More signups without the name field

For about a month or so we’ve had one of those annoying boxes that pops up on the page and asks if you want to sign up for our newsletter over at Børn i byen. It’s annoying, but it works like a charm – gets us about 10 new subscribers a day, and if you click the “Box go away” link, it won’t show up for another 10 days or so, so it’s not overly intrusive.

Now, it’s good to have the name of your subscribers as well, right, so you can personalize your mailings? Well, when we added a name field to the box, signups dropped to about 3 a day. That’s cutting it down to a third!

After a week of testing that, we switched back to email-only, and things are now back to on average 10 signups per day.

I was reminded of this story when Ryan Deiss wrote about his experiences with email-only signup here. Our numbers are much more staggering than his. 5-8% isn’t bad, but 200% is even better.

Another tid-bit from our experience is that initially we offered 4 free movie tickets with every signup. When we ran out of tickets after about 20 signups, we replaced the text with one that just stated what we’d cover in the newsletter, with no special signup gifts. And much to our surprise, the signup numbers remained completely unchanged.