Where are my email subscribers coming from?

A simple email marketing tip from The eMail Guide.

Many people ask…

Where are my email subscribers coming from?

Great question.

Is it Google, Adwords, Organic Search, Affiliate Programs, Email Signatures, Banner Ads, Text Ads?

I just read and interesting post buy Mathew Patterson on the Campaign Monitor Blog.

Quick tip: Recording the source of your subscribers -
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2830/quick-tip-recording-the-source-of-your-subscribers/

It talked about adding a hidden field called “source” so that you could track where your subscribers are coming in your online subscription forms. By doing this you can now determine what is the best source for your leads. (tracking at it’s finest)

One of the things that we have always done at The eMail Company is to add  these extra fields and more to help verify the permission process. If anyone ever asks where we got their name we could look it up and see that we collected :

The URL
The Referring URL
The IP address
The date & time stamp of the submission of the form
The browser type and OS

The value behind collecting the URL and the Referring URL is that you can now see where your submission are coming from. This shows me the page the subscriber submitted the form on and the page they were on before they submitted the form.

What I learn from that is if the submission is from a real person or a spammer / bot / script is stuffing my form. This is really handy when running contests – you can now see if someone is trying to cheat the system – also, the Referring URL lets you know the true lead source of your submission.

Here’s some sample code you  we use in our form submissions:

 <table cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=500 align=Center border=0>

<p id="IP_lab" style='font-family:Verdana;font-size:8pt;color:#000000'>

<input type=hidden name='IP' size=20 value=''>

<input type=hidden value='null'>

<input type=hidden value="">

<p id="URL_lab" style='font-family:Verdana;font-size:8pt;color:#000000'>

<input type=hidden name='URL' size=20 value=''>

<input type=hidden value='null'>

<input type=hidden value="">

<p id="Referring_URL_lab" style='font-family:Verdana;font-size:8pt;color:#000000'>

<input type=hidden name='Referring_URL' size=20 value=''>

<input type=hidden value='null'>

<input type=hidden value="">

<p id="Browser_Type_lab" style='font-family:Verdana;font-size:8pt;color:#000000'>

<input type=hidden name='Browser_Type' size=20 value=''>

<input type=hidden value='null'>

<input type=hidden value="">

Do you know of any great resources for tips and tricks. Let us know and we can help you post them here @ The eMail Guide