B2B Web Strategy Blog - eMagine » Updating “To register or not” with a bit of illuminating research

Updating “To register or not” with a bit of illuminating research

December 14th, 2009 Posted by: Bill Gadless

Recently we posted “To register or not, revisited” …an updating of one of our earliest posts from back in ’06. We reviewed the various camps of strongly-held opinion on the issue, including some promising new hybrid approaches that have surfaced in the intervening time. And then we bemoaned the surprising lack of research on such an important question.

Without being under any illusions of cause and effect, we’re nonetheless thrilled to report that finally the research logjam has been broken …at least a little bit. Posting on Michael Stelzner’s Writing White Papers blog, Rachel Karl weighs in on the side of “make registration voluntary”; but even more important, she cites a bit of recent research by MarketingSherpa showing that… voluntary registration appears to be the better way to generate a greater number of quality leads.

It’s not a broad survey; in fact, it’s basically a case study of one company which provides an e-commerce platform for the ocean-shipping industry. Their marketers had concluded that a product demo was an essential step toward a sale, so they felt that voluntary registration for the demo was needed to avoid scaring off valid prospects. The results would be eye-popping for any B2B: nearly one out of four (23%) demo viewers were converted into leads, and it was believed that voluntary registration was the major reason for this.

MarketingSherpa members may access the full report here. We hope that this is only the beginning of a flood of research on this critical issue.