by wadem

This is one of those moments when a blogger gets attention he deserves.  Ryan Deiss at DrivingTraffic.com conducts a split test by doing away with the name field from auto responder form.

After removing the field, he saw 5-8% (depending on the site) increaes in opt-in.

Normally, auto responder forms are created with at least both the “name” and “email” fields.  After seeing other websites such as Motley Fool using no name field for newsletter, Ryan decided to test it to see if it’d increase sign up rate for his sites.  It sure did — it’s one less thing for visitors to fill out and one less privacy being given away while visiting your site.  How often do you get opt-in names with subscribers only giving you their first name initials instead of their real names?  I get it all the time.

But let me point out something important.  I said earlier that Ryan’s post deserves attention.  Why is Ryan’s blog post so significant?  It’s worth bookmarking because Ryan successfully builds a case by doing against what is being accepted conventionally.

Back in the day when Cory Rudl was the top of the game, I remember him teaching “personalized email” strategy, that was to use customization feature in auto responder and make it look like you “personally write” every email addressing the recipient’s name.  However, today in 2008, people know that you’re no longer sending an email personalized and it’s just a part of your auto responder message feature.  So this may no longer effect any impact.

I should also implement this in my future campaign.  It’s kind of late for me to go back and redo the entire follow up series for existing lists and it gets confusing so I’ll leave those as they are, but for my future project, I’ll definitely implement this.

I wonder why I haven’t come across anyone else mentioning this yet.  What Ryan proved was certainly not a rocket science, yet I am surprised that I haven’t heard seen anyone challenging this wisdom.   It just shows that there are so many ways to make your blog posts interesting.

I really liked what I read.  Another nice split test done by Ryan Deiss.