Newsletter sign-up best practices

[Anonymous]

We are about to implement a newsletter signup on our website that will feed into Marketo. Love to hear from expects on any best practises we need to considered. Here are a few things I'd love to get advice on:

• Should we limit the fields to just asking for their email address or include first and last?
• Is it smart to send a confirmation email to verify their subscription (similar to have MailChimp acts)?
• What copy have you seen work well to get people to sign-up? Links to examples would be great!
• After signing-up, do we keep them on the same page with a thank you or send them to a new thank you page?

Looking forward to hear what the community has to say!

Cheers!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Clark,

The number of questions basically depends on the content of your newsletter. The more business or Market oriented it is, the more likely it is to attract TOFU leads, and therefore you will be more efficient will fewer fields. On the other end, if the content is more product / Solutions / Vendor it may make sense to add a few more fields. But in any case, keep it short : you want suscribers, not buyers at this stage, and you will be able to use other content for longer forms.

The confirmation email is a good idea and it also enable you to check immediately whether you have been provided with a valid address.

After sign up, I prefer to use web site pages for thank you pages, because you have the full menu context and you can create specific pages on your web site with CTAs for this usage. If it's not possible, I prefer to use seperate TY pages for that same reason (additional CTAs to invite the visitor to continue browsing)

-Greg

[Josh_Hill13]

You'll have to test the copy with your audience. There are probably 10 million websites that discuss that sort of thing.

Yes, double opt in is a preferred method if you take the time to set it up and everyone agrees to take a lower subscriber count that is quality vs. higher count with more bad leads.

I wrote about double opt in in my guide if you take a look.