Every now and then we like to show examples of good and not so good email marketing practices and today we thought since Ke$ha was trending in search we’d try to sign up for a fan newsletter.
We had to look a bit but we did find a signup form at the very top of the page, in a tiny tiny font. Now this site is like walking into a club. It’s dark, there’s video going on. Just seems like email isn’t a big part of their priorities.
So I go to sign up for the newsletter and I’m shown this very formidable form to enter my information into.
They are one of the early adopters of SMS messaging. If I enter my mobile number here I can expect to spend money when they text me!
They use the check box off for the select partners option. Good move.
They segment the list by country. Good news for concert 
promotion.
They ask for email address. Aside from attempting to verify age (over 16) they have a chance to send a Ke$ha to Mitch birthday message. I won’t hold my breath though.
There is however one thing on this form which irked me . . . a lot. I couldn’t successfully fill it in. Now I fill in forms constantly. I am pretty sure I know how to fill in a form. This form eluded me. Between email addresses not matching and the captia form not accepting my entries, I basically lost patience and moved on with my life. The lesson here is not, Mitch is an idiot, the message is, take some time to test and make sure your form is as simple to fill in as possible. Each check box, each entry, each feature slowly reduces the number of people who will potentially sign up.
The Times, They Are A Changing.
I suspect Ke$ha’s demographic is a bit younger generation. The group that grew up texting and Facebooking and MySpacing. I see she has it covered.
These days it’s not enough any more to just have a newsletter, I think you need to have all your channels covered. The best performers make sure there is synergy between them all. Email feeds YouTube, YouTube gives you something to Tweet about and so on.
Finally . . .
Right under the video screen I see a big old iContact ad.
I love iContact and use it for many of my client’s accounts but I’d be surprised as heck to find that the Ke$ha demographic matches well with the iContact demographic.
So while it’s cool to rotate a few ads though the site, (next ad I saw was for a bank) I would use this real estate to make a bigger deal about signing up for the newsletter.
Do the math. What’s more valuable to you?
A few clicks through to a third party media buy ad OR a few (perhaps more than that with the traffic this site must be getting) newsletter subscribers that you can run contests with, invite to events or promote fan merchandise?
Me? I’ll take the signups every time.
Overall I’d say they did ok with their email marketing strategy.
They did kick Lady Gaga’s butt, which we reviewed earlier.
We can review your email marketing efforts too. See below.