#1 Reason Why Potential Customers are NOT Signing Up for Your Email List?

You may remember Mr. TooManyHats, a busy man who suffers subscriber fatigue. His wife, Mrs. TooManyHats, has the same problem. She has so many emails, she doesn’t know what to do. About 20 times a day they get an email offering some free webinar or report if they just Register. Ah, no problem its free, right?

But, when he gets this, he changes his mind

Would You Fill Out This Form?

American Marketing Association (AMA) Webinar Opt In Form

About once a week I get an email from the American Marketing Association (AMA) about an upcoming webinar or event. Like most businesses they offer a free service (i.e. webinar) for the purpose of building their “list”. You have all heard “the money is in the list”. Many of their webinars are very enticing to me. And, probably at least five times I have hit the Registration button. But, when the above form pops up and requires me to fill in 21 fields of information, I terminate the signup. As a result, I (and most likely thousands of others) have never attended an AMA webinar. Am I missing something good? Probably, but remember I am Mr TooManyHats, and I don’t have ten minutes to spend filling out one of the 10 daily invitations I get to a webinar. I don’t even have enough time to read all my emails. Instead I watch about five other webinars each week. Webinars that only asked for my first name and email.

There is probably no more valuable asset to an online business than their “list”. And to build a large, quality list of highly targeted consumers, who specifically gave you permission to market your product or service to them, is a lot of work. So how could , of all organizations, the AMA appear to be oblivious about the rules of proper email opt-in etiquette? You force us to fill out TWENTY-ONE fields of information to attend your webinar? Are you serious?

There have been countless split tests demonstrating that when a potential opt-in has to fill out more than two fields of information (i.e. name and email) the signup abandonment rates begins to skyrocket. The AMA form requires 21 fields of information including address, zip code, job title, blah, blah , blah. Can you imagine how many potential AMA members they are losing. My guess? About 90% at least are terminating their registration. Why would the AMA (or any other initial online marketing campaign) need my zip code or street address or my title? If you need that info, get it later. But, don’t scare off 90% of your prospects just to be greedy or employ aggressive data mining tactics before you even say “hello”. .

Here are just a few things to consider when creating and employing your email campaign.
1). Offer a lot and ask little (as little as possible)
2). Provide something of value for free
3). Make sure your “freebie” encourages engagement
4). Reduce (not increase) anxiety with Un-complicated signup forms.
5). Only make name and email mandatory, other fields make optional
6). Always follow-up with a welcome message and/or auto responder.

Kevin Conway is owner of Cutting Edge eMarketing which provides proven online marketing strategies. We are not just consultants but business owners that have actually created and managed several successful e-commerce businesses.