Maximizing Engagement by Minimizing Required Data

Landing pages, including sales pages, capture personal data to enable follow-up engagement.  This data represents investments of trust and time in you and your business; an investment that must yield a significant enough return to be made.  Thus, it is imperative that you balance the amount of data required with the value offered.

Achieving Balance

As business owners, we naturally want as much data about our potential customers as possible.  We believe that having this insight will enable us to optimally market to and convert our website visitors into paying customers.

Website visitors, however, hesitate to share their personal information.  They worry about the security of their data and whether it will be used abusively.

Achieving the balance necessary to gain the engagement of potential customers involves several points:

• Credibility: Website professionalism communicates a seriousness that instills confidence provided data won’t be abusively used (aka spam)
• Privacy Policy: Your documented commitment to potential customers guaranteeing the security and appropriate use of their data; including not selling it to third parties
• Offer Value: Personal data requests that are proportional to the perceived value of the offer and reasonably necessary for its delivery assures visitors that their data is being appropriately used

Proportional Value

Examples of proportional offer value to data requests include:

• Online Comment Submission: First Name (optional), Last Name (optional), Email Address (optional)
• Weekly Newsletter, Webinar, Training Video: First Name (typical), Last Name (optional), Email Address (required)
• Reusable Template, eBook, or Benchmarking Report: First Name (typical), Last Name (typical), Title (typical), Company (typical), Company Size (typical), Email Address (required), Phone Number (optional), Other Information (optional)
• Paid for Product or Service: First Name (required), Last Name (required), Title (optional), Company (optional), Company Size (optional), Email Address (required), Phone Number (optional), Address (required – physical product / optional – digital product), Payment Information (required – typically collected by the merchant services provided), Other Information (optional)

Final Thought…

Remember that the time to complete the data submission will be a cost that is also considered by visitors.  As such, evaluate the use of option selection lists to speed data collection when developing forms.  When such lists are used, always provide an ‘other’ option for those whose circumstances don’t fit the selections provided.