Using Incentives to Build Your Email List

Does using an incentive to entice visitors to signup create a tainted list of people truly not interested in your content or just or is the list just as legitimate as one craeted without an incentive? This is a subject that I struggled with twice first when I initially built my subscriber base and then again when I wanted to rebuild my list.

My incentive was offering 1 entry into a drawing to win products from Carol's Daughter for every subscriber to my newsletter. Both times the registrations poured in. But I could also see that a portion of my list failed to even engage with the newsletter. It seemed as though people only signed up to win the free product and really didn't care to read any communication I sent to them afterwards. I've learned in situation like this though all is not lost.

My goal now is to find a way to reengage those subscribers who don't even open my newsletter or get rid of them by asking if they really want to remain on my list because I do pay per subscriber and would rather unload those that aren't interested than continue to pay for them.

What is odd is that when the drawing was over I had another surge in registrations which showed me that you don't always have a lure to catch a fish. If someone is truly interested in what you offer they'll signup anyway. But that doesn't mean that I will totally abandon the idea of offering incentives in the future but I will weigh it a bit more heavily and it's effect on the quality of my list.

Here is my advice if your thinking about using incentives to boost the size of your list:

1. Offer something related to what you offer on your site. For example, I offer content on beauty and fashion for women of color so my incentives were all-natural hair and fragrance products from a much coveted line. I think that this increases the chance that after your incentive no longer exists you may be able to keep them interested in what you have to say.
2. Segment your list to track exactly the behavior of registrants that signup for freebies. You never know their true motivation so you might want to keep them seperate from no freebie subscribers.
3. Those of you offering free e-books or white papers go for it. Your freebie is the gift that keeps on giving. Not only do those type of free gifts increase your brand recognition but may be printed and kept, passed around or forwarded to a friend.

Hooray for Google Analytics! It's Powerful and it's Free. Part 1: Goal Tracking

As you can already tell this post is about singing the praises of Google Analytics. First of all no I am not being paid by Google I just love their product. It has so many valuable features that I have used to help make crucial decisions regarding the marketing and design of my site that I wanted to share how they helped me. Also instead of writing one long posting I decided to break it up and this is part one.

For the last year or so I have been using Google Analytics to track activity on my website. Now in the past I used the stat tracker that came with my Godaddy.com hosting account( didn't provide enough information) and a service called Indextools (provided plenty of information and the ability to drill-down but wasn't exactly cheap). Eventually I found Google Analytics and proceeded to paste the tracking code into my pages.

I suggest that all website owners use analytics because they allow you to monitor how people are actually using your site. As a designer or developer you may have an idea about how you want visitors to navigate your site and what content you think they will find compelling but nothing is more eye opening than to actually find out what your visitors are drawn to and what they decide to not to engage with at all on your site.

My personal favorite feature is the goal feature. I use it to track how effective my newsletter sign up link is and all the subsequent actions which includes confirming the subscription. My first goal ( I call it 'intention to subscribe') tracks how many people respond to my call to action to sign up for my newsletter which is critical to my new business model. For the last 90 days my conversion rate has been 10.42% so that means that 89.58% of my visitors leave my site without visiting my subscription page.

Goal two, 'subscription submitted', measures how many visitors visited my subscription page and decided to subscribe. That conversion rate is 3.65%. My third and last goal is called 'subscription confirmed' and tracks the clicks of the link in my subscription confirmation email that's sent to their inbox. I wish I could say that my conversion rate for this goal is 3.65% because that would mean that everyone that signed up went on to confirm their subscription but that isn't the case because that conversion rate is 2.50%.

From these stats I figured that I definitely need to improve the call to action that initiates the subscription process, make sure that my copywriting helps visitors understand the value in becoming subscribers and keep my subscription process clear by ensuring they understand it is a double-opt in process.

If you have an e-commerce website and want to track where your visiors are abandoning their shopping carts or any process you want visitors to engage in on your website this is a great tool.

6 Easy Ways To Improve WebSite Usability & Accessibility

The first time I ever heard of usability and accessibility was when I decided to re-design my site. After doing some research I discovered that no matter how fancy your site is nothing replaces the need for it to be usable or functional to your visitors. Accessibility covers whether or not your site is functional for those with disabilities that may use alternate methods to view websites besides web browsers. Usability addresses whether or no your site is easy to use or if users have to stumble through to get the information their seeking. There are a multitude of websites and books dedicated to both subjects. Since I can’t implement every single thing that is suggested these are the simple changes I did use to improve usability and accessibility for my site.

1. Keep design simple. I used Dreamweaver and used DIV’s for pinpoint placement of images and text and used CSS to style the DIV’s. CSS also allows for consistent application of the style of the website and for easy changes if need be.
2. Use persistent and consistent navigation. Give users familiar references like a Home button that goes back to the index page and logo or mast head that also goes back to the index page.
3. Easily distinguish links or buttons that are a “call to action”. It can be something as simple as a link that changes color when hovered over or stays underlined. Just make it obviously clickable.
4. Write content in a “scannable” fashion. I know that I rarely read every word of text on a website so don’t use long pages of text without giving whitespace where eyes can rest.
5. No splash pages or flash intros. They really serve no purpose and can waste valuable time of your visitors.
6. Provide alt text for all images. Some people like to surf with images turned off and plus it gives search engines more relevant content to index.

There is always more to learn to learn about usability and accessibility and I will incorporate more with further updates of my website. Here are some of the websites and books I have used to educate myself.

Websites:
Jakob Nielson on Usability & Design
Universal Usability

Books:
Don't Make Me Think- A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (My personal fave and a quick and easy read) by Steve Krug
Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity by Jakob Nielson (a big book chockfull of information)