2011-01-15dated from the first comment; a lower bound

Double Your Mailing List Growth by Asking Fans to

Published no later than January 15, 2011, dated from the first comment on the original post. Platforms and services described here have changed. This is kept as a record, not as current advice.

This is the second experiment in our “ Data Driven Music Marketing ” series. In our first experiment, we tested which type of button would lead to the most music sales on your website. This month we have run an experiment with the goal of increasing mailing list sign ups. Almost every musician we work with gives away some music to encourage a fan to join their mailing list.

Whether they offer a full song, a remix or an acoustic version, we wanted to test which Call-to-Action encourages most fans to sign up. The Test We use Topspin to power our fan acquisition campaigns, so we used a Topspin Email-For-Download widget as the basis for this experiment. For example, an email-for-media widget looks like this: As you can see, there are two main text elements which could influence the fan’s decision on whether or not to sign up: The Headline - “Free Download of Two Live Songs” The Button - “Download Now” The Options In order to keep the experiment manageable, we decided only to test the “Button” text and to keep the “Headline” consistent.

We took proposals from the Topspin Greenrom (a discussion forum) and arrived at the 5 following options: 1. Download Now 2. Get The MP3s 3. Click Here 4. Enter Your Email 5. Download Free MP3s The Results In this experiment we measured the conversion rate from views -> new subscribers. It didn’t matter if one button got more clicks or even more emails entered, we only counted a conversion when a fan clicked the button, entered their email address AND clicked the confirmation email. For current rights and policy context, see ASCAP.

The results were very impressive and much more varied than we had anticipated. The difference between the worst performing and the best performing buttons was a whopping 69% ! To measure the effectiveness, we first calculated the average conversion rate (which was 1.12% of views lead to a subscription). The worst performing button was “ Enter Your Email” , which resulted in 24% fewer sign ups than the average.

The best performing button was “ Click Here” , which resulted in an impressive 28% more sign ups than the average. Conclusion This experiment, which was run on multiple websites over the month of December, had a cumulative 18,362 views and 206 email sign ups. From this relatively large sample size we are confident to conclude that the average musicians could increase the growth of their mailing list by 25% or more by encouraging fans to “click here” to get a free song.

—####— Notes : The full raw data is available on a shared spreadsheet, showing all the results and calculations. The subscription rate is quite low (1.12%) because we didn’t test many widgets in very prominent placing. Do you have any experiments you’d like us to run? Leave a comment below. We’re looking for more suggestions for our February experiment.