Thursday, 17 February 2011, 4:42 PM
How To Get More Newsletter Subscribers through Your Homepage — Part 2/3: Simplify the Registration Process
If there’s a part two, there must be a part one – PART ONE.
We’ve all heard the phrase “less is more”. It’s a great design principle, but not a good rule – because sometimes in some cases, less is just less. An icon that’s labeled “Newsletter”, what exactly does that tell you? Probably not a whole lot, unless you work with email marketing. Simplicity is great, but with our titles, we have to think about our readers – will they get it?
In this case, “Newsletter” is just not enough. We need it to be obvious – this is a newsletter that we send out, and you can subscribe to it – no extra thinking required of our readers. It needs to explain itself, and move our readers to action. We went with what’s called a call to action – “Subscribe to our newsletter”.
We have to avoid sending our readers on a clicking marathon from page to page to subscribe to our newsletter. We have to keep our readers on the same page as the blog. We can’t risk pulling our readers away from that precious blog content – and with todays HTML capabilities, it’s just not necessary. But utilizing that precious 11-15 inches of space at the top of your homepage can be a challenge. The buttons at the top need to be noticeable, not enormous. Sizing is important, you don’t want to push down other important icons into never-see land. Striking a balance between your important icons is what you want.
What happens though when you run out of space for your darling icons? We solved that problem by making an expandable registration box (below). That way the box stays out of the way when you want it to be out of the way, and is there for you when you need it the most.
From a website’s point of view, today’s internet is a very different place from yesterday’s. One word: mobile. Mobile devices have changed how we build our websites, and the change that they’ve begun is well worth the traffic that they generate. 4% of our visitors use a smartphone or tablet computer, that’s significant – significant enough to potentially annoy your readers with a stubborn signup box. Have you checked with Google Analytics lately to see how many people you may be annoying? If you want to use a fancy schmancy HTML expandable box or the like, make sure it works on iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. It pays off – and it thwarts website induced reader rage.
We’re almost there, now that we’ve made signing up a breeze and a joy, we can move on to the rest of the magic.Wait for part three in the coming days.
