Blogs

Today I received an email from a sender that then took me to another site—the AOTA. For those of you who don’t know, the AOTA is the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance. This is suppose to be one of the premiere websites for finding information on the topic of online trust and brand awareness. Now, most of the people within this organization are from within the email space, so I thought it was interesting when I went searching on the site to sign up for their newsletter that it was very difficult to find. Then, once I found it, the only way to sign-up for the newsletter was to send an email to an address and put “newsletter” in the subject line.

Now, I am not trying to be a pain, but it seems to me that most marketing folks know the more you ask your users to do, the less likely they will do it. My question is, why isn’t there a signup box on every page so that I could simply put in my email address and start getting your newsletter—without having to copy and paste an email address (let alone one I need to fix--Email newsletter @ aotalliance.org and include "newsletter" in the subject line—is how it appears on the website) just to get your content and to try to have you sell to me.

The moral of this story is, keep it simple. Your email program is not just about the messages you send out, but about the entire process, from address collection to content within the message. I decided not to sign up for this particular newsletter because it was more work than it was worth at the time (but apparently writing about it is worth the time). So, make sure that you make it easy on your users. Allow them to sign up for your content on every page of your website and think about how you sign up for newsletters (what do you like personally, what works for you)—it will probably work for a lot of other people as well.