Sign-up forms – good practice

So you want to datacapture the email addresses of as many visitors to your website as possible. How do you achieve this?

The interruption marketing way is to have a nasty pop-up appear as soon as someone clicks through to the site. Not a good idea – will instantly cause people to bounce away and cause immediate suspicion of your brand.

The permission way is to woo the customer with a nice reward. A white paper, a freebie, a competition. You give them something useful and in return they give you their email address. Permission equates to win:win.

So having persuaded the customer to click through for the reward, what hoops do you then demand before they claim their prize? The temptation is to capture all vital statistics possible - full demographics, source of referral plus at least the name of the family cat, their insurance renewal date, child’s middle name and more beside. Research, however, shows that the more complex the sign-up form, the less likely someone is to complete it. What is the real “need to know” data at this stage? Probably just their name and email address. Once you’ve begun to build a relationship later you can begin to learn more about them as they reward your wonderful communications with increased permission.

So keep it simple. Capture the need to know, reward the customer with something worthwhile and then begin the business of building a relationship. Don’t reward with spammy eblasts. Dance with them, woo them and show them you care.

Marie Page runs an international e-business selling instructional DVDs teaching contemporary musical instruments. She blogs at http://musicademy.com/blog