Capturing That Shy Prospect

By Jason Stewart  - July 2, 2007

More on web forms, landing pages and lead scoring.

I came across a few articles and blog posts recently that tie in to my commentary about lead scoring and your online forms. One was by Marketing Sherpa’s Anne Holland and appeared in Chief Marketer, about streamlining your online forms for improved conversion rates. She says to  “face it, when a site asks for your telephone number, it's akin to saying, ‘a sales rep will call.’ Many folks figure they would rather not be pestered, so they lie about their phone number.”

A few different strategies are suggested, including leaving it off the form altogether, making it an optional field  instead of a required one, or introducing the request further down the pipe. For example -- ask for the number when a prospect is signing in to your webinar instead of simply being invited to it. Isn’t that person who attended your webinar more interesting to you than the one who simply registered and didn’t show anyway?

Case in point -- when I was at Maxager Technology we streamlined the web forms on our PPC landing pages, including the removal of any requests for phone numbers or even address information. All Maxager asks for now in exchange for a white paper is name, company name, email, industry, department and title (see example). To make things even easier, the industry, department and title fields are pre-populated with choices in a drop down box (that coincidentally match up with items in Maxager’s lead scoring profile). Also, consider emailing your collateral to the prospect rather than offering it online as it can improve the number of valid email addresses captured from online forms.

Removing the request for things that people feel protective of is going to reduce the number of people who either abandon the form or purposefully mislead you with an incorrect phone number. When Maxager stopped asking for phone numbers, landing page conversions doubled and the cost per conversion dropped 40%.

Marketo also had an interesting piece on their blog recently called “Lead Nurturing: Triggered Emails, Newsletters and Webinars” which leads with this question: “…your demand generation programs are running, bringing lead information into your SFA system or other database. What do you do next? Send the raw leads directly to your sales team to qualify?”

Of course not! I would suggest using that lead score again to determine next steps…either pass to the sales rep or put it back into the nurturing pool. As the Marketo blog suggests, every time you come across this prospect you get more information about them -- be it through webinar attendance, email campaign responses or plain old-fashioned cultivation by an inside sales or telesales rep. If they come in to your pipeline scoring a 90 right off the bat, then those are the ones that go straight to sales. If it is a 70, but a soft 70 – i.e. the main reason they didn’t score higher is because you don’t know enough about them? That’s when you nurture them.

As you gather more information about where they are, their lead score will either climb or you can disqualify them and move on to a better prospect.

Comments

[Michael Ortner]

Great piece. Amazing to hear that your conversions doubled when you removed phone number. Did you try removing some of your other fields such as title, department and industry?

[Jason Stewart]

Michael,

I think that stripping the phone number was a huge part of it. We did a complete redesign on the landing page that helped, specifically by limiting their choices to the offer mentioned in the Google ad ... i.e. no extraneous links to the home page or alternative offers piggy-backed onto the page. Also, while we did ask for some other things (like title) we let them select the title from a drop down instead of having to type it in. That also seemed to help...it's almost less intrusive if they are selecting from a list instead of typing in their title.

[Nick]

Getting rid of the phone number is definitely a good idea. Phone number deter so many potential prospects that not asking for it just makes more sense. In any case, there are many other ways of reaching a prospect other than the phone (email, direct mail, chat..) and which in time can lead to a phone number if the prospect is actually interested. In the end it might be smarter not to ask for a phone number since it guarantees that if you do get a number, the prospect is truly interested.

[Jon Miller]

Totally agree with your point about lead scoring, and using nurturing to collect additional information from non-sales-ready leads!

[Anna Talerico]

I wholeheartedly agree that users are turned off when asked for private information after landing on a page. Instead of simply not asking for or requiring personal information like a phone number on a form, we've seen conversion rates soar by easing users through a series of pages, while also segmenting them according to their needs. Prospects are much more likely to give that information out if they trust the company. Conversion paths are able to garner that trust slowly, unlike landing pages which thrust a call to action, pitch, body copy, and form at visitors all at once. Trust is something that is earned over time (or in our case, a series of pages segmented to the users needs).