Blog Subscription Form

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

I'm working on setting up a subscription system for our blog content and I am wondering if anyone could give me a little insight into best practices as far as the actual form for the subscription goes. What fields do you use - just email address or first name, last name, email address? Do you use any hidden fields?

Any and all suggestions would be appreciated - thank you in advance!

Allison

[Anonymous]

Thank you both, this is very helpful. Unfortunately, I am pretty limited at this point from a development standpoint on the actual layout of the blog, because I would love to do something with segmenting out the sections and offering different options. For now I'm just working on trying to build good content and driving more people to the blog so I can get some dollars from the marketing budget to revamp the page. I'm starting to see some good traffic, so now it's buidling a subscription model to capture some of those leads.

Any tips on resources for building the overall subscription model if you have them would also be greatly appreciated 🙂 

Thank you both so much again!

[Anonymous]

Extending Charlie's recommendation: your travel roles look like a great source of segmentation.  I would develop a blog section for each of these, and provide subscribers the option to choose one or all when they subscribe.  Marketo has done a great job of this on their blog.  Here's one example:
http://blog.marketo.com/blog/category/b2b-marketing/marketing-automation

Note they only ask for email address.  The perfect funnel might look like this:

1. Prospect finds blog via social media or Google
2. Prospect subscribes with their email address for more information.  You don't put this into Salesforce because they didn't ask to be sold
3. Prospect enters your nurture track for their specific interests.  This might include previous best of blog posts, new content offers, etc
4. Prospect fills out longer form, adding name etc when they download email content.  This triggers them entering your CRM and is more justified by their digital body language
5. Salesperson contacts prospect, who has now seen your brand a dozen times and is comfortable taking your call

[Anonymous]

Allison, it varies for every organization, but here are a few generally best practices for a blog capture point:

• Keep the number of fields down since this is an early stage acquisition channel - you can always ask them more information later. 5 fields will get you their basic contact information.
• Use hidden fields to track source information, blog post type, and asset type. An example of the latter would be if you had multiple forms on the blog: one for subscription and one for a white paper or case study.
• I always recommend getting one field that will optimize your nurturing for that lead - could be industry, title, company size, etc. The dropoff in conversions will hopefully be made up in nurturing effectiveness.