I’ve been following Stephen Dean’s blog for quite a while now. He recently posted about recent trends in 3 areas:
Gmail becoming more mainstream
Asking for email addresses only
The death of double opt-in
The second two are always interesting to me. I have heard the same as Stephen that some experts have claimed better conversions by only asking for only an email address, while others (and I happen to know a few who test this) claim that conversions will be higher by asking for both name and email address. Of course, with the large numbers of marketers playing “operator”, the actual test results that were released (assuming they even were) may have been useful for a specific market. Or, it could be that the test was looking for the highest number of conversions, but not profitability. Unless you do some of the testing yourself, you’ll end up scratching your head over hearing about tests like this.
You can read the Stephens blog entry here:
http://www.copywritingdean.com/living-in-email-sin-and-loving-it