How to boost your email opt-ins from registration pages

In some recent optimization tests for one of our clients, Inbox boosted registration rates by 13%. How? With the simple addition of a confirmation page. Most registration pages for things like events and subscriptions have a checkbox and a Submit button. A surprising number of people hit Submit but fail to check the box. When this happens, you've lost them for good. By simply adding a confirmation page (a page that displays if the person neglects to check the email opt-in box) you get to remind them before they disappear into the ether. This page should re-state the benefits of opting-in to your email program. Try it - it works. Tests with a consumer packaged goods client increased opt-in rates from 84% to 97%.

Sarah Haggerty

Analytics coming to the fore

A recent survey by Alterian (article on BtoBonline) reports that 2/3rds of the marketing professionals surveyed indicated that analytics and database resources will be the biggest investment this year in support of online marketing. This is driven from the need to increase the effectiveness of their online marketing.

As generating a response becomes more difficult, utilizing data to provide more targeted and relevant messages will drive higher overall response and increase conversion while reducing the likelihood that you will fatigue your email list. In addition, the recent Marketing Sherpa email report reinforced this need as many responders indicated that they considered too many contacts as SPAM.

Carey Mende-Gibson
Director of Analytics
Inbox Marketer

Watch those WWWs!

It's come to this. The latest spammy word to avoid in your emails is any Web link spelled fully with the 'www' prefix, as in www.inboxmarketer.com. The prefix now gets flagged in spam filters.

All spam filters are rules-based algorithms, and the rules are based on monitoring trends in spam itself. It seems that more of these messages contain the offending 'www'. There are several easy fixes. You could make the prefix presumptive and write the link minus the 'www'. (There probably aren't too many left in the Web universe unaware of its importance, just like you don't have to type the prefix into the address bar of your We browser - it adds it automatically.) The other fix is simply to disguise the link as another word or phase, such as 'See Full Article'. This has nicer aesthetics anyway.