Buzzcube

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.

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 write an article. 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 my 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

One of the things that came up during a recent email campaign 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.

All they needed to do to fix it was to change the code for their form slightly:

From this:

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

To this:

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

Note that you can use the example above to modify your own forms. 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!