The Path of Least Resistance

I read a really nice post today from Direct Connections (one of the blogs I recently mentioned) about direct marketing best practices. It's called Direct Marketing: Rules vs. Laws.

The one sentence to remember is this one..."But there’s also a law that comes into play, a law any high school physics student knows: the law of inertia. Simply put, audiences want to take the path of least resistance." Bingo! The less you require of your prospects, the more likely they are to do what you want.

You need to do everything you can to microtarget your campaigns and qualify your prospects before you market to them. And then, if your offer is good enough to get them to one of your landing pages, make it so easy for them to convert that it becomes a no-brainer.

At the very least reduce the number of fields on your form to the bare minimum, and eliminate anything you can't find out with a quick search on your own. If possible, provide pre-populated forms so that data entry requirements are minimal. Otherwise, consider creating drop-downs with choices in them that can conform to your data requirements and help with any sort of lead scoring you have in place. Your conversion rates will improve, guaranteed.