Website Design Guideline #3: Building Relationships with Email Capture

ARTICLE SNIPPET - Website Success Depends Largely on Providing an Incentive—i.e., a Free Email Newsletter—to Encourage Visitor Registration and an Email Address

Usability and design are two key factors in publishing great websites. You may have a clear strategy and great content, but if your site is unusable and unattractive, it will be difficult for users to find what they're looking for, difficult for you to get users to do what you want them to do and difficult to get users to become loyal customers and revisit again and again.

Creating user-friendly websites begins by following the 14 Mequoda Website Design Guidelines for successful website design. By reviewing a site's score for each of the 14 items, along with the overall average score, the areas of the site that operate well, and those that need work, become evident.

In this chapter of Website Design for Publishers and Authors, we take a close look at Guideline #3: Building Relationships with Email Capture.

• Acquiring email addresses is the first step toward creating lasting relationships with site visitors.
• If a website does not attempt to capture the visitor's email address, the individual may never revisit and the relationship is lost.
• A detailed description of the free email newsletter, and its benefits, should appear in a "can't miss" space on the homepage.
• In addition to signing up for the free email newsletter, a site may offer access to blogs, RSS feeds, tools, favorites and other special content if the visitor signs up with a username and password.
• The ultimate goal, of course, is to escalate the messages to revenue-producing product offers.

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