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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