Background
A big part of the DSNews.com website is its Daily Dose. The Daily Dose is a daily email that includes the top 4 stories on the site. We send it out to a lot of people and it is opened and people click through to stories. Before the re-launch in August, this email was the site’s main source of traffic.
Since the email was a big source of our traffic, I thought I would take a look and see if we could optimize it. I looked over the original signup form. When I first clicked the signup button I cringed, the site had committed the most common web design sin: asking for more data than you need. In order to receive the email you had to enter your name, mailing address, phone number, and finally your email. These were not optional fields; they were required. This was way too much commitment for people, who just want to receive a daily email. All we really needed to know was their email, their name would be nice as well, but at the end of the day just their email.
I asked around the company and found out that we did nothing with the extra data we collected, but most people reassured me that it was valuable data. I agree that it could be valuable data, but the customer signing up for the email just wants an email. I thought of Seth Godin’s rules on permission marketing. You communications must be anticipated, relevant, and desired. With this in mind I axed all the fields on the signup for down to just an email. If we wanted to send them something in the mail then we could ask for the extra data later. Removing the excess fields in the form and a boost in traffic resulted in a 238% increase in signups.
The lesson learned: DON’T ASK FOR IT IF YOU DON’T NEED IT.
I am saddened to think about the hundreds if not thousands of customers that we have no interaction with because our signup requirements were to high.
Moving to Mailchimp
Our company had been using Constant Contact for all of their emails. I watched the painstaking process of our editor cutting and pasting the top headlines and summaries from the old CMS into the Constant Contact interface. I had played around with MailChimp in the past as well as Aweber. I ultimately decided to go with MailChimp because of its API. Constant Contact has an API, but it is not nearly as mature or simple as the MailChimp API.
MailChimp’s API has made it very simple to allow our editors to queue up stories for the Daily Dose email. It took me about 2 hours to set it up the API and saves the editors at least an hour a day. Setting up the email template took me longer than setting up the API.
In addition to the time saved, we have found that MailChimp has a better delivery rate resulting in 50% higher opens and 50% higher click-thrus. We were using the same list with the same basic layout, but getting much better response. MailChimp also auto prunes the email list of email addresses that hard bounce or soft bounce 3 times.
On a side note: I have plans to play around with their split test functions later. I am very interested in finding out if the titles we use on our emails are hurting or helping us.
Getting Noticed
Since the re-launch we have had a lot more traffic from Google. One of our goals has been to take that one time traffic and convert them to repeat visitors. Allowing people to receive the Daily Dose is a great way to meet that goal. I did some research and found that while we spent most of our time developing our homepage, more people were landing directly on an article page. I modified the article page to highlight the Daily Dose form. This modification only took me about 2 hours to design and code. The result has been a 632% increase over the original form on the old site and a 264% increase by adding the highlighted signup form. Keep in mind we also had a large increase in traffic, but the absolute numbers of signups is significantly up.
Before
After
Conclusion
These are great results eliminating the excess fields and highlighting the feature has really boosted our signups. There is a strong correlation in between spikes of new visitors and Daily Dose signups. When time permits I am going to try testing some variations on the call to action headlines and possibly some other tweaks to increase my conversion further.
Shameless Plugs
If you would like to signup for the Daily Dose you can here.
If you would like to signup up for MailChimp, you can use this link to give me the credit.
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