Here is the Rundown:

1. FISA requires consent where the CAN-SPAM Act in the US does not.

2. The new law defines consent as: Explicit – when the subscriber specifically provides permission to the sender (e.g. through an opt-in webform) and Implied: where there is an existing or non business relationship, such as a customer purchasing a product or service.

3. FISA applies to anyone sending to subscribers in Canada, not just companies based in Canada. (Hint: you should start segmenting your subscribers based on location if you are not doing so already)

4. Other key elements include the basics that you should already be implementing, such as company contact information on every email, a clear unsubscribe link or reply email, and timely processing of opt-out requests (within 10 days).

At the end of the day, everyone should naturally implement these practices. We want to provide relevant content to individuals who want to receive it, and provide a nice user experience with transparency. On a strategic note, the need to have better data for Canada subscribers may sound like a pain, but embrace it as it could create some very interesting segmenting opportunities.

The next page had a great  preference section that was obviously specific to this particular promotion. I was able to indicate if I wanted reminders for Laptops, Desktops, Monitors, etc. You’ll see in the screen grab below that they have large visuals for each of the options which is a nice touch. Not only is it more usable, but seeing the products makes a user more likely to want to receive updates on them — tech “eye candy” if you will.

They offer an opt-in check box to subscribe to additional offers and also allow you to subscribe to mobile reminders. On the confirmation page though, Dell had a really cool move of providing links to “Shop Now” for the categories I selected to receive updates on. Sounds like common sense, however many retailers take you to a general thank-you page and you have to navigate your way to certain products. Dell does a nice job here of making it easy for the user to get where they likely want to go and retain visitors while they are in the buying mindset.

Great opt-in process from Dell here. They stay consistent with their brand and usability of their site, offer a reason to opt-in to their list, provide user preference options so they can further segment and provide more sophisticated dynamic content, and they integrate the process with other site goals. One quick area of improvement would be on the first page where you click “Need a Reminder…” and then go to the opt-in page. I would recommend having a quick sign-up here (have a field to enter your email address) accompanied by a button reading: “Click to subscribe and select product preferences” — or something to that effect. By doing this they likely increase their opt-in conversion rate by acquiring more sign-ups from the main page and drawing additional attention to the fact that there is an email sign-up option.

The next post will focus on the reminder emails deployed during their campaign.

Cheers,

Forest

Questions or thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment below or shoot me an email.

I love how they are trying to encourage opt-in at the store locations with this signage. They also give a sneak peak at content to expect (New Items, Grand Openings, Recipes), which is a good move.

Below are a few suggested improvements

1. Drop Box: Why not have a drop box attached so people can leave their business card or have a pen and paper to leave their email address? Yes, this would create more work for someone to manually enter info, and there could be some errors in transcription, but you could still send a confirmation email requiring action to subscribe. By just having the signage you are relying on people to actually go to the site and sign up.

2. Sign-up at Checkout: Better yet, why not have store personnel ask if you would like to join the email list while you are paying for your groceries? The technology is there to integrate, and a patron could have a nice welcome email by the time they get home!

3. Incentive: Recipes and new items are cool, but offering something nice to encourage people to sign up is a good idea. List building is difficult business and many are reluctant to join new lists. But if I get 15% off my next grocery purchase, entered in a chance to win a big prize, or a plethora of other ideas, I’m much more interested to get on board.

4. Follow Through: When going to the site, it wasn’t super easy to find the sign-up. On the flash site I couldn’t find it on first run-through, and on the HTML site I believe it was only apparent as a text link in their main copy. If you are not going to get the sign-up at the actual store (highly recommended) then make sure it’s quick and easy to do so on the site. — that should go without saying…

Thoughts or questions? Feel free to leave a comment below or shoot me an email.

Cheers,

Forest

To kick things off, let’s look at some elements of their online sign-up. There are a lot of email opportunities for Quicken Loans. For first time buyers in particular, a great deal of education is desired to help them guide through the process. Even for seasoned borrowers, there are opportunities for education, rate announcement, market news and more (not to mention cross-sell opportunities for other products in the Quicken family). As many home buyers are shopping around, email is critical to keep the brand top-of-mind and help nurture the sale.

When going to sign-up for their email list, a few good things were going on but there were also some areas of improvement:

1. Where to Sign Up? On the home page there was no clear option to sign-up. You have to click on About Us and then Email Alerts. This is a key area of improvement: make it easy to sign up! Steve Krug notes says this well in his book title: Don’t Make Me Think. It’s inevitable that there are some lost opportunities here.

2. Sign Up Page: (1st screen grab below). Some nice things here. First, it’s very user-friendly w/ email address and two preference options. The Rate Alert was a very cool feature! You can select your desired rate to receive notification when it is available. I was excited to see this in action. While there could have been a few more preference options or opportunities to collect data for further personalization, it was a decent sign-up page.

3. Thank You Page: (2nd screen grab below).

A. Starting off with the good: I like how they have 5 links for “Looking for info Right Now?” — Direct users to helpful information and keep them active on the site. Nice job.

B. One piece of copy though that threw me off: “…you’ll receive your requested emails as soon as we write them” – To me that sounds a bit lazy and uncertain. On the sign-up page I thought I was signing up for the monthly newsletter and rate alerts. So wouldn’t it be more relevant to say something like: “…you’ll receive your information packed newsletter each month and rate alerts as soon as they become available!”

C. Finally, there was no confirmation email — or welcome email. I’m not 100% sure I was added to the list, and I’m waiting for a welcome email! This welcome message is a great opportunity as open rates will be sky-high and you can kick the relationship off on a positive note.

Sign Up Page – Click to Enlarge

Thank You Page – Click to Enlarge

While they are off to a decent start, there are several areas of improvement that will quickly improve the QuickenLoans sign-up process. In Part 2 we’ll discuss the first email received.

Cheers,

Forest

Questions or inputs? Feel free to leave a comment or shoot me an email.

My experience with the Wynn Las Vegas email list has been even more frustrating. To establish some context; I love the Wynn. It’s probably my favorite hotel in Vegas and I have stayed there on numerous occasions. Every time I have had exceptional service and a fantastic trip. I’m definitely a promoter. On the gaming side, I’m a fairly serious poker player. I have played in the Wynn Poker Classic, a WSOP event and the like.

In summary: I like the Wynn, have been a loyal customer, and WANT TO BE ON THEIR EMAIL LIST. I’m an absolutely perfect subscriber.

The only problem is I can’t sign up for their list. I was on a transactional list many years ago when I stayed there for the first time, but that address is long gone.

Here are the steps I’ve taken to opt-in

1. Website: My first action is to just visit the Wynn site and expect to see a quick sign-up on the home page. Nothing.

2. Reply-To Address: A friend of mine is on their list and forwarded me an email (that actually had several flaws). I emailed them and requested to join the list, but received an auto-reply explaining the address was not functioning.

My Next Steps

1. Phone: I will try calling guest services to get on the list. I shouldn’t have to do this.

This quest should have never started (they should already have me in there), but should have definitely stopped at the first step. I expect to see an email sign-up when I visit the website; combined with a nice preference center, well planned welcome letter, and integration with other channels.

Questions or thoughts? Leave a comment or feel free to shoot me an email.

5 Common Mistakes with Email List Building

1. Don’t keep the sign-up process fast and simple: This is a big one. If you make the sign-up process complex, you will not get many sign-ups. It’s that simple. Below are some previous posts on email sign-up forms and process.

Good simple form from Express

Nice simple opt-in from New York Life

Flawed sign-up process from SCORE

2. Don’t send a welcome email message: Another huge mistake. When people sign up for your list they are expecting an email welcoming them. This will be one of the highest open rates you will see. Use this opportunity to kick off the relationship on a good note. Below are some previous posts on the topic of welcome messages.

Pro Flowers welcome letter review

Good things from Olive Garden’s welcome email

Sephora screws up their welcome letter

3. Purchase lists: It’s just not a good idea. Unsolicited messages have the highest spam complaint rates and have the opportunity to deteriorate your sending reputation. Focus on building your email lists naturally and you will have much better results from the email channel.

4. Automatically add forward to a friend folks: This is not true permission. But do include an easy way to join your mailing list in the forwarded versions of the email.

5. Don’t offer website sign-up: Sounds elementary, but some big players drop the ball here and don’t leverage their site traffic to build their email list. Here is a post about jewelry retailer Shane Co making this same mistake.

In a future post we’ll provide some more best practices for email list building.

- Forest Bronzan

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With an approach that you don’t often see, they have a screen take-over on their home page with an email sign-up form.

A few cool things going on here:

1. It’s a priority: If you have a site with lots of traffic, you especially want to get new email subscribers. Here, they clearly make it a key focus that nobody can miss. I would be very curious to see what their conversion rate is here.

2. Promotion: They provide an incentive to sign-up. Many email marketers can’t understand why someone would not want to sign up for their list. Well, people already get lots of email and that probably wasn’t their goal when coming to your site anyway. Express provides 15% off your next purchase for signing up.

3. Preview: Express gives a little idea of what you are signing up for: fashion exclusives, new arrivals, special offers.

4. Data for Segmentation: They make zip code a required field. Clearly they will be doing geo-segmentation for local in-store promos. They also ask for gender, which is great for providing dynamic content and more refined personalization. Segmentation is key for a successful program.

5. 2nd Chance Sign-Up: Notice in the upper right they have another piece of home page real estate for their email sign-up. In case you don’t complete this first form, you can easily do so later.

Good stuff here. I’ll be very interested to see how well they execute their email campaigns.

- Forest Bronzan

Follow me on Twitter

Here, we see several good things going:

1. The subscription form is in a nicely contained box.

2. They ask for your name and email, and then give a preference option for HTML or text

3. They offer 3 reasons for why you should subscribe! This is a nice touch many companies don’t bother with. It’s good to focus on what’s in it for the user.

Three items to make it better:

1. The title ‘What’s New Email’ is somewhat difficult to read. I would make this really stand out. I would also have more direct copy here, such as: “Sign up of for our Newsletter” or “Exclusive Email News”  — something to that effect.

2. It’s nice to have the bullets for ‘why subscribe’ — but I would also have a link for ‘view a past newsletter’ — so the individual subscribing can get a hint of exactly what they will be signing up for.

3. The thank you page after clicking ‘subscribe’ was ok, but it would could have been better with additional options (after I already opted-in) for my newsletters. In a previous post we discussed email preference centers, and how they are great for the subscriber AND the marketer. I’m sure New York Life has some form of this, but it wasn’t easily available during the sign-up process.

Step 1. On their home page, there is a link in the upper left for ‘Get eNewsletters’ – Points for having this above the fold, but negative points for not having the option to fill in my address right there and submit. Every additional page I have to go to is another opportunity for me to leave and not complete the process. Get my most basic info (email address) right away while I’m interested and then ask for more information.

Step 2. After clicking that link I get to a page with a few options. First they give the option to view a sample of their newsletter. Major points here – it’s a good idea to give a preview of what a subscriber is going to receive. Set expectations from the beginning and you’ll start the relationship on a good note. Major points were also deducted on this page, as it asked me again to follow a link to sign up. I already said I wanted to sign up on the home page, why must I go to a 3rd page just to enter my email address? This is a major flaw. If they must go to this 2nd page, put the actual opt-in field here, in addition to the ‘preview’ link.

Step 3. Finally on the 3rd page they ask for my email address.

Step 4. On the 4th page (yes, 4 clicks and counting to sign up for the newsletter) They are asking for a lot more information, but it’s unclear if I have been signed up already. I thought that’s what I did on the previous page. But with no welcome email, I continue on. On this page they ask me to confirm my email, plus make First Name, Last Name, City, State and Zip required fields. Additionally, they have a security check for input of text from an image. For the contact info, that’s great that they are collecting it as it will be useful for segmentation and personalization later, but why make it required? It’s a nice to have, not a must have. For the email confirmation, why not have that on the previous page, or just have a double opt-in (where I must confirm by clicking a link in an email)? They do give me newsletter options, so are on the right track of an email preference center, but are way off on so many other elements.

Step 5. Finally on the 5th page I get a confirmation and the shortly after I receive a welcome email.

This 5 page process could have been reduced to 2 or 3 pages. On the home page they could have had a quick opt-in field and then taken me to a 2nd page to put in more personalization info (after I was already in the system and about to receive a confirmed or double opt-in email).

If they didn’t want to mess with the home page, they could have left the link as it was there, and then on the 2nd page had the opt-in form with a preview image on that page of their newsletter. On a 3rd page they could offer more personalization options.

I’d be very curious what their sign-up conversion rate is, from start to finish. While they are making efforts to implement some sound best practices for list acquisition, SCORE is dropping the ball with some red flag mistakes.

Screen Grabs from the process (click image to enlarge):

Home Page

Page 2

Page 3

Page 4

To compare a bit with some of their industry competitors, I wanted to add myself to the Shane Co. email list. Living in San Francisco for several years, I heard radio ad after radio ad from. “We’re your friend in the diamond business” — I will never forget the consistency in tone from Tom Shane, and how much frequency they had on the major radio stations.

At any rate… I went to shaneco.com and… no email sign-up. I searched around for several minutes with no luck. An image at the end of this post shows the home page above the fold (where I would want to see a simple: “Sign up for exclusive offers”). I went to several other pages with no luck.

Now in this case, I’m not just an email marketer doing research; I’m a primary persona: mid to late 20s male in a serious relationship and in the early research phases of engagement rings.

With the engagement ring product line in particular, the email channel is a great fit for a jeweler like Shane Co. Let’s examine:

1. It can be a long sales cycle: Customers of course will differ, from the spontaneous to methodical, but with a high ticket (and very personal purchase) like an engagement ring, it’s reasonable to expect a prospective customer taking a longer time to make a decision. Email can help that relationship by providing educational pieces, shopping tips, and other general guidance during the cycle. With email we can create the impression of a one-to-one communication to enhance the subscriber experience.

2. Keeping the brand top of mind: With purchases likes these, it’s natural to ‘shop around’. While a prospective is out at other jewelry stores (and on other sites), it sure would be great to send some reminders of your value, and check-ins so they don’t forget about you. These check-ins can also be good for the customer that is not shopping around much but who is just taking his (or her) sweet little time to decide when and what they want to do. Helping them get into the moment can be quite rewarding for you.

3. You can see how they engage: Utilizing just some of the simple elements of email marketing technology, you can gain valuable information about how your new subscriber engages with your communications. On a basic level we will know if they open and click through. We can also monitor which links they click on and set up corresponding content to be sent based on those links. We can take it a step further and see if the subscriber hits certain goal landing pages after they click through from our email. Now where we just started with a name and email address, we may potentially discover that our subscriber opens 70%  of our emails, and spends a lot of time on the site learning about ’round shaped diamonds’ — the retargeting options here are exciting.

Frustrated with my discovery, I decided to ‘chat live’ with a sales representative. The response after asking if they had a newsletter I could sign up for was: “oh, no — we don’t really send email blasts”  — I didn’t go any further, but was thinking: “Well it’s good that you’re not sending ‘blasts’ because you should be sending highly targeted and personalized emails — but WHY are you not sending anything?”  — if someone from the marketing department at Shane Co. would be so kind to explain their reasoning, I’m all ears.

- Forest Bronzan