COMMENTS
So... people don't like giving away personal information or information that may lead to annoying salesmen or marketing materials following up.
I would be curious to see what the comparison is between a phone field and an email address field. That would be some useful information to have.....
Zip code would also be interesting to see. We do seminars and request the zip code only so we can market to them when an event comes to their area.
Dan - As always, great stuff. I would love to see the downstream numbers for lead-to-sale conversion. By adding more fields (e.g. phone, email, state, etc.), the form qualifies out uninterested parties. I guess you need to balance the quantity of leads with the quality.
Were the fields optional or mandatory?
What Matt Nelson asked ...
And further to Matt's question about filtering out uninterested parties, if you are selling higher priced products in a B2B environment do these fields make as big of a difference.
Be very careful with the advice not to use the "phone number" field. We're using call tracking with a number of clients, and calls from the page outnumber e-mail/form leads 4-1.
Very interesting - I think overall, his findings are
accurate - but, there is a caveat to this. If it's a first time visitor, what the site is selling, if it was an organic find, if fields were mandatory, if there was an incentive to provide more information... what's the carrot on these? whether it's a first time visitor or loyal customer etc., etc., but his point is pretty clear and accurate. I'll give you limited information until you earn my trust. Then, once I'm comfortable, give an opportunity to give you more information. So, in the early stages of relationship building - ask for as little as possible. Do NOT be intrusive. After all, why do you need that information? If it's critical - like you're selling timeshare and have licenses in certain states - then let them know that's why you need it.
...and if a customer is older than say 40 - they don't want you to know that, or younger than 18 - but once comment indicates asking for an email - great study.
This seems interesting, but not implementable. Conversion rates are all about knowing your target market. Sites targeted at different age ranges, for example, might face users with differing privacy concerns. Context is also important. People might be much more willing to give up contact information if they think that you will be contacting them about something they want or are interested in, rather than just saying you want contact info for no particular reason.
It also doesn't factor in people who give false information. There's plenty of GIGO.
When making a form for a landing page I always ask myself what information I would be willing to give up and your poll hit it right on the head...name and email address only and that is first name not last. Great information Dan, keep up the good work.
Dan,
You present some valuable insights here, thank you for making them public.
It's also important to keep in mind that quantity of leads doesn't always equate to a win. Even with the most targeted demand generation strategy, many marketers are best served including form fields that help qualify and segment the lead. My take away is that if you don't need it, don't ask for it. But...if it's important, ask for it with the understanding that the more valuable the content you provide in return, the more information you can get away with asking for.
Your comments are fairly accurate in my opinion. What still astounds me is a company that says to not use a phone or email but still requires it and uses that for marketing. If you offer a free whitepaper and the person asks for it and states they are just browsing, why still hound them? There is one site I frequently use content for research and they call me all the time to see when I'm going to be buying after I tell them I am researching. Now I just avoid their site like the plaque.
Gee, they pay you for this?
Dan, This is great stuff. Is HubSpot planning to trim back the number of fields that they ask people for before they can download content? What's really needed is an intelligent form, connected to a database, that knows whether you've already asked a prospect for this information already. I can't tell you how many times I've had to enter the same contact information into your landing pages. Something to think about...
Well, nice findings. But everybody knows that the more fields a form has the more users leave your site.
One more remark: Where are the statistics in your graphs (e.g error bars, distribution, standard deviation, significance ...)?
Without this information a difference between 12% and 18% is nothing more than useless.
Okay, so you less conversions, big deal, but what about the lifetime value of the lead or customer. Example, let's say you get lower conversion rates on the page when you ask for phone, but your sales go up. What would you rather have.
This is only one piece of the puzzle. At the end of the day, what matters is someone converting into a buyer, so that the lead liquidates and turns profitable.
Interesting article. But why is the graphics with "age" the only one that does not start at Zero, it starts at 13%.
Is it to make the drop from 18% to 15% look really impressive?
Hai Dan, As always, great stuff. You present some valuable insights here, thank you for making them public
We have an enquiry form on our business website and we have always talked about how many enquiries we may be losing by having the form ask for address and phone number. It is most interesting though that the biggest loss of conversion is when asking for age. We have no need for it but it's interesting that's the most sensitive piece of data that we won't part with. Thanks for sharing this information, it is most informative and helps us shape our online forms better for our business.