Would Email Marketing Work If Your List Had To Re-Subscribe To Every Email?

A question to Marketers:  How successful would you be with email marketing if you asked your subscribers, on every email and before they could read the message, to re-subscribe to your list?

“Thank you for opening this email, however before you can read it I need to ask the following of you:

Please go to this webpage and fill out your name, email, title, company name, size of company, industry, whether you are the buyer, how long before you are ready to buy (although I understand you may not know exactly what I’m selling), size of company, and a few other questions.

I understand we may be asking a lot of you and unfortunately I’m going to ask you to do this every time we send an email… but at least you will have the privilege of reading my message!”

Is it me or would this be marketing suicide?

So why do you continue to do it with your webcasts/webinars?

This morning I received a half-dozen email invites to attend upcoming webcasts. I found four of them interesting and decide to register.  Exactly two of these events were using one webinar provider and the other two using a competing solution.  While registering for the third event my frustration snapped. Not only because I’ve previously provided my details to the ‘host‘ of the third webinar - but I HAVE PROVIDED THE SAME DETAILS TO BOTH WEBINAR PROVIDERS HUNDREDS OF TIMES IN THE LAST 8 YEARS!

Back in 2005, while I was with WebEx I had this same frustration. I was teaching clients how to clone the same registration form event after event. I then designed a ‘web event marketplace’ that would solve this problem. However, the project was killed after WebEx was acquired by Cisco. While this is not a new frustration - it has clearly never died and I had hoped the market would force change.

As a webcast host and attendee, I find myself in a dozen+ virtual events every month.  That’s 144 times a year that I’m having to fill out registration data. Would you use twitter if you had to re-register every time you wanted to ‘follow’ someone? Or would you find value in Facebook if you had to re-register every time you wanted to add a friend? Or better yet, would you re-create a new profile for every connection on LinkedIn so they have your virtual CV updated. Of course not!

So why are we tolerant with forcing our community to re-register for every event? Isn’t it hard enough to get people to attend your webcasts?  Don’t you and your team put a tremendous amount of effort into preparing, promoting, and executing an event? Of course you do!  So stop forcing me, your audience, to jump through the same hoop at every event.

Unfortunately, at this point I wish I had a number of alternatives to suggest - but I don’t. I only know of one provider that offers single sign-on for any event on their platform. But I can’t understand  why we don’t have single sign-on with ALL webcast providers.

The major providers continue to force me to re-register for every event and I’m done. I’m sorry if I don’t attend your future events, but I hope you understand it’s not from your lack of preparation or quality of content.  It’s your provider who is failing to understand I shouldn’t have fill out the same form four times in one day or 144 times in a year.

Disclosure: I WORK FOR BRIGHTTALK, a competing Webcasting Platform. But that doesn’t take away from my continued frustration as an attendee to online events.  I just don’t understand why marketers continue to force their audience to complete this chore and I know they wouldn’t even think about doing it with e-marketing. So if you are a marketer - please explain why it is OK for your online events. I’m always up for learning something new.