Monday, 14 February 2011, 8:49 AM

How To Get More Newsletter Subscribers through Your Homepage — Part 1/3: Evaluate Present Registration Process

Ousting the ugly and ineffective and ushering in the new and effective is sometimes what you have to do to see a little newsletter growth. That’s exactly what we did in the last six months, and it’s what spurred some notable subscriber growth. I bet you want to know what we did…and you shall.

You know that moment when you do something just right and seconds later you realize how wrong it was before? I’ve coined a phrase for this – I like to call it “learning from your mistakes”.

Sometimes, make-shifting a sign up process is something you have to do. Thinking that our sign up process would do for now, Sarah and I realized that it didn’t really do anything. It was time for a little self criticism – we took a closer look at our registration process.

For the sake of attention span and simplicity this will be a three part lesson brought to you by I-Love-Email:

Part 1: Evaluate present registration process

Part 2: Simplify the registration process

Part 3: Optimize the registration process

With our makeshift sign up process, we simply didn’t get enough people to sign up – specifically from our homepage. A fairly large icon in the column on the right hand side, a tad on the low side but still fairly high up, seemed like it should have worked…

But like I said, it didn’t work. Our registrations were minimal – except the week we introduced the newsletter.

So the question was: Was it not obvious that we have a newsletter? Our visitors increase,d but our newsletter subscribers didn’t!

The answer to our troubles lay in Google Analytics, namely, the visitor statistics. We noticed a few interesting trends. This is what we found: At least 35% of our visitors use smaller widescreen computers – probably laptops. Remember when I said that the newsletter icon was a tad on the low side? That was the problem! With a widescreen laptop of a certain size, the icon is invisible! You would have to scroll down to see the newsletter icon. Well, if only we had listened to Analytics sooner.

We also reviewed the design we used at the time. It was an icon for signing up that linked to a page with a registration form. This was neither obvious nor simple.