Email Optin Forms: Should You Ask For Their Phone Number?
By Anna Johnson on August 7th, 2008Interesting insight by MarketingSherpa: ask for people’s phone number and you’re likely to get a lower optin response rate.
MarketingSherpa conducted a follow-up presentation to a recent teleseminar on business-to-business (B-to-B) email lead generation. In the course of addressing some of the 100 questions they received from marketers following the teleseminar, the company’s founder, Anne Holland, and senior reporter, Sean Donahue, discussed optin forms.
Granted they were talking specifically about business-to-business – and like so much of direct response marketing, this stuff should be tested – but I wonder if some of their insights aren’t so off the mark for other niches too.
For example, despite the prevalence of “white papers” (in other niches, “free ebooks and reports”), these are NOT losing their effectiveness. The standard expected by consumers has just increased. So a good white paper (read: ebook or report) can still be a great lead generation tool IF it is of high quality and value to the target audience.
About asking people for their phone number… According to Anne Holland, this has the potential to lower response rates (i.e. deter a lot of people from signing up) or cause a lot of people to LIE. So think twice before requiring people to give you their phone number… or, at least, test it.
I’ve seen a lot of marketers in the Internet marketing niche include the phone number as “optional” or place “VIP” beside the phone number field. Definitely worth testing these variations.
And it should also be mentioned that although asking someone for their phone number may lower optin rates… or cause people to type in fake numbers… it may also yield valuable contact information about your hottest prospects.
For more insights from the MarketingSherpa presentation see the MarketingSherpa presentation.
