This fashion brand wanted to increase sign-ups for their email marketing campaigns. Since email marketing can give a significantly better ROI than other channels, getting more customers on the email marketing list could potentially benefit the business significantly.
And in order to do that, we needed to encourage more customers to consent to receive the brand’s marketing emails.
Our previous experiments on increasing email sign-ups before checkout had been successful, and we used the lessons from those to try and optimise email opt-ins at the time of creating an account on the website.
Form analysis showed that this brand’s customers often chose to opt out of emails at the time of creating an account. Customer research and surveys showed us that they didn’t think emails from the brand would have any value and expected to be bombarded with potentially irrelevant spam emails.
This indicated that the existing micro-copy around email opt-in did not do a good job of telling users about the benefits of choosing to receive emails from the brand.
Hypothesis and Psychological Technique Applied
We believed that by increasing the visual fluency of the email opt-in section on the form and making the micro-copy benefit-oriented, we would be able to simplify the section and make it easier for users to decide whether to opt in or not.
If we used copy that clarified what the user would and would not get, we would be able to show them the benefits of opting in as well as assure them that they won’t receive spam.
We hypothesised that framing the benefits in a way that would generate a bit of FOMO (fear of missing out) among users would increase the likelihood of them agreeing to receive emails from the brand.
Experiment
We made the email opt-in element stand out by adding a speech bubble around it and reduced the chunky but unhelpful micro-copy to this: Tick this box to receive exclusive offers & promotions | Only great offers, absolutely no spam.
We also made it a two-step opt-in, wherein users who ticked the checkbox would be asked if they wanted the promotions via email only or email and mobile.
Variation for the two-step opt-in.
Results
From the observed data, we were able to see that the Variation showed a high probability of being better than the Control on both Desktop and Mobile.
Email opt-ins increased significantly (over 5,000 opt-ins in 3 weeks), and interestingly, we also saw a slight increase in conversion rates.
Learnings
If you assure your users of the value of an action, they are more likely to perform that action.
This experience actually exceeded our expectations by also increasing conversion rates, albeit slightly.
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