2:26 am
  8. Vee Sweeney

    I shop there all of the time, but never thought to sign up for their newsletter, but maybe it’s a good thing I never tried!

    I always believe that Internet users just need a little simple direction, but too much or too many directions can lead to frustration, confusion and sometimes scams.

    I see the tactic that ThinkGeek uses a lot on websites that have fine print in the shopping cart pop up or other types of pop ups where the user unknowingly signs up for something else as well.

    While this does not seem to be the case with ThinkGeek, it makes one wonder why why why they are doing it this way. It would be interesting to see the conversion rate! (or lack thereof).

    11/12/2010 7:59 am
  9. rich

    i can’t understand the amount of companies that make it hard for you to sign up to their lists.

    What do people really need your phone number for ? 99% of the time they don’t ring anyway.

    11/15/2010 7:51 am
  10. Ideas at the Bottom

    Solid man!

    11/15/2010 2:29 pm
  11. Ryan

    I agree with these tips, practice them and have solidly tested them too!

    Simple tips go a long way :)

    11/15/2010 7:18 pm
  12. Lisa Attias

    I am really grateful to get the expert advice from AWeber and individual views which compliment this.

    11/17/2010 9:06 am
  13. Parfumio

    As always, great advice from Aweber team…
    Thanks!

    11/18/2010 8:48 am
  14. Nancy

    I wish I owned a website instead of a restaurant. It is a hassle to get your customers to opt-in to your list. My staff hated asking for emails on our email signup sheet.

    I loved using AWeber but couldn’t get my subscriber list to grow. Then I googled and binged to stumble up on Sterizon wiZit handheld for collecting email opt-ins, and it works directly with AWeber account. It was a blessing.

    Email and first name are the only fields i collect, and i am currently getting 50-60% conversion rates on my customers who are opting in!!

    11/25/2010 4:58 pm

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