In one of our recent “How to Get Started” webinars, one of the attendees how to ensure that they get valid email addresses from their subscribers:

Is it a good idea to ask them to enter their email address twice to prevent typos?

It’s a great question, and not something most people new to email marketing think about.

After all, you don’t want to get just any old email address, but rather an address where you can reach your subscriber (not to mention where they’ll see and read your emails).

So… is this a good idea?

Two Email Boxes Isn’t a Good Idea

I don’t feel that asking people to fill out their email address twice is a good idea for a few reasons:

• Typically, for any signup form, about 5-20% of the submissions are invalid.

  However, this isn’t always because people mis-type their address — it also includes intentionally bogus data (people trying to get to your thank-you page without entering their address) and maliciously entered data (i.e., bots).

  Asking people to enter their address twice serves, at best, a small minority of your visitors.

• Not everyone will be willing to take the time needed to enter their email address twice.

  By asking them to do so, you cut off a portion of your potential subscriber base.

• Of the people who do fill out their address twice, many will simply copy-and-paste whatever they entered in the first email box into the second one.

  So while the entries will match, they may both be wrong.

• Similarly, there’s no way to know, even if both entries match, that the address actually belongs to the person filling out your form.

How Do I Make Sure I’m Getting A Valid Email Address?

The best way to do this is to use Confirmed Opt-Inhave subscribers validate their addresses after they sign up.

In addition to being one of the email deliverability tips that we recommend to all businesses, Confirmed Opt-In has the advantage of making sure that the email addresses subscribers provide you are indeed valid ways to reach them.

Reduce Data Loss By Using Confirmed Opt-In

Not only can you use Confirmed Opt-In to validate the addresses of subscribers who fill out your web forms accurately, you can also leverage it to “save” those subscribers you might potentially have lost due to typos. Here’s how:

On your Thank You page, when you inform your subscribers of the confirm email and show them how to confirm, point out to them that if they don’t get that email, it might be due to them mis-typing their email address — in which case they should return to your sign up page and enter their address again (carefully! ).

Other Ideas?

Do you take these measures to minimize lost subscribers? Do you do something else?

Share your thoughts and ideas below!

Know someone who would benefit from email marketing tips like these? Share this with them and encourage them to subscribe by RSS or email. Thanks!

Over at MarketingSherpa there’s a great case study of how AWeber user Leo Notenboom of Ask-Leo.com increased his opt-in conversions by more than 1000%.

The part that might surprise a lot of our readers (but not us)? He did it using a popover form. As in, a simulated popup form.

Popover Forms? But Won’t They Annoy Visitors?

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard someone say something to the effect of, “I just won’t use a popup. I don’t like them, and neither will my visitors.”

This makes me sad, because it shows an unwillingness to split test, which as I discussed recently is key to running effective email marketing campaigns.

This ‘annoyance factor’ is something Leo addresses in the case study — he found no negative effects of running the popover forms.

How’d He Do It?

While I don’t want to hijack MarketingSherpa’s article, I think we need to highlight one key element of Leo’s success: he rigorously tested the time delay he used for his form — it didn’t display immediately when visitors landed on his site. He set the delay based on the average amount of time visitors spent on his site.

For more details on the study, go read the writeup on MarketingSherpa. It’s only available to the public until July 9th 2008 (after that it’s members-only), so act fast!

To see Leo’s popover form in action, swing by Ask-Leo.com and hang out a bit

Does your form ask for just the information you need to build and engage a list of subscribers, or does it go above and beyond that?

As MarketSherpa has pointed out, “above and beyond” in this case may lead to signup conversion rates and information quality that fall below your expectations.

In the latest Chart of the Week, they illustrate why name and email should typically be all the information we ask for in our email newsletter sign up forms. Take a look:

Name and email are the two fields most likely to be provided accurately, and still, even these fields are “fibbed” sometimes (e.g. 32% of respondents to their survey said they didn’t always provide an accurate email address).

That’s one of a few good reasons to use confirmed opt-in for all of your campaigns. The fact that respondents were generally less willing to give other information accurately (and presumably *at all* in some cases) is a convincing reason to ask for only what you need from your website visitors.

Alas, sometimes less means more! I couldn’t resist .

As attendees to our web form webinar know, getting website visitors to notice your form is a critical part of building your list.

Many people supplement their inline web forms with various types of popup and hover-style forms.

Today, we’re happy to announce a new type of popup form that AWeber users can use to grab visitors’ attention and present them with an opportunity to subscribe.

Read on for more details and a short video.

Lightbox Forms: Focus The Reader’s Attention on Your Signup Offer

You may already be creating unblockable hover-style popups in AWeber that slide or fade into your web page. They’re a great alternative to traditional popups for getting people to consider signing up to your email newsletter.

The new lightbox forms further focus your visitors’ attention on your form by “greying out” the remainder of your page until the visitor either subscribes or closes the form (which is easy for them to do – they just click “close” or hit the ESC key on their keyboard).

RSS Subscribers: to see how these forms work and how to create one, click through to the 1:53 video on our blog.

Pretty cool, right?

Not Using Popups Now? Give Them a Shot!

If you aren’t at least testing popup forms with your site now, I strongly recommend you do so. While they don’t work for everyone, they have the potential to raise your opt-in rate significantly, meaning you get more subscribers from your existing website traffic.

Do you use popups now to build your list? Try the lightbox forms out against your current popups and see if they raise your opt-in rate!

One of the things we like to stress around here when it comes to building a subscriber list is that “simple signup forms are good, and that you shouldn’t make signing up hard because then people… don’t sign up.

But sometimes it helps to hear what others outside the email marketing world have to say.

Our Director of Technology, Andy, passed me a blog post a while back that talks about usable registration forms.

The name of the post — “User Registration Pages Suck.” — might sound harsh, but it’s a helpful view into what your visitors may be thinking when they’re asked to sign up for something.

Lesson #1: What’s In It For The Subscriber?

If you’re going to require the subscriber to fill out a signup form, it had better be for something valuable.

In the first example on Codeulate, a signup form was required to signal approval of an article with a “thumbs-up.” Who’s going to be willing to fill out a signup form just to vote on an article?

Lesson #2: Make It Easy To Sign Up

Q: What’s the goal of an email signup form?

A: To get opt-in email subscribers.

Q: Why?

Q: So I can send them email messages.

Q: What do you NEED to know about them to do that?

A: Their email address. Maybe a name so I can address them personally.

Seems simple enough, yes?

So why are so many signup forms a mile and a half long? Do we really need to know company name, position title, budget, etc?

I’m all for targeting and segmentation, but they serve a purpose: to reach the right people with the right message at the right time.

If you’re asking someone for all this information up front, before they even know you, let alone trust you, many otherwise good prospects aren’t going to sign up, and then it won’t matter how narrowly you segment and target your subscribers, because you won’t have subscribers to reach.

This is why forms like the first one Codeulate points out bug me so much.

It’s a registration form for a website. Not a medical history form. Not a mortgage application. Not a tax return.

Why would you want to mimic those things with a form that, when you get down to it, is there to help you build a community around your website?

Take A Look at Their Recommendations

I don’t agree with everything the author says, particularly about delaying the signup as long as possible.

As we discuss in our webinars and elsewhere, using a signup form and an email campaign to build a relationship with visitors and get them back to your site is essential to your success.

That said, there are some good lessons here. Have a look, especially at the five suggestions at the end of the post.

In the comments of a post discussing our recent FeedBurner integration, Mike Hill asked a great question about email subscription options:

The scheduling would be more useful if it can be setup by the subscriber, not by me as the publisher. Is that a possibility with any subscription services on email?

To me, this would be far more useful to my readers than me picking when to get it. I’d even consider subscribing some of my blogs on email instead of RSS if this was available.

View this comment on the original post

While creating a signup form that gives subscribers an unlimited number of frequency options would be tough to pull off without making the form look awkward and intimidating, it’s easy to offer them a couple of different options.

All it takes is a little HTML know-how and a few minutes to set up an extra list or 2.

First, Create 2 Lists

In this example, we’re going to give our blog’s email subscribers the option to sign up for daily emails, or weekly ones.

First, let’s create lists for each of those subscriptions. I’ve named mine blog-daily and blog-weekly. You’ll need to choose different names, but you’ll probably want to follow a similar naming scheme.

(Need to learn how to create a list? See the Getting Started section of our Knowledge Base.)

Next, Set Up 2 Blog Broadcasts

Now, you need to create 2 nearly identical Blog Broadcasts (one in each list).

The only difference? You’ll schedule emails for your daily list to be sent daily, and the ones for your weekly list to be sent weekly.

Daily Posts (list blog-daily)

Weekly Posts (list blog-weekly)

Now, Set Up Your Web Form

Create a web form in one of the lists. It doesn’t matter which one, because we’re going to edit the HTML to let our readers pick which list to subscribe to.

Need help creating a web form? We’ve got a Knowledge Base entry on that, too.

Once you’ve created/saved your form, get the HTML for it:

Note that we use the HTML in the lower box, not the JavaScript in the upper box.

We’re going to let our subscribers choose daily or weekly posts from a radio button.

Find the line of HTML in the form for the box where subscribers put their Email Address:

Just beneath it, paste the following:

Replace my sample listnames (blog-daily and blog-weekly) with your daily and weekly lists.

Finally, delete this line of HTML from your form:

and publish the form to your site. You’ll get something like this:

Whenever subscribers fill out the form, they choose how often they want to hear from you, and the form adds them to the appropriate list (in this case, to get daily emails or weekly ones).

What If I Have a Message I Want to Send Everyone?

No problem — just create a broadcast and use our send to multiple lists feature to get in touch with all of your blog’s email subscribers.

RSS Subscribers: discuss this post or share it with others.

During yesterday’s Workshop/Q&A Webinar, Karen asked a great question:

We commonly get this question from people who are concerned that putting a signup form on their site will be difficult, or feel that in order to maximize response, they need to make significant changes to the appearance of the form.

Listen to Marc’s and my take on this, and then let us know what you think.

Who do you trust on the Internet? How do you decide who is or isn’t trustworthy when in most cases, all you initially have to go on is a website?

Not long ago, we talked about trust and welcome messages (as part of a larger discussion of urgency in email marketing).

Your welcome message is key to establishing/furthering your credibility and reputation, but today I want to back up to an even earlier point in your email campaigns:

We’ve talked a lot in this space about making it as easy as possible for your subscribers to get on your list.

Recently I came across an opt-in form that highlights just how frustrating signing up can be.

And this site wasn’t even marketing anything!

Read More on the AWeber Blog

One of the questions we get a lot is about how to offer a bonus or download to people who sign up to a list.

Here’s an example from a recent support ticket:

So what’s the best way to do this?