Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

Many of you may have hear the term "barriers to entry," it refers of course to how difficult it is for your competition to enter into your area of products or services.

Now I want to change that a little bit and think of your customers. The same way you want a business that is difficult to go into business against, the opposite is true of your customers in what you want them to perform on your web site.

Let's talk about getting customers to sign up for your newsletter. Are you having trouble getting a lot of signups? If you are you need to look at this one, simple reality: the secret to getting signups is to reduce the barrier between the visitor and the submit button. It's that simple, the more barriers, the less signups. Case closed!

I know that there are those out there that say that you should find out everything you can about your visitor while they are signing up for your ezine; but they are dead wrong.

Just yesterday I tried to sign up for something like that and they had so many barriers up for the reason I said, that after 10 minutes, I just gave up and left. They lost a good customer because the things they offered were related to long-term involvement that I was ready and willing to give. Now they won't get my business and I won't go back there again. My time is just too valuable.

The people at Know This did an experiement with their online signup process to correct this mistake themselves, here's what they did and the results:

1. We reduced the number of pages in the subscription process by one.

2. We reduced the amount of data required to sign up, focusing only on vital information (name and email address) and eliminating additional demographic information.

3. We incentivized new subscriptions with a free e-book download.

Here are the results of those changes:

Average Daily Subscriber Growth

Before   10.2

 After    82.5

By making those three easy changes, the number of daily subscibers increased by 711%.

What they did after was to welcome them by email and then offer some additional incentives to motivate them to give away some more information if they at that time wanted to.
 
This is the classic case where less is truly more. While I've known this a long time, I hope the test performed convinces you to do the same. You'll see a dramatic increase in signups.

Bottom line: Web Surfers don't want to be kept waiting, and that's the truth.