Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Dear Greg

I’ve never come across any published data to say that it actually improves the ratio of people who fill in a form in over the percentage of people who decide to move on without completing the form.

There is however internal data from HP and Dell and informal feedback from CRMGuru, IT Business Edge and Technology Evaluation Centres which indicates that for sign-up pages which are a requirement for newsletters, white papers or other user demanded free information, that it does not diminish the sign-up rate to any appreciable extent.

You must understand that for at least the latter 3, the data is not really scientific, because it is before and after changes to the validation procedure on their websites were introduced, not as a result of a single or double blind market test with a control group, but it looks pretty convincing – you don’t lose people.

As a means of preventing unintentional incorrect email addresses being entered, the improvements cited has been as high as 41% and as low as 27% but at either end of the range, that is impressive. A further means of improving your sign up validity is to get rid of intentional false email addresses which an easier process than you might think. See
https://regexadvice.com/blogs/jschoolcraft/archive/2003/11/11/261.aspx for some guidelines on how to check that the email address supplied actually exists.

Your statement that “I'm not interested in sending a confirmation email because that wouldn't work well with our system” is arse about face and worries me. I realise that your question is about whether asking people to enter their email address twice will put people off, and the answer is no. But if the email address is doubly false, on purpose, it seems worth your while to validate it.

As CRM consultants, we try never to fit business practice round the software and this seems to be an e-business example of exactly that. OK, you might be changing your software to catch a tiny number of false intentional double incorrect email addresses, which appears to be an exercise which is not worth the candle. But not to do it because it doesn’t suit the existing process is plain wrong and a bit bonkers! What happens if the number of false entries suddenly jumps 1000 folds through malicious practice as has happened in the USA, by a rival employing hundreds of impoverished far eastern workers to falsely complete web registrations in order to screw up a rival’s site? Email validation costs peanuts and it is worth it. It can be done automatically as in the article above and by confirmatory email, which when handled automatically by a half decent CRM package like Maximizer, is maintenance and operationally cost free.

Best wishes

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions