Put Some Pizzazz In Your Registration Page

Email Marketers live and die by their email lists. Having the right email registration page can make or break your program. Many email marketers try to be overly cleaver or overly stuffy with their registration pages - this turns off potential subscribers and customers.

I found an email registration form and process that is easy to understand, refreshing, comical, and honest. This is for the daily deal site shirt.woot.com. (shirt.woot.com is one of the four woot sites. woot.com, shirt.woot.com, baby.woot.com, wine.woot.com and sellout.woot.com.) Why not start building the relationship at the point of email capture? This is what woot.com does.

Here is how Woot does it.

• One, the Registration location is easy to find on the homepage. "Hi, are you new? Start here." is welcoming and clear. If you are not new, you know where to Log in.
  

• Two, the form itself is clear, funny, and not intimidating.

• Three, if I make a mistake the error message is lighthearted and clear. There is no question what I need to do to make the form right.
  

Once I hit "woot me", there is not a Thank You for filling out the form, but I was redirected back to the home page where I can start shopping.

The next morning I received a Rich Text Welcome. This welcome was lighthearted and informative. It explained how the various woot.com sites work and what I can expect when placing an order, tracking and order, and what to do if I have questions.

Woot! Woot!

How Obvious Is Your Registration Link?

We all know how important it is to have a captivating e-mail registration page. However, it is even more important to allow your potential subscribers to easily find where they can register for e-mail on your site. Below are some e-mail sign-up icons from well known and not-so-well-know marketers.

- Which ones grab your attention?
- Which ones do you prefer?
You can find out who is who by clicking the image.
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Too Many Choices Can Be Dangerous

Online registration pages are vital to marketers. Offering too many choices or requiring too many steps, however, can lower conversion rates, result in bad data, and will harm overall marketing programs. A study reported by the American Psychological Association concerning employees choices of 401(k) plans supports this theory. The study discovered that when given two plan choices, 75% of employees at a certain company participated in the 401(k), but when given 59 choices, only 60% participated. The more choices given decreased the chance that a conversion occurred. In addition the research team found that the more options that were offered the more cautious people became and the more likely they were to abandon.

Here is how to get the most out of a registration page: