How to Capture Visitor E-Mail Addresses
Web Marketing Today, Issue 59, August 1, 1999
It took you a lot of work to get that visitor to come to your site, but only 0.5% to 5% will probably make a purchase. Make sure you collect your visitor's e-mail address -- and perhaps more -- before he leaves your site. Here are a number of techniques to accomplish this, some better than others.
Registration
Force your visitor to register in order to use your site. Most larger sites have abandoned this approach, since it cuts way down on the percentage of people who will respond at all. The advantage is that you can often collect a good bit more information about your visitors this way. What keeps people from registering? Fear of commitment probably. (After all, a large number of visitors are men.... Only kidding!) Seriously, registration is a commitment that seems to violate a sense of privacy, and that doesn't come too easily in a culture that values anonymity as much as the Internet.
A less rigid approach is to provide full access to several popular features on your site, but require registration for certain functions. This might allow you to qualify your prospects so you develop a list of only the more serious visitors..
Announce a Contest
"Free" is immensely popular, and when you offer something of value free to the winner of a contest, you'll get many sign-ups. Of course, you may find you've selected for the cheap "something-for-nothing" crowd, and they may be more interested in your prize than your product or service. So make sure the prize is directly related to what you offer if you're trying to target your list.
Web marketers can't get something for nothing either. People will give their information in exchange for something they perceive has value.
Offer Free Information via Autoresponder
Some sites offer special free reports that they promote on the webpage, but that require you to send e-mail to their autoresponder to receive. This gives them lots of e-mail addresses but no clear permission to market further to these individuals. You can assume permission, perhaps, and some will continue to receive what you have to send. Others however, will forward you angry notes demanding you remove them from your list.
Offer a Valuable Newsletter Subscription
When you offer a free newsletter that the site visitor believes to be of value, you'll get many sign-ups. How much information should you request?
My friend Larry Chase, author
of Essential
Business Tactics for the Net (Wiley, 1998) and owner of Web Digest for Marketers
(http://www.wdfm.com) asks for five pieces of information so he can develop a valuable list for future marketing. He stores the data in a database on Revnet's
UnityMail (http://www.unitymail.com) that he uses to send out his newsletter.
I have a different philosophy. I think that the more information you ask for, the fewer people will complete the form, so I ask for only an e-mail address. This limits my ability to personalize mailings and market from the list, but it brings me plenty of subscribers.
Here's a tip that helped me. Once upon a time I was getting about 500 new subscribers per month. Then I added a newsletter sign-up form on every page of my extensive site. Subscriptions skyrocketed. Then I decided to offer a subscription opportunity two times on every page, once in the left-side menu area, and another time in the text, and subscriptions shot up again to about 2,000 new subscribers (net) every month.
Doing the Two-Step
There is a way to combine both approaches. You could ask for the e-mail address only, and when they respond, program the site to say, "Thank you for subscribing. We have a special report/gift/prize to those who complete filling out our form," and then ask some more questions. When they submit, ask more yet. You'll get both many e-mail addresses, and more information from people willing to offer it. Microsoft does this on their site, and it can be very effective.
Privacy Concerns
But lest we Web marketers get carried away with collecting personal information, we must be aware of a two-pronged trend: (1) a fear of loss of privacy by individuals and (2) saber rattling by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) towards sites that don't display a privacy policy -- a clear statement of what information you are collecting and what you intend to do with it. If you plan on doing business in Europe, you may be aware that the European Union (EU) has an extremely strict policy about data collection and storage by companies, and violation could severely limit your ability to do business there.
The Direct Marketing Association has led the way with privacy policy recommendations to all its members (http://www.the-dma.org/policy.html). Responsible Web marketers will post clear privacy policies on their sites and adhere strictly to them.
For example, we tell people on every one of the two dozen forms on our site that we respect their privacy, provide a link to our privacy policy, and state clearly that we never sell or rent our lists to third parties.
Our integrity -- and the freedom of the marketplace is at stake. We will either police ourselves or expect Big Brother to do it for us. For more information and samples of privacy policies see the Privacy section of our Web Marketing Info Center (http://www.wilsonweb.com/webmarket/privacy.htm).
Be aggressive about capturing e-mail addresses and other information from your visitors, but show integrity about the way you use that information. After all, relationships -- and successful businesses -- are built on trustworthy behavior.
