brendan - 1:06 pm on May 16, 2003 (gmt 0)

Just to add to that, we have a site where users get a quote and we have found the more we fill out the form for the users already the more likely they are to want to quote.

Sd we have done two fairly clever but pretty simple things.

1. Stored the average nubmer of days that people want to quote for and calculated it on the fly based on the specific location so that we can make our best guess as to what the user wants a quote for before they tell us.

2. Our page reads the refferer and scans is for locations that we quote for if the refferer contains any of the locations that location is selected. Which means people coming through from a search engine with specific search terms in their search will get targetted content.

The effect of this is that now about 28% of the users coming from search engines visiting our site have already got the exactly the right data filled out on the form before they click anything. Which gives them even more incentive to click the quote button and leaves a good mental impression as well I think.

Other things we found really useful was allowing users to save a quote and emailing it to them.

Also if you asks a user to validate their email address via an email sent to them where they have to click a link to activate it that increases conversion because they have had to go to quite a bit of trouble to do it so they normally complete the process at the same time it doesn't put people off and it dramatically reduces fraud.

I'll post some more tidbits once we see the next installment from digitalghost :)