Eureka Email Marketing Sunny Side Up

Put subscribers in the driver's seat; include frequency questions upfront.

When soliciting for optins online, the golden rule is to keep your subscription forms simple and short. Additional questions such as gender and birth dates can be perceived as irrelevant or suspicious and many will abandon registration at this point. At the extreme, most subscription forms stick to requesting just the first name and email address at most.
That said, there are a few other questions that can be advantageous for building your relationship with subscribers.
Such as:

• How often would you like to receive our e-newsletters? Weekly? Monthly?
• Would you like to receive promotional emails or newsletters from us?
• What days of the week do you prefer us to email you?
• Would you like a special birthday offer from us? if so, please add in your birthday: dd/mm.

These questions put your subscribers at ease by giving them control over their inbox and in the driver seat in their communications with you. Such inclusions will also remove excessive unsubscriptions as the readers are getting exactly the frequency they opted in for. Ensure that you also allow your subscribers to change their preferences on frequency at anytime. Additionally, also provide the option of temporary suspension in your unsubscription form instead of just a straight opt-out.
Having this in place, you should then segment your list according to their frequency preferences; accomplishing a more sustainable future with their permission.

Help! I want more subscribers, but I'm not doing anything right.

Here are some common mistakes that others make:

1) Uncooperative website.

You are fixated on your open rates and miscellaneous metrics, and forget to make sure your sign up "call to action" is visible on your website. Or your web developer is not your friend.

2) No promises.

You ask people to blindly opt-in without providing compelling reasons for them to do so.

3) Overly nosy

You ask way too many questions on your opt-in forms.

4) Being shady

You don't provide a privacy policy and/or don't detail what you will and won't do with your subscribers information.

5) Not seeing other opt-in opportunities.

You did not include everyone in your organization on your opt-in strategies. Front desk, support desk, accounts and admin, networkers, telemarketers....the list goes on.

6) Badly designed offline opt-in forms

You  provide little scrappy forms at your front desk that do not provide enough space for email addresses.

7) Unfinished business

You don't add opt-in's collected from your offline forms because they are a pain to decipher. You may find that they have piled up so much that it may be 3 months later that subscribers are finally included.

8) Crappy content

You provide such crappy content that no one wants to forward your emails to their friends.

9) Really crappy content

You provide such crappy content that people unsubscribe in droves.

10) Simply hostile

You go with one click unsubscribe, and have no strategy to persuade anyone to stay a bit longer.

"Here's another e-zine you might find more relevant"

Well done! You've just done yourself out of a job.

-- What else are you doing wrong? Let's make this list grow to 20 points.