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How to succeed in gaining new subscribers
01.12.2009 | Page 3 of 6
Martin Bucher
Friendly
Often, when completing a subscription form, I feel like I’m filling in an official form. Does this sound familiar? Normally, when you’re given an official form, you have no choice but to fill it in. However, when a subscription form is used for email marketing purposes, website visitors should be gently persuaded to complete the form.
On the one hand, subscription forms should be clearly designed and easy to use. On the other, many forms would benefit from having the same attention paid to them by the web designer as is paid to the rest of the website.
A successful subscription form is not only clearly structured; it also has the power to persuade the website visitor. The form should point out the benefits of a newsletter subscription and clarify how often the reader can expect to receive information.
But there are plenty of bad examples too. These bad examples are easy to recognise; in all these cases the focus is on the interests of the marketer rather that the prospective subscriber. An excessive amount of personal data is requested and all confidence-building information such as data protection and data usage notices is omitted.
One such bad example is the hotel subscription form shown below. The English version has only been partly translated. Prospective subscribers are even generally suspected of posing a spam risk and a small arithmetic problem is therefore provided as a security measure. A simple double opt-in procedure would have served the same purpose here and would have been much friendlier.
Newsletter subscription form that requests too much information and ‘spam protection’
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 Martin Bucher,Managing Director
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