If all your subscribers come from one signup form, then it is easy for you to write a clear permission reminder for your email, letting them know how they got on the list. On the other hand, if you have several subscribe forms, or you sign people up offline as well as through your site, it can be difficult to know where a particular email address came from.
A simple way of keeping track is to add a custom field to your list, and use that field to store the source of the subscriber.
-
Add a custom field to your subscriber list called “source” (or something similar).
-
Head into Create a subscribe form and make sure you select the new “source” custom field to be included. Save your changes and copy the supplied code for your subscribe form.
- Add the subscribe code to your site, but change the text for the source field from
input type="text”toinput type="hidden”. - Place this code wherever you need it. You’ll want to fill in the value according to where the form is. For example, the front page could use
value="frontpage”and the contact page could bevalue="contactpage”.
Now every time someone completes the form, that hidden value will also be added to their record. When you manually add subscribers from your offline list, you can enter in an appropriate value for the source, like ‘in store’ for example. You can have as many different values as you need. Just make sure you use the same value for people from the same source.
Now you have the data, you can refer back to it if someone ever disputes signing up, which is very useful. You can also start to segment your list based on the source, and offer your physical store customers special deals, or offer web only deals to the site visitors.
