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.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.