[Question] Online Registration

[Cream]

I hope someone can answer my question or help me with advise:

Every second month we publish Information Guides on our website (similar to a newsletter), however the Information Guides aren't accessible to public viewers but only to those who register on our website. If you have a look at our website as a non-registered user, a brief is available, and if you were interested in reading that particular Information Guide you would have to register in order to download it. News Page

We took this approach to encourage our visitors to register with us, hence receiving our latest news, events and so on.

Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by doing this?

Sadly we haven't had a great deal of visitors registering with us, and I was wondering if there were some other ideas we could consider?

[Dave A]

Is your goal to accumulate subscribers, or is accumulating subscribers a means to achieving a more important goal?

What is your real ultimate goal here?

[Cream]

Having more subscribers registered with us allows us to share information more effectively, saving time and our registered users have full access to any download. We too obtain new and more contacts, which we wouldn't normally have.

[solweb]

Tracking visitors & registrations

What you are doing is establishing yourselves as the experts in your particular field.

Try advertising or doing cross promotional ads with the Web Sites your target audience is likely to visit

[Chatmaster]

Cream are you saying that you are getting traffic but it is not converting, or do you like to use the newsletter to attract more traffic?

[Cream]

Cream are you saying that you are getting traffic but it is not converting, or do you like to use the newsletter to attract more traffic?

We are definitely getting traffic, in the two months of our website going live we had 918 hits, which I think is really great. However no converting

[Cream]

Try advertising or doing cross promotional ads with the Web Sites your target audience is likely to visit

Currently we have done so on LinkedIn, SA Business Directory and Bizcommunity. So far LinkedIn is the best.

[Mark Atkinson]

By "cross promotional ads..." I don't think he means having profiles on social networking sites and directories.

Without trying to put words in his mouth, I think what solweb is trying to say is find websites that your target market is most likely to visit and arrange to exchange ads with them.

For example, I sell sports shirts online. Hence, I arranged with the owner of an SA sporting forum to exchange ads with me, whereby he advertises my store on his forum (via a banner) and I advertise his forum on our website. This way, it's more targeted advertising. It speaks directly to your target audience, whereas listing yourself on various directories is more like a stab in the dark (although advisable nonetheless).

[Cream]

Fair enough, we don't literally advertise on anyone’s website, we do promote our events, and we are consistently adding comments within LinkedIn groups, a range of groups, sharing bits of inserts of our articles. Our links are always available to interested parties.

Maybe I could consider IT companies, as they would be our target market.

[Dave A]

Maybe you should try partial open content.

At the moment your website is a bit of a black box. If I as a passer-by don't have some sort of idea what's inside the box, why would I want to open it?
Possibly more important (and my particular dislike of the curiosity strategy), if a person opens the box out of curiosity, all you've established is they're curious. You have not qualified them as a prospect!

One of the advantages of the web is it will do as much of the work as you let it. That includes seperating the prospects from the suspects if you will let it. Prospects will sign up because they don't want to miss a reminder of the next issue. Prospects will take the RSS feed, or at least bookmark the site.

The way you're doing it now someone will register just to find out what the heck you're going on about and if they're a suspect, hit the spam report button when your next newsletter lands. Who needs that aggravation, especially from someone who is unlikely to convert?

In short - yeah - I think you're shooting yourself in the foot.

[Cream]

We have much to improve on it seems

[Dave A]

Don't feel bad. I think the web flips quite a few traditional marketing ideas on its head.

If you have a shop, you tend to get pretty focused on getting people in the door on the chance that they might buy. The shop window is aimed to get people in the door - and there's a whole psychology behind this essentially massaging pack dynamics.

I think lots of people see their website as the shop window, and that the visitor is only "in the door" when they subscribe, make a phonecall, send an email or "open the box" (sticking to my earlier analogy).

I suggest the way you've got to look at a visitor to your site is they're already in the shop!!

What information can you give him or her to close a sale?
And why create obstacles to getting that information?

If they get what they're looking for, they'll be back - or subscribe, become a fan etc.

You want to spend your quality time working with prospects.
Let your website do the donkey work of sorting the prospects from the suspects.

[Chatmaster]

Just a humble opinion from my side.

With a website if registration is identified as a conversion factor you need to plan a funnel from the end to the beginning.

In other words start with the registration process.

• What information do we require from the individual that registers
• How can we make the registration process as fast and effective as possible without loosing abovementioned information
• What added bonus can we offer an individual for completing the entire registration process
• Plan the auto-mailer sequence and also see if you cannot integrate some cross selling and up-selling in there

Then you need to look at the why an individual would like to register.

• What exceptional value can we offer the individual?
• How can we make our offer to the individual truly worthwhile with added bonuses?
• What would our call to action be?
• How will we word our call to action in the shortest possible way?
• Do we have urgency integrated into our offer, eg limited time offer

Now you need to look at where you would integrate the conversion factor into your website. How prominent would you make it on the website and how would you guide the visitor into the funnel.

Your website seems to be down but on memory I can't recall that there was a registration feature anywhere on the site that guide the visitor into registering, the only thing I can remember that was on the website was a login button which I cannot see would have been effective for converting the visitor.

[Cream]

Thank you to everyone!!! The feedback I have received has allowed me to re-think our approach.

Chatmaster - probably the reason why you couldn't enter the site was because we have been doing a lot of updates, hopefully the next time you pop in, there shouldn't be any problems.

An overview of our services has been added on the about us page because most of the hits happen on the About Us page.

I have installed another application for new registrations; I find this one to be more user-friendly.

Public visitors can now view our articles on our website without having to register, if the visitor would like to download the PDF article, they can by registering with us.

Only Registered visitors can download presentations provided to us by our presenters from the forums we organise and sponsor.

Just what you said Dave:

I suggest the way you've got to look at a visitor to your site is they're already in the shop!!

We want our visitors informed, leaving us with having learnt something new, we want our visitors coming back wanting to learn more and hopefully by having our articles available to read on the site they will come back!

Thank you again!!!

[Dave A]

Oh yes - much better