[tweetmeme source=”getintheinbox” only_single=false]Recently I received an email the day after someone accepted my invite to Linkedin. This is great and possibly the only example I’ve ever seen when this worked, this was most likely down to the expertise of the bloke who implemented it…

It was a nice soft welcome email, suggesting I sign-up for a newsletter. I clicked through to the signup form, there was a lot of text on it. While I was reading the text the page went grey and a light box popped up asking me to sign-up for the newsletter.

When I got the email I was reminded of a giant bollocking someone got from John Caldwell and many others, including me, who added Linkedin Contacts to a list and sent them an email inviting them to a newsletter with one click.
This guy got properly ruined, it was awesome: RedPill Email was where the main forum ended up from Linkedin but there are also blogs from Word to the Wise and Al Iverson.

I believe the email they got was pretty poor and very salesy. The email I got was well written with a very welcoming and thankfull attitude with the newsletter sign-up as an obvious call to action but the copy had already won enough attention. Also seeing as the person in question was already a trusted source in email & content it was easier to click through than be offended.

However, I can’t help but compare the two.

I believe the reason why I accepted this email was due to the short time between connecting with the person and receiving the email. The momentum of engagement was still very warm, so there was more leeway and was more likely to want to further engage and stay in the zone, had this email got to me in two months, the engagement would have been less and so would be the rapport.

Once I clicked through I found the sign-up page was a bit too wordy for my attention-span and as I was working my way down the page I got hit with a lightbox asking me to sign-up for the newsletter. So while I was on the the newsletter form’s page reading about the benefits of signing-up I was interrupted with a call to sign-up for the newsletter.

I did not enjoy this and have not signed up.

I do believe that this was most likely an oversight, although I will be more than happy to be proven wrong if the lightbox on that page made a positive the difference in conversions.

Here is the email I got, as you will see, it is from a very very well respected member of the email community. I have since contacted him about removing the light box from sign-up form.
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Here is the newsletter page with the newsletter lightbox:

I don’t know Christopher Penn personally, but we have interacted via Twitter once or twice. I am not being critical here at all, merely reflective of my experience. If it wasn’t for the lightbox on the newsletter page, I would have signed-up.

To be honest if someone had told me about this beforehand I’d have not taken the action but after having the concept forced upon me, I’m not unhappy about it.

My personal opinion is that the process was clever, the email content was perfect and the timing of the email was the key winning point here. I am not surprised  to get this kind of excellence from Mr Penn and he has certainly lived up to his reputation. While the concept was a risky proposition, the implementation was near perfect.

I also love the idea that if someone pays $2,499.00 through Google cart, they’ll get a response for a speaking job within a day. I wish I had that kind of klout 🙂