The Email Wars

As a massive fan of email subscription and preference centers when it comes to email marketing I think that I stumbled on to the Holy Grail of email opt in pages. I was both amazed at the depth of this WSJ email opt in page while at the same time floored at the complexity and breadth of what they had to present. I had no idea that they published so many different versions of daily, weekly and unique emails until I stumbled upon this one. Now after scanning and trying to decide what I really wanted to get I dove deeper into all of the levels of complexity they made public facing.

My hat is off to whomever is managing all of these and my hopes is that they are using a content management system that automates the production of all of these choices. I mean for those of you that publish just one or a few emails you can imagine how many Full Time Employees it would take to pull this off.

If you take some time to look at some of the screen shots I made you can really gain some respect for the time and thought that they have put into this page. It goes to show me that email is a major driver of visits and engagement for them as well as I would assume a revenue generator in the ad sales for the paper in this electronic age where we are gathering more of our news from online than offline.

One of the things I wanted to call out was that they clearly present not only the text and html preferences but also the frequency and days of the week you can expect to get these emails. Win Win for them and for the subscriber here. One draw back is I had to make some changes to the ones I was subscribing to as I thought I might have too many on certain days. But on the flip side of that thought it was really nice to be able to make those decisions. I would assume that even with me opting in to 7 different editions that I would be happy with my selections and have better understanding of when they would arrive in my inbox.

On top of that if you dive in deeper you will notice that they are also VERY clear about helping you to make the right version selections if you are reading them on a mobile device. The thought that went into this email subscription/preference page is so inspiring that I almost want to go work for them for a week and see behind the curtain as to how they pull all of this off and manage all that data.

Bringing back down to earth now it makes me wonder why more people are not taking the time to create email preference centers that work as well as this one does. Sure you might only have one or two email marketing programs in place but could you do better by clearly presenting how it is all going to work and helping to explain to your subscribers some benefits they might have by selecting different versions from a simple Text vs HTML preference? Think about what you can do to make life easier for your subscribers. It will pay off in spades.