22% of marketers surveyed by Experian Marketing Services say they use pop-up windows on their website to collect email addresses, with the majority only showing them to new visitors. The Experian study [download page], which examines a range of email subscriber acquisition and engagement tactics, finds that the most common ways of capturing email addresses on websites (excluding checkout) are on a dedicated email page (58%) and on the home page (56%), with fewer doing so in the header (15%) or footer (38%).
Overall, 58% of marketers estimated that they acquire 25% or less of their email addresses from their website. 21% said that more than three-quarters of their addresses come from their website, with the remaining 21% projecting somewhere in the range of 26-75%.
Roughly three-quarters of the respondents don’t collect any data from subscribers in addition to their email addresses. The most popular pieces of data collected are first (75%) and last (73%) name, followed by ZIP code (57%), country (35%), date of birth (34%), and full mailing address (32%). Interestingly, while 30% collect a phone number, only half that proportion collect a mobile phone number.
About 3 in 10 respondents said they don’t make any field other than email mandatory. The most common mandatory fields follow a similar pattern as to the most popular collected fields.
7 in 10 Collect Input Via Surveys
Many marketers are leveraging surveys to collect input from customers, according to the study, most commonly supporting post purchase (50%), customer service (46%) and online experience (43%) surveys within email. Roughly 6 in 10 do not offer any incentives for completing the survey, but completion rates are fairly healthy: 38% say that their completion rate exceeds 10%.
About the Data: The Experian survey respondents come from 8 verticals. 49% are retailers, with consumer products and services brands the next most highly represented (19%).
