Hi Petr.

I cannot recall the exact article which said that subscription rates are higher. If I remember right, most of the research on this topic suggests rates are higher because you are requesting more information from people.

Kevin

I am exactly at the point when I am considering to ask the name in the subscription form. Well, for this reason I have found your article in Google :)

One question – as you used to ask the subscriber’s name and now your readers can subscribe without entering it, do you have some numbers which would confirm the hypothesis that the subscription rate increases when we do not require the name?

haha I never thought of it that way. Use it as a way of finding the troublemakers!!!

Apparently, many people prefer to see their name and open rates are supposed to be higher. This blog is different. Everyone who reads this blog is pretty savvy with computers and knows how email newsletters work. I’m sure huge companies such as barnes and noble will see a big difference from using the name field. For smaller blogs like this, I’m not so sure.

Hi Karen,

I’m glad you found my blog. Kudos to Tiffany :)

If you’ve been using the name field for a long time, it could be worth keeping things as they are. I was creating a list for this blog from scratch (again) so it was something I had to think about. You’ll always find people who enter dummy names into the name field. The thing is, are these people who actually wanted to subscribe or just people who wanted a free ebook? I’m not sure.

If you’re doing a redesign, you may want to look over the situation again. I don’t think it’s bad if you go either way. There are few studies on this and the ones there are seem to lean towards using the name field. To me it’s a little silly as you’re only using the name they provided.

I’m still not 100% sure of the issue. If someone could inform me conclusively that using a name field was better, I’d be happy to add it back.

Kevin

(Seriously).

I also like to have it if there’s a problem with anyone so I know who’s being a troublemaker.

But I personally like seeing “Hi Tiffany” rather than “Hey Guys” and I don’t know why. I know it’s a mass email but it looks better to me.

I found your blog through Tiffany Dow :)

Very interesting discussion. I don’t personalise my email subject lines, because I find it annoying myself to see that in my inbox. However I do start my emails with “Hi [name]”.

I’ve just had a brief look through my subscribers in Aweber and some of them have set the Name field to the name of my newsletter, I guess so they can easily track anything they feel is spam. And a good proportion haven’t entered anything for the name field (I didn’t make it mandatory on my signup form.)

I’m going to have a rethink about my email salutations. Thanks for giving me a nudge!

Karen :)

Glad you got it. Good luck :)

In each you will find a photoshop image and 7 folders. Each folder contains an images folder, a preview image and an instructions text file. All the text you need to use is in the instructions file (including HTML and CSS).

:)

The forms can be adapted to any provider. You just need to change the form details a little to accommodate it. If you play around with it, you should be able to get it working.

Hi Maria,

No they are hard coded. I created a widget area for underneath the post area. I then created widgets using HTML and placed them in the sidebar and underneath the post.

Here’s a good article that lists 7 newsletter forms: 7 Custom Aweber Email Signup Forms. All you have to do is copy the HTML and images onto your website correctly.