How COVID-19 Changed Client Experiences For Good

New email subscribers are the lifeblood of almost any email marketing programme. The average unsubscribe rate for Vuture clients is between 0.1% and 0.2%, so without new contacts, your lists will gradually start to shrink. Additionally, new subscribers tend to be more engaged than older ones, making them vital to your sales funnel.

There are many important factors to get right at the point of sign-up. Not only do you need to collect data carefully so as to protect contact privacy, you also need to think about how to attract new contacts and create a sense of trust in order to increase their lifetime value to your business.

Make the Sign-up Process Easy for Prospects

For a small number of firms, you might not be concerned with subscriptions. Perhaps the strategy is to foster a sense of exclusivity, in which case you might decide to keep subscription mechanisms closed off. However, in most cases it’s beneficial to have an open sign-up form to make it as easy as possible for prospective clients to engage.

Yes, you might get some less valuable subscribers who aren’t serious about making a purchase, but that’s where your marketing funnel and qualification processes kick in. The fact is, if the contact can’t figure out how to sign-up, they might subscribe to competitor emails instead, and you’ll lose out.

So what can you do to make it easy for potential customers to join your marketing programme?

Validate Subscribers With a Confirmed Opt-in

When collecting data from web forms, it’s vital to make sure it’s genuine. Collecting false data, whether accidental or otherwise, can be harmful to your sender reputation and email deliverability, or worse, lead to fines by regulators.

The first step is to protect against bots or typos. There are a number of ways to protect against bots which Vuture laid out in this helpdesk article. Some may still sneak through, and it’s for this reason we’d always recommend confirmed opt-in as a best practice technique.

Confirmed opt-in requires one extra step for contacts to validate their sign-up. This means the overall number of mailable contacts you generate through the form will be lower, by around 10 – 25%. However, because it reduces the risks associated with collecting false data, it’s often worth the trade off.

Collect Consent and Source Data for Future Segmentation

For modern marketers, data is critical. You need to be aware of privacy regulations, list quality and hygiene, and tailor email journeys to specific subsets of your audience. None of this is possible without accurate data and somewhere to safely store it.

The point of sign-up might be the only time you collect data on some recipients, so it’s essential to look ahead and think about what you’ll need going forward. Date and time of consent is often a core requirement, but you might also think about collecting information such as the source of the sign-up.

By hiding source information in your forms, you can power future personalisation or segmentation efforts. For example, you might want to change the message for someone who signs up via the website versus someone who subscribes from LinkedIn.

Increase Subscriber Engagement With a Welcome Journey

For the valid contacts that make it through your anti-spam protection, welcoming them effectively to your email programme can significantly increase value upstream. There are several reasons for this:

Thanks to the majority of B2C companies which now send welcome emails of some description, 74% of all consumers expect one when they sign-up to a mailing list. This expectation is beginning to grow across B2B audiences.

A good welcome email will: