I am looking for some statistics on the impact on registration rates of asking for additional information.  The general view is that the less information that one asks for, the more registrations one gets.  

Clearly, the stats will clearly be influenced by such things as the nature of the offering that people are signing up for;  whether good reasons exist for providing the additional information and so on but if anybody can point me at some stats on this, I would be grateful.

What I would be particular interested in is the impact of going from
'email only' to 'email plus name' to 'email plus name plus postcode'  to 'email plus name plus full address' 

I have yet to find anything useful via Google.

Thanks

Richard Collings
Information Systems Consultant

Thanks for the reply, Jon.

I agree that the ideal solution would be to run a test because as you say,  there are a large number of variables at play here that will mean that individual sites will see very different results.

However, for reasons that I won't go into, it is difficult to run a test at the moment so I was looking for some broad brush results: - if one goes from a registration form that captures name, address and a few other details for the purposes primarily of emailing to a form that just asks for email address, then what sort of increase in registration rate is one likely to see.   Is it likely to be 'worthwhile'.

Richard

OK - let me add a bit more detail.  What I am struggling with conceptually is a situation where names and full addresses are, at the moment, being sought from people who want to sign up for a newsletter.  

Clearly going to just an email address only signup will increase the registration rate but does carry a cost.  In particular, there is a CRM system which holds details of a large number of existing contacts - but primarly with white mail addresses only.

Going to email address only registration means that a) it will not be possible to match email registrations to contacts held in the CRM database;  b) there is an issue with where the email addresses are then held because the CRM system can't easily store the details of a person where the only thing we have is the email address.

Neither of these is a show stopper but there are cost and other issues to consider in moving to an email address only registration approach.  If the registration rate increases by only a few percentage points, then it is probably not worth changing;  if it increases significantly more than that, then it is.

Hence the original question.

Regards

Thanks for that, Ashley.

Perhaps one thing I should have said is that this is primarily 'B'2C rather than B2B and quite a different business to the one that you are in. In general, for this application it is true to say that any registration is potentially of value - ie we are aiming for a large number of low value registrations rather than expecting/looking for the 'nugget of gold' to come via the registration process (there are other routes to these).

The stats about rate of change of email address are interesting. One of the other things that we are debating (which you have partially answered) is whether it is worth holding multiple email addresses for an individual. And whether it is worth retaining old email addresses that have either died; or have been killed off by their owner.

Did recently find some stats which said that about 50% of people in the US have three or more active email addresses which they use for different purposes. However, it is probably true to say that for a given site, they would probably use just one of those email addresses.  In this particular case, it is possible that they would use two - one for professional purposes; and one when registering as a private individual.   However, in that case, they may well provide different addresses anyway so spotting that they are the same individual will not be straightforward.

One other benefit of capturing postcode in the B2C sector is that (if it is correct) it can be used to access demographic data which is potentially useful in segmenting the market.   In this particular case,  there is the potential to offer the registrant 'local information' based on the provided postcode as an added incentive to provide the correct postcode.

Regards

Richard

On 19:13:18 14 November 2005 Ashley wrote:

Hi Richard

Not sure of exact stats without rooting around but a few things to throw in from our experience.

Obviously (I hope) there's a big difference between volume of registrations and value. On the face of it the less you ask, and therefore the more people can hide their identity, then the lower quality of registrants you'll get e.g. all your competitors!

However, there is another side to this. We've found that the biggest cheeses (senior potential customers) are, understandably, the most keen to protect their identity to avoid unnecessary hassle from people trying to sell them things (including you!). It always amazes me how many e-mail only registrants turn out to be E-commerce Directors of large companies. For this reason I'd be tempted to stick to e-mail only. You'll get a lot of rubbish but you'll also have some nuggets of gold in there.

On the other hand, we've also found that the only thing to age faster than a credit card number, is an e-mail address. Not just because of changes of job but even the same person in the same job. Big corproates seem to be doing this more and more - personal work e-mail addresses change remarkably often (every 6 months or so).

As a result, one of the things we're about to implement is to ask, at the point of registration, for a 'back up' secondary e-mail address. We'll explain to the user that we'll only use this if we can't get through on the primary e-mail address, and it'll be optional for the user to give. So no stats on that either yet.

We've found that asking for a name isn't hugely useful for online marketing / e-mail purposes over and above just the e-mail address. However, as you allude to, it is useful for matching with CRM records to find out an existing mailing address or customer. We've found people less sensitive to giving their name (it's often clear from the e-mail address anyway) than giving their company. So registration conversion rates don't appear to dip much by asking for name + e-mail.

Having the postal address is obviously useful for DM and targeting purposes but is also potentially very useful for "reclaiming" dud e-mail addresses. Again, one of the things we're looking at is automating a process whereby a postcard is sent to users whose e-mail address has failed repeatedly to try and get them to update their details or unsubscribe.

As for postcode, again I guess it is good for matching with existing data. But we haven't found it great to have postcode only with no additional address data. And postcodes seem more often to be junk ones people have put in. So I suspect asking for postcode would affect conversion rates more noticeably.

Regards

Ashley Friedlein
CEO, E-consultancy.com

:-)

Looks like we both subscribe to the same lists - I had already picked that one up.  Doesn't quite answer the specific question I was looking for an answer to - namely, the uplift in registrations seen when going from a form requesting full personal details; to one just requesting email address.  But - some interesting results there all the same.

On 18:17:15 15 November 2005 jbovard wrote:

here you go

fill 'yer boots!
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=3119