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Your subscribers have a lot of email competing for their attention in the inbox. In order to stand out among all the clutter, you must make it as easy as possible for them to find and interact with you.
People will almost always gravitate toward things that are easy to do and abandon things that are difficult. Making it easy for the customer is the hallmark of products and services such as Google AdWords, iTunes and Intuit’s Turbo Tax.
Like everything else, making things easy for your subscribers and customers is, well, easy to say but harder to practice. Also, what's easy for you might not be for customers, especially new ones.
See you how stack up against these five factors that promote easy interaction. Give yourself a point for each one you do already:
- You provide a simple email address opt-in form field or link to an opt-in form for your newsletter or promotional email on every page of your Web site.
- You provide a Web version of your HTML emails.
- You include send-to-a-friend functionality or link in each message.
- Subscribers can read and take actions even if images are blocked.
- You label each "submit" button with the action you want the reader to take: "Subscribe here;" "buy now;" etc.
Did you score fewer than three points? Don't feel bad; lots of emailers lack these basic touchpoints that allow your readers to connect easily with you. But it means you need to re-engineer your email program. This list of 11 suggestions can get you started.
Top 11 Ways to Make Life Easier for Your Subscribers
These tips are organized into two categories: Email Management covers the mechanics of receiving email: how easily your users can sign up, manage their preferences and subscriber data, even unsubscribe; and Accessing Content assesses how easily they can find your emails in the inbox, read your email message content and navigate from your email to your Web site.
EMAIL MANAGEMENT:
1. Make it easy to subscribe.
Post a sign-up form, or link to a form, on every page of your site, even on purchase confirmation and "About Us" pages, and label the "submit" button with the desired action, such as "Subscribe here" or "Sign me up!"
In your email messages, include a "Subscribe" link to tempt readers who may have gotten the message forwarded from a friend. Also add a subscribe link and copy to transactional messages, such as news alerts or confirmation emails.
Second, a prospect should have to click no more than two or three times to get a subscription going. Click 1: moving from a landing/Web page to the subscription page, or submitting an email address. Click 2: submitting data on a registration page or clicking a confirmation link. Click 3: Confirming the request via a link in a double opt-in email after submitting from a registration page.
A recent MarketingExperiments.com study found an email marketer who cut the number of steps in its subscription process from nine to three saw a 300% increase in conversions. How well could you do?
Third, you need personal data from your subscribers to segment your list effectively and to send out more relevant content and offers. But if you ask for too much information too soon, it can turn off people who haven't taken the plunge yet.
If you go with just an email address box you'll get more people to opt-in, but you won't have any information or preferences upon which to use for personalization and segmentation – and it will be tough to gather that information later from subscribers. If you use an opt-in form on a separate page, make sure you ask for only the information you actually need and will use for your email program. Leave off extraneous fields and/or clearly mark the critical fields as "required."
More information:
2. Make it easy to set or update preferences.
Collect your information on one page, including personal data, subscriber preferences (format, frequency, etc.) and content preferences (newsletter, offers, news alerts). You can also allow password setting and changing here but include a retrieval link for people who forget their passwords. Post this link prominently on your Web site and in your email messages.
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3. Make it easy to find subscription details and management tools.
This includes data such as the email address used to sign up for the mailings, a link to the preference/subscription page on your site, your privacy policy (a one-sentence statement plus link to full version at your site), contact information and your postal address.
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4. Make it easy for subscribers to send your email to a friend.
Make it easy for subscribers to use your email software’s “send to a friend” function rather than having them use the forward function of their email client. You can't track how often or where those emails are going, and most importantly many email clients still don't forward HTML emails with links and images intact. Instead, include a link or submit button labeled "send to a friend" in each nontransactional message.
5. Make it easy to unsubscribe.
This sounds crazy, but it will protect your list's integrity and value. If you bury the link or create too many steps, your reader will either take a simpler course, such as hitting the "report spam" button thinking it will make you go away, or simply ignore you. Multiply that one subscriber by several thousand like-minded subscribers, and you end up with a big, useless black hole in your list.
Unsubscribing should take one click, or two clicks max if the subscriber is moving from your email to a Web preference page.
Click 1: The link in your email message or on your Web site that takes you to an unsubscribe page, preferably one that loads with the subscriber's address already filled in, or activates an unsubscribe request. Click 2: Submitting the unsubscribe page. Or, clicking the unsubscribe box on a preference page and submitting the page. That technically is two clicks, but since it all takes place on one page, we'll count it as one.
More information:
ACCESSING CONTENT
6. Make it easy to recognize your email in the inbox.
Your "from" line should show your company or newsletter name, combined with a subject line that either lists the top story in a newsletter or summarizes a special offer. Your subscribers should immediately recognize and differentiate your emails from the spam and competitive emails flooding their inbox. Give readers a compelling reason to open your email – do away with those bland, nonspecific subject lines.
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7. Make your email easy to read and to take action – even when images are blocked and/or when subscribers use their preview pane.
Readers who use a preview pane to view email before opening see only a fraction of your message. Combine that with image-blocking, and you will end up with a big blank area or those annoying blank image boxes. You don’t have to stop using images, but do design the top of your email to be preview-pane and blocked-image friendly. Make sure calls to action, “In This Issue” copy, etc. are text-based (use HTML tags – colors, bold, fonts) and not embedded within images.
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8. Make it easy to view a Web version of your message.
Provide a link to a Web version of your email. This helps readers when your HTML messages don't render properly in their email clients. Put the link high in the email, to accommodate preview panes, and test it to make sure it points to the right landing page.
More information:
9. Make your emails printer-friendly or provide a printer-friendly version.
Design your email templates so that when printed out there aren’t big areas of black and large surrounding background colors. Many of your readers like to print out emails to read later or as a reminder, so make sure your email designs are easily read and geared to minimal ink consumption. It's another important reason to make sure key text is not embedded within images, in case images don’t print well. Alternatively, provide a printer-friendly version of your emails on your Web site.
10. Make it easy to find additional information on your Web site.
Your email message's goal should be to draw readers into your Web site one way or another. For a newsletter, include links to past newsletter content, both past issues and previously published content that relates to material in your current issue. For an ecommerce or promotional message, link to related products or offers in case what you offered isn't quite what the reader wants – give them options.
Include links to the most common actions or information your subscribers would be interested in (for example - return policies and shipping options for etailers and advertising information for publishers).
Also, include recurring main navigation links in your email that uses the same language as on your Web site. You’ve trained subscribers and customers how to shop or find things on your Web site – don’t introduce a different lexicon on approach in your emails that would confuse them.
Finally, if you have search functionality on your Web site, include a search link or actual search form in your emails (include a link also if you use a form as not all email clients will pass your search information to your Web site).
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11. Make sure all links work and point to the right pages and that images point to the right files so subscribers don’t have to go hunting for content.
No need to explain this one, right? Always send out several proofs to your team and preferably someone outside your department or company and have them click on EVERY link in the email. If you want to be extra-careful, test links in different browsers and email clients – Firefox in addition to Internet Explorer and Yahoo!, Hotmail, AOL and Gmail in addition to just your office version of Outlook.
Making your email program as easy to navigate and interact with is one of the most customer-friendly things you can do to improve your results. If you're not ready to overhaul your whole program, try one or two of these tips and measure the before-and-after results. You'll be pleasantly surprised.
Did we miss any “make it easy” tips? If so or you have some good or bad experiences as either a sender or recipient, please send them our way to intevationreport@emaillabs.com.
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