The Email Wars

This week I was over on the Washington Post site to read an article that I was pointed to from Twitter (one of the best things about Twitter is the link sharing of relevant articles) and noticed a great new call out on the top left corner for newsletter sign up. Of course being a email marketing student (in the slant of I learn and search for new things each day) I was excited to see them dedicate such prime real estate to the opt in when typically portals like this focus just on the ad placement. So figuring that this was one of the last remaining lists I might not be on, I clicked through to sign up for some emails to keep me in the loop.

Simply enough right?

Well no. What happened was a major let down to me. They wanted me to create an account. Last thing I checked I was just signing up for some newsletters to come to my inbox and not thinking I needed a full blown account to do so. Quite a disconnect IMHO. Well one good thing they had going on was using Facebook Connect to log me in. But yet this did not solve the problem of signing up for the newsletters. It was only to log me in temporarily into the site. Although I am a BIG fan of using Facebook Connect for the log in ability (we use it on many eROI client sites now) it did not close the loop of getting me registered for newsletters.

These are two different beasts and they lost me here. Now being someone that lives in this world I would assume that the average user would be even more confused as to why they had to jump through so many hoops by taking so many steps just to opt in. My point of sharing this example with you is that you need to be clear when you set expectations from a call out to opt in. Give them the experience that they know and expect or you will lose the conversion to your goal.

As for me, I guess I will just opt for the RSS feed into my mailbox and check things as I remember to. I will be checking back in to see if they make changes to this later on as I hope that they are paying attention to conversions down this critical path.