A Quick Marketing Lesson from Social7 to Remember on Your Resort’s Next Form

With the new site finally up, I’ve directed some of my non-blogging time back toward Social7. Now, I’ll have some new stuff to roll out soon in that regard, but in the meantime, let me share with you a little marketing lesson I am (re)learning as I do.

Form Optimization
I want you to guess which two days are chosen by Social7 subscribers more than any others to receive their weekly emails. I’m serious, take a quick guess. When I first got it up and running, I expected Friday to be the big day (hint: I was wrong).

The correct answer is Monday and Thursday. More than 60% of all emails are scheduled to be delivered on Monday and Thursday. So, noticing a trend, you may start to speculate, “Monday makes sense, start the week with some new ideas and data. But Thursday? Maybe that’s a slow day for marketers and they’d prefer to get it then so they don’t miss a single tidbit from the email’s life-changing contents?

Actually, the reason is really, really simple…and obvious.

Guiding Choice
The system I use to send the emails allows me to push out 200 messages a day through their API unless I want to pay. I don’t. When I launched Social7, I noticed that almost everyone was choosing Monday for the delivery day. I wondered how I was going to keep within the API limits and spread out deliveries while still giving users a choice.

So, i tried a little experiement, I changed the default day on the form from Monday to Thursday. Since then, 90% of new users have chosen Thursday for the delivery date.

Don’t you feel manipulated, used, abused? Don’t, I really didn’t expect it to work but, because it does, it helps my little script handle the daily load much better. So thank you for playing along.

A Quick Check
But the lesson is both interesting and obvious, don’t you think? I’d recommend a quick check today of the forms within your marketing system. Things like:

• Is the default for “receive email updates” on your e-store defaulted to checked or unchecked?
• Does your vacation date chooser populate the second field 1 day after the first day picked or longer like 3 or 5 days? (would love to split test this)
• Do delivery/pickup options for passes default to your preferred method?

You do have to be a little careful with this, your lawyers might night like it if the “agree to terms…” box is defaulted to checked or if your users find an extra $20 fee on the checkout screen they didn’t expect, you could be getting some angry emails, but the principle does have some solid uses. It’s a funny little thing that might not make a huge difference, but every little bit helps.