MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

Infor­ma­tion is power, every online mar­keter knows that. That’s why some­times, sites get a lit­tle car­ried away in their quest for infor­ma­tion. One of the tests we did showed us that over­do­ing it in this area can be very costly.

One way to col­lect infor­ma­tion is via the sign-up form on your site. When we were in the process of design­ing our sign-up for our sem­i­nar newslet­ter, we brain­stormed on what infor­ma­tion we could ask for that would be use­ful for our mar­ket­ing cam­paign to get sub­scribers to reg­is­ter for a seminar.

This was the sign-up form we came up with:

As you can see in addi­tion to sub­scrip­tion details, we asked our sub­scribers 2 questions:

- What areas they were inter­ested in.

- If they wanted to receive area-specific sem­i­nar information.

As a test we decided to shorten the form by remov­ing the radio but­tons. Our result­ing sign-up form looked like this:

The results of this change boosted our sign-ups with 3.3%. Because sales directly cor­re­spond to sign-ups, this 2-minute change gained us $33.000 US a year!

Was the basic polling infor­ma­tion on sem­i­nar inter­ests worth this amount? We decided it was not.

We used the infor­ma­tion we col­lected on subscriber’s sem­i­nar inter­ests purely for polling pur­poses. We did not need this infor­ma­tion from every new sub­scriber, a sam­ple of per­haps 500 peo­ple would already give us the infor­ma­tion we were look­ing for. So instead of ask­ing these ques­tions on your sign-up form and pos­si­bly los­ing a sign-up, just email the ques­tion to a sam­ple of your sub­scribers. This is just as effec­tive and a lot less costly.

Take a look at your own sign-up forms and test what you are pay­ing for your infor­ma­tion. Keep in mind that infor­ma­tion is only pow­er­ful if it increases your sales level.

The more com­pli­cated your signup form the less signups you’ll get! Care­fully think every addi­tional form addi­tion beyond the usual first­name, email or pass­word.

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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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