I am a huge advocate of deliberate, meaningful messaging in marketing. Clarity goes a long way to establish a relationship. Building a relationship with your subscribers is a sequential, progressive process; a process in which each of you must make and keep certain commitments.
Why it’s important to make and keep commitments
The point is that you want to help interested people engage with you and take certain steps. Whether you run a for profit membership website, an ecommerce store, a non-profit or support a political cause, you want people to make donations, purchase products and spread the word. In most of these scenarios, the best first step is to get them to subscribe to your email list.
There’s some powerful psychology involved in the subscription process. In the first place you make a promise to give something of interest. They take a risk that you’re not a scammer or a spammer and give you an email address. The email subscription process is your chance to deliver on that promise and establish trust.
When you make and keep commitments to your subscribers, it becomes easier for them to trust you when you ask them to take bigger steps, like making a donation or buying a membership.
Thank You Pages
The Thank You page is central to the optin process. All email service providers, of which I’m aware, allow you to identify a Thank You page where the subscriber is sent after confirming his or her email address. Many even allow you to send the subscriber to a custom page after subscribing but before they confirm. This gives you two chances to deliver on the promise you made and to build confidence in your subscriber that when they complete certain actions for you, they will be rewarded immediately.
Remember that the visitor who ended up at your site has only had a few seconds or minutes of exposure to you and your site. You have spent hours, days, weeks and maybe even months thinking about what you want that visitor to do. If they optin and find themselves on a generic email service provider website telling them to confirm their email address, that can be very confusing! Many consumers still don’t understand what an email service provider is. They may feel like they got tricked into signing up for something other than your email list.
Simplicity and clarity are important on Thank You pages. When you craft deliberate messaging and always bring the user back to your website and deliver immediately on the promises you make, the end result is trust. When trust is present, you will find it easier to help subscribers take future steps toward bigger actions that will benefit both you and your subscribers.
