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If you have several newsletters, you’ll want to specifically have calls to action that match content on your site with the topics of the newsletters. For example, the Business & Technology page at BarnesandNoble.com includes a very prominent subscribe form on the left-hand sidebar for newsletters related to business and computers. One of our clients, Business & Legal Reports, created a mini-subscribe form with specific newsletters for their interior pages that quickly accounted for over 50% of their web sign-ups, and increased their web to e-mail conversion by 108%!

Since e-mail capture is the single most important aspect of your marketing campaign, keep tweaking the wording of your calls to action and the placement on the pages until you see optimal results, as measured by a rapidly-growing e-mail list.

In addition, encourage and provide an easy way for readers to forward all the goodies you offer via e-mail, including product specs, graphics, articles, statistics, surveys or any other material featured on your web site.

For example:

*Next to that fabulous new pair of boots featured on your site, shoppers can click to, “Tell a Friend About This Sale.”

*Along side an article about the latest in Mediterranean Cuisine, readers can “Share Recipes With A Friend.”

*Right below your bold and vibrant invitation announcement of a new gallery opening, readers can choose to “Invite a friend to the cultural event of the summer.”

Always encourage readers to pass your web site content along via e-mail, and always make sure those e-mails have at least a small pitch or even a live form for the recipient to subscribe to your regular newsletter program. After all, the more opportunities you present for organic capture, the greater the potential for positive results.

Designing Subscribe Forms that Encourage Sign Up In your efforts to collect e-mail, don’t put up data-collection obstacles. Every time you ask the reader to register, use a password, answer questions on a survey or provide personal data, you are essentially setting up roadblocks each of which carries the potential to make the would-be subscriber decide it’s not worth the trouble. Just as e-commerce sites never put any barrier between the shopper and the sale, don’t prioritize getting a lot of data over getting the one piece of information you need most: her e-mail address!

You can always gather additional data later on using surveys and feedback forms, once you’ve opened the lines of communication (much more on this in Chapter 6), or by appending the data (which we cover later in this chapter). By asking only for the person’s e-mail address and permission to send them e-mails, you are keeping it simple and not driving away potential business.

Creating an irresistible subscribe form boils down to two key imperatives:

*Provide a compelling reason to sign up—This might mean an incentive, such as a money-saving coupon, a free gift, or perhaps a gift certificate for another company with which you have a partnership. But whether you have an incentive or not, be sure that your form has strong promotional copy touting the benefits of receiving the newsletter.

*Design a super-fast sign-up process to quickly capture the e-mail address and only the most basic additional information (we recommend either just e-mail, or at most one other field, like zip code or gender). Close while the prospect is hot.

We worked with a major consumer packaged goods company that had a newsletter that was well designed and filled with terrific content. In spite of these good qualities, they couldn’t get anyone to sign up for the newsletter. When we dug into it, we discovered the subscribe form had 17 required fields. Seventeen fields! We weren’t surprised that most consumers weren’t willing to go through all of that work just to get e-mail, even if it was from a brand-name marketer. We advised that they just ask for the e-mail address up front. Within weeks of making the change their sign-up rate skyrocketed, at one point hitting a high of 400% improvement!

As we mentioned earlier, you can always gather more data later, once you have built up a level of relationship and trust. For example, when a prospect requests a download of your latest white paper, ask for their e-mail address and include a checkbox to subscribe to your newsletter. Later, when the prospect responds with interest in a product demo, then you might ask for telephone number, company name and job title. The prospect will be much more likely to provide this information when they have learned more about your company.

One way to entice people to give you more data is to offer an incentive. This works particularly well when the data and incentive are tied together. Remember the marketer with the 17 fields? Well, what they really wanted was their customers’ mailing addresses. Our suggestion was to offer the incentive of a $1 coupon that would come in the mail. How did it work? For starters, this eliminated the garbage-data problem, because if you didn’t give the correct address you wouldn’t get the coupon. And while not everyone who signed up for e-mail filled in this second form, many others did. In fact, the postal data supplied under the new offering was much more accurate.

So always think about why you want a certain piece of data and how you intend to use it. If, for example, you want to do geographical target marketing, but not actually send anything by mail, then ask only for their area code, Zip code, or state. This allows you to target an area for marketing purposes without requiring a high level of trust, since the data is not personally identifiable.

Surveys are also good ways to acquire additional information. People love to share their opinions, and you can often sneak a few demographic questions in at the same time.

Finally, don’t fall into the trap of gathering information just for the sake of it. If you have no reason to be gathering data at this time, don’t ask for it. Remember, the more data you own, the more privacy issues you have to contend with. In today’s climate, if you don’t really need it or use it, you might not want it.

Asking for E-mails in the Real World

Think of your offline customer touch points the same way you do your Web site — every point is an opportunity to gather e-mail addresses. Of course you’ll want to ask in a way that reassures their privacy will be upheld and offers a compelling benefit statement.

*Trade shows and other live events—Every booth at every trade show on the planet has a fishbowl or some sort of container designed to gather business cards. The whole point of trade shows is to meet lots of people in your market and get their information so you can continue the conversation after the show.