The shaggy-haired rockers in Cage the Elephant have been blowing up since 2008, when their single “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” broke the Billboard Hot 100 and landed at #3 on the Modern Rock chart. Gearing up for the release of their second album, Thank You, Happy Birthday, the band tapped Topspin to power an Email-For-Media widget featuring the brand-new track “2024″. In a nifty fusion of online marketing and PR, Cage the Elephant gave Filter Magazine a first-day exclusive for the E4M widget, which Filter embedded in a post today announcing the new track. The article provided some awesome exposure — it was Liked on Facebook over 300 times and Retweeted 22 times, which helped spread the news across the Web. More importantly, it made it super-easy for readers to join Cage The Elephant’s mailing list. Gathering a fan’s email address from a press announcement using old-school methods would have required several steps:
- Fan reads announcement about new track
- Fan clicks a link to the band’s webpage (assuming the magazine even posts one)
- Fan looks around the webpage for the “Enter your email” field (and hopefully finds it)
- Fan enters their email address
Topspin’s widget helps cut that process in half:
- Fan reads announcement about the new track
- Fan enters email address in the E4M widget embedded in the article
Those extra steps may not seem like a big deal, but on the Internet, every additional click in the user’s path is a huge barrier. There’s a reason one of the most popular web-design books is called “Don’t Make Me Think”. The smoother and easier you make something, the more likely people will be to convert. We’ve seen great successes from our clients who get E4Ms embedded in their press coverage, and we hope it happens more and more.
