Newsletters are a great way of communicating news about your company to people that are interested either in your brand or what you have got to say about the industry. This is even more important to email marketing service providers, as they have an excellent opportunity to educate their existing customers on newsletter best practices and secondly their prospective customers can see how good their newsletter programmes can be.

Having this in mind WhichESP has analyzed newsletter subscription processes of 100 ESPs worldwide to show you what Newsletter signup process should be like. Or should I say “Should not be like”?

Statistics

60 ESPs have a visible signup form. This includes pages which are linked to from the homepage. If we only include those ESPs that have a newsletter signup form on their homepage the figure should be around 50%.

37 asked for a name (Either First name or the Full name).

28 asked for a company name.

32 have asked to verify the email address.

25 have sent welcome emails.

23 asked to be added to a safe sender list.

10 have given an option to change subscription preferences either in the verification or the Welcome emails.

9 confirmation/welcome emails have junked. It may not be a huge problem, but I would be concerned for those ESPs. If I would be a prospective customer I would have serious doubts about an ESP that is unable to deliver its own newsletter into my inbox. This number may not be significant, however this is only from those that do send confirmation emails. (Spam filter used: Outlook 2010 beta integrated Junk folder.)

Email Newsletter frequency

It is important to note that out of 100 subscriptions to ESP newsletters in a period of 4 months (February to June) I have only received newsletters from 50 email marketing service providers.

5 Takeaways

1. Newsletter signup form locations.
   Displaying the newsletter subscription box or a link to a newsletter signup page on any other page than the homepage is just as good as not displaying it at all. On one occasion I had to use website’s search facility to find the newsletter subscription form.  Another Email Service Provider mentioned word “newsletter” 7 times on the homepage, but has not got a newsletter signup form of its own.
2. What information to collect?
   This is one of my favourite takeaways. One ESP asked for my birth date and the other one asked 13 compulsory questions. I am sure this may have looked like a great idea at the time, but this is a newsletter subscription form and there is no obvious answer what does this information has to do with the newsletter. The chances are that I am going to eat my words, as I will receive a great targeted e-card on my birthday and I might have just signed up to the most precise targeted email in my life based on 13 questions I answered, but very much doubt it.
3. Sales pitch or a newsletter?
   We all like Salesforce, but Email Service Providers adding their newsletter subscribers through Salesforce might be sending a wrong message. First off all it says that you could not care less about keeping me up to date with the industry news and secondly it makes me question the reliability of your own Email Delivery Platform. Similar situation when you send verification emails from sales@ email address.
4. Wording
   Think about the language you use in the sign-up forms.
   “To become an expert enter your email address here:” – It sounds great, but what does this actually mean? It does not explain what will happen after the visitors submit their email addresses.
   “Contact added” after the subscribers press the ”Signup” button. Your subscribers are not “Contacts”. “Thank you for signing up to X industry newsletter” is much more appropriate.
5. Process
   It is crucial to test the signup process not only to make sure it works and emails end up on your database, but think about the logic. Do your website visitors after subscribing really want to end up back on the subscription page or would you rather send them to a “thank you” page containing a free whitepaper explaining how to enhance their own newsletters?