3 Ways to Improve Your E-mail Signup
Email is a resilient technology. In the last decade it’s survived the growth of spam, the rise of social networks and rumors of its coming demise. And yet, email is still growing in usage . So while little on the Internet ever feels like a sure bet (Myspace anyone?), email remains the most consistent tool for non-profits to build relationships.
So when our crew at Union Gospel Mission (UGM) discussed redesigning our website, we knew an easy sign-up for our email newsletters was going to be important.
By focusing on three improvements, we were able to increase email sign-ups by 1,000%:
1. Cleaned up our Homepage
Our old homepage looked like this:
[caption id=”attachment_843" align=”alignnone” width=”520" caption=”Our old homepage”]
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If you count up the green dots (above), you’ll see we were giving users 13 different options to click on. The problem is, no one takes the time to read through 13 options. Instead, people scan webpages for relevant information.
So we got rid of any unnecessary options and pared it down to the four most important options (below). The result? Clarity and an easy choice for users.
[caption id=”attachment_844" align=”alignnone” width=”520" caption=”Our new homepage”]
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Tip: A keen reader may notice we moved our email sign-up from the right to the left. Since English reader go from left-to-right, a good rule of thumb is to always put the highest priority content on the left.
2. Consistent Call-to-Actions
Each page of our new website has signup call to actions (CTA) on both the header and footer. These CTA’s are always in a consistent place without being overwhelming or disruptive. This way, a user always has the option to sign-up for the newsletter and never needs to search to sign-up.
[caption id=”attachment_837" align=”alignnone” width=”300" caption=”Call to Action on our Header”]
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Call to Action on Footer
3. Made our Sign-Up Form Work For Us
Our old signup page (below) was gross and in need of some serious work.
[caption id=”attachment_845" align=”alignnone” width=”520" caption=”Our old signup page”]
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We made these improvements for our redesign (see below):
- Designed it to be integrated into the website (consistent header and footer)
- We made sure that the people knew what they were getting by:
- Putting an image of a typical newsletter
- Informing the user how often we would email them
- We made our form more responsive and user friendly with some sweet Javascript
The final page looked like this:
[caption id=”attachment_846" align=”alignnone” width=”520" caption=”New Signup Page”]
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Conclusion
Since designing our newsletter sign-up with these three improvements, we’ve seen a big increase in newsletter signups:
- On our old website we averaged 2 signups per week to our email newsletter
- On our new website we’re averaging 20.3 signups per to our email newsletter
This is a 1,000% increase! We were obviously stoked. The key takeaway is this: interested users were always on our website, but by making it easier to sign-up we were able to increase the amount of people getting involved with the good work of UGM.
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Steve Benjamins is a webdesigner for several non-profits across B.C.. You can follow him at @stevebenjamins or email at steve@benjaminsdesign.ca
