Where I work, the marketing department is always putting horrible newsletter popups on the web page, etc. I used to say, "That's going to detract from people signing up, not encourage it!". But they've got the data and they've shown it to me. As you say, it works.
I wondered why for a while, because as soon as I see those shenanigans, I'm gone. But then I realised: I'm not the target market for the websites we have at work (a full service travel tour company). Most of our clients are booking travel for a group of 30 people from their company 6 months or a year in advance. They are coming to our website because they want the damn newsletter. Took me a long time to understand that.
Do you have any citations for that? I see people either signing up because they don't realize they have a choice because the button to say "No" is intentionally smaller and obscured, but then they mark the newsletters as spam, or simply throw them out. I also see lots of people adding fake addresses like "screw@you.com" just to get past them. Has anyone verified that they actually do some real amount of good for the business putting them up beyond the simple metric of "we got tons of signups for our newsletter after doing it!"?
