Email and Newsletter Subscriptions

[Carla the Moose]

I'm adding an email subscription sign-up box to my sidebar. I also want to sign people up for my monthly newsletter. How do you handle this on your website? Do you have two separate boxes for this, or do you collect emails via email subscription sign-ups and mention they're also signing up for your monthly newsletter?

I usually see one or the other on websites, but I haven't noticed people including both sign-up options. I was thinking of placing two sign up boxes side by side below each post. But again, I usually only see one sign up, not both. So how do you feel I should handle this so it's tasteful and clear that these are different sign ups?

Should I just offer a single email subscription sign up, mention the newsletter and make it clear it's a double sign-up, and grab those emails for the monthly newsletter as needed?

Thanks!

[essaysnark]

I'd do it one of two ways:

- Either the latter option you asked about, where you have one sign-up and put people on both lists, and just be clear about it and tell them they can unsubscribe from either/both at any time. However, I know nothing about the spam laws so I don't know if it's a no-no to do this.

OR

- Have 2 signups but style each of them so differently that they look like very different things. They're essentially different "products" so treating them as such visually should communicate that to your audience. If the subscription one is an RSS feed then just call it that and use a plain "enter email here" type input. Make the monthly newsletter fancier and place it more prominently on the site, maybe put it inside a colored box, and include a more direct call-to-action message on it. Or vice versa, depending on which signups are more valuable in your business model (my gut reaction is that the monthly newsletter would be the more important one but I don't know why I thought that).

[Carla the Moose]

Thanks for your response. I think it's probably more common to create two separate sign-ups, like you suggested, and make it clear what they're for. So I'll add a prominent newsletter sign-up box in my sidebar and then put the RSS sign-up box elsewhere.

🙂

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