Getting newsletter signups?

[acherelief]

Well my new website is up and running and taking orders but no-one is signing up for my ezine. I have a sign up form on my front page at www.ache-relief.co.uk but possibly due to adwords sending customers direct to product pages maybe people aren't seeing it.
Anyone know the easiest way of getting customers to positively opt in for email communication during the check out stage?

Many thanks

[DavidGeran]

Not a solution, but...

We have two online shops, one running on Actinic Business v6 and one running on (please don't kick me off the group), . This forum automatically deletes the title of the software, very funny!

With the non-Actinic option, customers are automatically added to our newsletter subscription unless they explicity opt out - not sure how this can be done in Actinic because it has no online customer account management to speak of - its greatest failing.

[acherelief]

I was under the impression that nowadays you had to get explicit permission to send marketing emails to customers, hence I'm wanting to get customers to actively say yes to receiving emails rather than them opting out.
I could however be completely wrong so if anyone can point me in the right direction i would be very grateful.

[cdicken]

How are you with sendmail forms? You could put a little sign-up form into your overall layout template (Act_Primary).

[the_bfb]

Marketing online

If a customer has previously bought from you or used your services and you are sending them related information, you can do, provided you give them the option of not receiving anything from you again.

You must have a 'relationship' with that customer though.

I use an online e-mail newsletter system which I think is ace called constantcontact and I add all new customers weekly to the mailing list. Once they get their first newsletter, the software then lets them opt out.

Regards

[acherelief]

Thats Ok then, if there is no problem emailing them once they are an established customer. I'm set up with ezezine.com to automate the emailing of a newsletter although i havn't tried it yet and I can easily manually add customers email addresses to it.

Thanks for everyones contributions

[oldhasbeen]

Mailing List

We use one of Actinic's own in built messages on check out. I'm not sure which template it's in (but could find out - we did this a couple of years ago!) - it's the one about "keep contact private" - I think it relates to whether or not the customer agrees to you passing on their details to other companies.

On the website, we've changed the text to "Click here if you'd like to join our opt-in mailing list and receive details blah...blah... blah" with the check box defaulted to off. I guess you can't change the text in Actinic itself, but hey, it works for us.

When a customer checks the box, on our reports we get the message (under the name and address details) - Keep contact private? YES. Thus the customer has read the text on the site and wants to join mailing list. If there is no message at all, they don't (shame on them!).

Not a fully automated solution (we also get people joining directly from our mailing list form which links from the homepage which can be automatically picked up by software like Group Mail, but we also get people emailing and asking on the telephone and in person too!).

But it's a way of getting that information on check-out. Plus you also have the additional information relating to that customer if you want to enter it into your mailing list software (which my mailing software doesn't pick up).

I manage our mailing list manually because we have so many different avenues that people want to join by - to some a bit long winded, but it gives me a good idea of what's what and who'se who (and our mailing list now runs into the thousands - takes about half an hour a week to keep on top of, so it isn't insurmountable).

Hope that might help - even if you do go onto a more integrated solution in the future, this might be a starting point.

Regards

Helen
www.calicocrafts.co.uk

[Jan]

I'm don't think that you can email people just because they have shopped with you - in fact I am pretty sure that you can't. You need to get their permission, they need to tick a box rather than accept a default. I'm not sure how this applies to long established customers though.

You can switch on the option to ask customers to for permission to email in design/text, the prompt in question is on the the 'web site (cont)' tab, on the invoice sub tab, the id is phase 0 ID 15 and it starts with the text 'Occasionally we share ...'. You have to tick the show box to have it shown to the customer and then you change the text to anything you like.

But this will only add customers to your list, so I would recommed taking a look at Chris's idea of adding an email signup form for to your primary template (or even just a link that takes you to your signup form page) so that you can encourage people to join that haven't shopped yet.

We have a product that helps transfer customer details from Actinic to Email marketing tools, take at look at the URL below for more details and a free trial :

http://www.mole-end.biz/acatalog/One...Marketing.html

Regards,

[garyhay]

You would also need to produce a custom P3P policy as it clearly states on the Terms and Conditions > Privacy tab inside Actinic that none of the policies Actinic adds are useable for e-mail marketing.