Explore Features  Free Trial

SendLabs Blog

Email Marketing best practices, thoughts and more


Categories



Become an Email Marketing Pro


Subscribe
Hints tips, best practices, recent blog posts and happenings dropped into your inbox.

Subscribe to the semi-regular email newsletter from the crew at SendLabs.

Note: We don't rent, sell or spam your email. Get an issue or two. If it isn't satisfying, unsubscribe at anytime.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Email marketing: keep 'em unseparated

I'm very big on user experience when it comes to the email signup process, so it always pains me when I see a practice that one of the bigger companies in the email marketing space constantly insists on using.

I signed up for a newsletter today through the Boston-based Comcast SportsNet and after I put my email address in the box and hit submit, I got the following:

I cannot stand the practice of sending the user to an external page to complete this process. It completely removes the idea of creating a unique user experience and instead, translate it into a very bland, antiseptic hospital-like feel. Unfortunately, the company uses these external pages pretty consistently with all of their users so I see them more often than I'd like and they all...look...the...same. I'm not sure why anyone would think it was a good idea to take people away from the main site with no real incentive to return. 

If you're asking users to sign-up, you should be able to get a snippet of HTML code for your web developer to implement within a landing page on your site. Your email marketing services and software provider should be able to provide that for you. If not, you're missing out on the chance to keep people on your site and 100% branded.


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Posted on Tuesday, June 24, 2008 at 10:28 AM in Best Practices | Industry News and Thoughts

Actions: E-mail | Permalink | Comments (0)

Add comment


 

  Country flag





Live preview

September 8, 2008 12:47 PM




Related posts

Email Marketing: Is Pizza Hut Delivering Great Email?
In 2006 alone, Pizza Hut brought in over $9.3 billion in sales, almost doubling the second-place finisher, Domino's. You see their TV ads and you see their flyers in your mailbox every few months. They spend a lot of money in branding themselves a certain way and take great care in their image. So why isn't their email given the proper care?

Email Marketing: 16 reasons not to paste and blast emails from Outlook
This one seems to come up often with smaller businesses or email marketing newbies. I thought I'd give you some food for thought as to why pasting code into Microsoft Outlook and blasting is not such a good idea for your company, its brand or your sanity. I vow to post three new reasons a day until I run out. (Hint: maybe there are a lot of them).

Winnie The Pooh and Email Marketing: a tale of keeping clean lists
According to this article from DIRECT Magazine, MSN maintains "honey pot" email addresses. These are dormant accounts that they've created, and are never used to sign up for marketing. They might post them online somewhere, and wait to see if a "bot" ever comes by to grab them. If you send email to one of these "trap" addresses, you've obviously been scraping email addresses, or purchased a list from someone who has. Guess our old pal Winnie The Pooh getting stuck in the honey pot was more of a metaphor than we ever would have imagined.