Retail Email Subscription Benchmark Study

When it comes to their newsletters, retailers largely fall into two camps: those that make the sign-up process as quick and painless as possible, and those making it rich and personalized. That was the chief finding of RetailEmail.Blogspot’s Retail Email Subscription Benchmark Study, which looks at current trends and best practices surrounding the newsletter subscription practices of 101 of the top online retailers.

Half of the top retailers offered one-click sign up for their newsletters, allowing people to sign up on their homepages by entering their email address in a field and clicking a “sign up” or “submit” button. It doesn’t get any more pain-free than that.

The second group, representing 24% of the retailers in the study, went for personalization, offering subscribers more than one newsletter or product focus from which to choose. In fact, these retailers offered an average of 9.5 different newsletters or product focuses to choose from. Barnes & Noble had the widest selection, offering 24 newsletters on a variety of subjects.

Unfortunately, there was also a third group of retailers, the 26% that made signing up for their newsletters cumbersome or intrusive. This group includes the 13% of the top retailers that require subscribers to create an account in order to sign up for their newsletters. It also includes the 6% that required the subscriber’s mailing address and the 4% that required their phone number—both pieces of sensitive information that many people aren’t comfortable giving out just to receive an email newsletter. These retailers risked not only losing potential newsletter subscribers but also hurting their brand reputations.

Other key findings from the study, which looked at the subscription practices between June 13 and 21, include:

· 27% of the top retailers offered subscribers some kind of incentive to subscribe or a reward for subscribing.

· Beyond the person’s email address, retailers most often required the person’s name (31%) and zip code (23%) to complete the sign up. All other pieces of personal information were required by less than 10% of retailers.

· 24% of retailers asked subscribers to confirm their email address by entering it in a second field at the time of sign up.

· 11% of retailers in the study didn’t have a sign-up field or button on their homepage.

· 13% of retailers had not sent their first email within three weeks of the subscription date. At the time of publication, most still hadn’t. Given the lapse of time, it’s possible that the sign-up processes failed at these retailers.

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