How to Get Customer Data AND Newsletter Subscriptions

Majordomo Subscriptions

In nearly every form on our site one of our questions is "Do you want to subscribe to Web Marketing Today newsletter?" If they say yes, we've programmed the form to automatically send a "subscribe message" to our list server software.

If you use Majordomo software you would begin the e-mail message with the words "subscribe listname" and put the word "end" on the next line of the message. You can use the Bcc: field to send the same message to Majordomo that you send to yourself. Anything after the word "end" will be ignored by Majordomo, and you'll find it easy to program your mind to ignore "subscribe listname/end." This is especially easy to accomplish with programs such as FormHandler, which let you prepare a template exactly structuring the e-mail message sent to you.

Data in Stages

It's a well-known fact that the more information you ask people to fill out, the fewer people will complete the form. Here's an approach that allows you to get a little or a lot. Here's how it works:

1. Ask your Web visitor to subscribe to your newsletter by putting his e-mail address in the box provided and pressing "Submit."
2. When the visitor submits his e-mail address, he is redirected to another form which asks, "Would you mind giving us your opinion about…" with more boxes to fill in. The visitor's e-mail address is transferred from Form A to Form B so that their answers in Form B are linked to the e-mail address, already given.
3. When visitors press the "Submit" button on Form B, they are thanked for their help and asked more questions on Form C.

At each step you'll lose people who won't complete the additional information, but you'll get many who will fill out more information than they would have if you had asked for it all at once. It is vitally important, however, that you request permission to use the information you ask for, and respect your Web visitor's privacy wishes.

The technical difficulty you face with this staged form approach is maintaining "state," or making sure that the information you collect from one person all stays together. Perl and other languages have ways to pass information from one Web page to another, both in the URL as well as less visibly. This can also be accomplished with cookies. All approaches require specialized programming, so talk to your Web developer or programmer.

Read more articles from Web Marketing Today, Issue 46, June 1, 1998