Setting Up your Post-Sign-Up Email System
Last Thursday I described how to encourage site visitors to sign up to your email list. This week I shall describe, your post-sign-up email system, the things you need to prepare once they have signed up.
Confirmation Page
So, someone enters their email address into a form on your webpage. The confirmed opt-in email will appear in their inbox. This might take a few minutes. What should happen is when they press the button, they jump to a confirmation page. You give your email provider the address of the confirmation page. It should not appear in your site’s navigation.
What do you put on it?
- Thank them for signing up.
- Explain they should receive an email requesting them to confirm they wish to be on your email list. Ask them to track it down and follow the link.
- If they can’t find the confirmation email, ask them to check their spam folder and explain some spam systems are very sensitive. If they want to receive your emails the best way to stop them going to the spam folder is to add your email address to their contacts list.
- If you’ve offered them an ebook or a video or whatever, remind them what they’re going to get and tell them it is on the page they reach by clicking the link in the email!
Write the confirmation email
Most email service providers write this for you but you may want to personalise it. Remind them they need to add your address (in the “From” panel at the top of the email) to their contacts list so that emails are not diverted to their spam folder.
Final Confirmation Page
This will feature whatever you have promised in return for signing up. If you have promised an email sequence or something that will arrive later, you will need to explain what will happen on this page.
Don’t forget to remind them of the long-term benefits of remaining on your list and the consequent disadvantage of unsubscribing.
The types of long-term benefits you might offer include
- regular updates when you add posts to your blog – if you post most days it may be best to promise a weekly summary email and not an email every time you post. If you post occasionally, an immediate email should be acceptable.
- A newsletter. This may be an issue for membership organisations that send newsletters to their paid-up members. Whilst you will want substantial benefits for paying members, you also want to build relationships with prospective members. Working out who gets what is an example of the challenge to your established ways of doing things through the Internet. You could issue a shorter version that summarising the members’ newsletter. Or members might get advance notice of meetings or special offers.
- Occasional broadcast emails with the latest news. So, if your organisation organises events, you may promise subscribers will receive advance notice.
- Downloads of pdf, video or audio files.
Connect your blog to your email service
Your email service provider will provide instructions about how to do this. You can set it up to send an email every time you post or else you can send summaries once a week or at whatever frequency you like.