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The assessment is not entirely scientific because the forms differ slightly as some have been indexed and others havent. It also depends a great deal upon the willingness of the visitor to want the information.
These forms enable information to be retrieved for free and are not forms for online ordering or transactions.
The least success always comes from the form where a visitor is required to enter a username and password. That is usually the biggest turn off. Click throughs (CTRs) are off the radar.
Forms where a visitor has to enter purely an e-mail address are usually the highest performers, however, the quality overall is diminished through increased volumes of tyre kickers. CTRs are easily 75%.
Forms requiring e-mail and some basic visitor details (such as name, business name and/or location) do help improve performance over purely e-mail requirments. But we do get a lot of enquiries from Mickey Mouse. ;)
CTRs of about 45%
Increasing the number of questions does cause the form's performance to tail off, even for valid visitors. We tested this with a dual form (simple versions and progressively more detailed versions).
The more detail required the the poorer the performance.
The best overall success of quality vs quantity comes from simple forms which require a return e-mail to access the information. Once they've got the e-mail with access details we add a simple questionnaire asking for comments on the value of the information.
CTRs of about 25 to 30%
In addition to the above, we have added other free info on completion of more detailed forms.
This pulled in a much higher performance, although the numbers were reduced to about 10% of the original enquirers. These, however, were highly qualified.
In general, if the visitor is genuinely interested they will complete the details as long as it doesnt take too long. Make it a few clicks a way and it works.
What are your observations?
So in these new forms, only the email address is required. First name, last name, and phone number are also there, but optional.
Early returns are showing that this is their most successful approach to date at collecting highly usable names and email addresses for their in-house lists. It's amazing how many people are volunteering the extra information. And when they do, their name is not Mickey Mouse.
I think this is the "opt-in" permission-based principle at work - the kind of thing the web excels at. After three weeks, we see 85% of the people who ask for the registration page are completing it with valid data. And 4 out of 5 fill in their names. 2 out of 5 are also giving a phone number, creating a hot list for immediate action.
I'm looking forward to doing some follow-up emailings to the full list. My sense is that they will also be very successful, but you never know for sure until you measure.
