June 2002

Email Technique
Ezine Signup Testing

Now that I've got lots of good websites in place that are catching Internet traffic, I'm starting to put more effort into tracking the effectiveness of things that I do.

For instance, when I put a pop up box on http://www.public-speaking.org I noticed an immediate increase in ezine subscribers. What I was not able to determine with accuracy was whether an entry pop up or an exit pop up was better. It just took too much watching and counting to suit me. The answers I would get would be rough at best and maybe not even good enough to help me make decisions.

The same thing is happening to me in my pay per click search engine efforts. Yes, I can assure you it's effective, but no I don't know exactly how effective. And I'm absolutely positive that I'm wasting money on certain keywords, but again I can't tell you which ones. (I'm doing something about this and will report later how it worked out).

I read an article by a person who I occasionally use as a consultant, Brian Alt. Brian was talking about different ways to track the effectiveness of each of your signup areas for your ezine. Since I use a list management company, I was very interested in how this would work because the list management company provides the signup form that I put on my websites and in my pop up boxes.

I will be working on this very issue this month, but I thought I'd give you a jump start in case you want to start working on it too.

When you know which signup area is getting the most signups you can attempt to duplicate it at other places in your site. You can also take a form on the left side of the page and track it to see if moving it to the right side of the page gets more signups.

MASTER SUBSCRIBER PRO

This is a cgi script produced by the same guy that I got my recommend form from. This script allows you to key each signup area of your website to see which ones are getting the most subscribers. You will most likely need to get help on the installation because it requires access to your cgi bin on your web server. It's most likely something you don't want to mess with. Get the guy from subscriberpro to do it for you. He's fairly inexpensive.

http://willmaster.com/master/subscriberpro/ Check this out thoroughly before you buy because it requires a certain type of web server to run on.

PRO LINKZ

This is another script you would have to get installed before you begin using it. Pro Links lets you put tracking links in many different areas of your site. There are many ways to use this script which are explained beautifully at their site.

http://www.prolinkz.com/

STATISTICS PROGRAMS

You can also use some of the better statistics programs to track specific areas of your website. Stats packages like WebTrends http://www.webtrends.com let you pick what areas of your site you want to track.

FORMS

You can also install a simple form in your signup area that emails the subscription to the list management company and collects the signups on a certain page on your website or emails them to you. If you have multiple signup areas you would collect the signups on different pages so that you could count them later and compare which signup areas get the most subscribers.

IT MUST FORWARD THE SUBSCRIPTION

The important part about this entire thing is to be sure whatever you use will still forward the subscriber to your list management company. Most good list management companies have an email subscribe option. Behind the scenes your signup form or tracking link must send the subscription on to the list management company normally via email. Get with your list management company to find out the email address they assign that subscribes people to your list.

Upcoming topics for this section:

• Email strategy

• HTML email

• Smart Email

• Plain Text Email 

• Link tricks

• Getting subscribers fast

• Getting content fast

• How to make money with your zine

• How to gain clout with your zine

• How to maximize the signups on your website

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