As online marketers we all want registrations and lots of them, but we may be actually minimizing the number of new customers due to the innate difficulty in being made aware of our registration forms and then the actual challenges of successful completion. Following these top seven tips will boost your overall registration efficiency and make your customers much happier!

  1. Position opt-in invitations prominently – Can anyone explain the rationale behind burying the opt-in invite at the very bottom of the page where it’s only visible after endless vertical scrolling sessions? The success of your opt-in invitation is one of your primary marketing goals so provide it with the visibility it deserves as far up on the page in a very prominent location.
  2. Provide social login alternatives – It is truly amazing how many sites will only let you subscribe through a social log in. The marketing geniuses at these companies seem to fail to grasp the fact that not everyone has a Facebook or Twitter account. They seem not to understand that although 133 million Americans do have Facebook accounts, 202 million do not. When you provide no option to enter your site for non-social media followers (such as registering with an email account) you’re effectively eliminating more than half your potential customers.
  3. Allow info@ addresses – One of the great frustrations for small business owners is that they often use info@, admin@, help@, support@, etc. as their sole business email address. Far too many major brands refuse to register those email prefixes as they consider them generic and therefore worthless. Nothing could be further from the truth as the individuals who use those email addresses are often the decision makers in small businesses, and you can bet your entire online marketing budget that they aren’t about to go create another email address just to sign up to your offerings.
  4. Shun illegible CAPTCHAs – These forms of human verification are a necessary evil, but some of the more recent variants are so obtuse and require such lengthy entry of borderline illegible information that they suffer from extremely elevated abandonment rates. How many times do you have to type in mastermagillibrary 4095287459 before you give up and run away screaming from the site? There are alternative CAPTCHAs that are nowhere near as offputting, such as asking simple human answerable questions such as “what is 27 divided by 3” or “what state is Seattle in?” There are even some really fun CAPTCHAs available now which deal with pattern matching or other video game-like activities.
  5. Confirmation & edit element – Once the user has entered their email address, are you providing a confirmation element, screen, or box which repeats the address and allows the re-entry or edit of the original entry if it’s been typed in wrong? If you skip this critical feature you are just inviting errors in your email addresses which make the entire process essentially worthless and your customer won’t be frustrated by inability to correct an error.
  6. Immediate verification – Especially at a time when most of your users will be using their thumbs on tiny “keys” to enter their information, you’re going to receive many more typos entered in your forms than from the formal keyboard users on desktop and laptop computers. Therefore if you have an immediate verification facility which pops up and informs the user that they’ve typed @gmale.com or @htomail.com and that it should be @gmail.com or @hotmail.com, you’re going to minimize the number of non-existing addresses. And who knows, maybe they do have email through a gmale.com website!
  7. K.I.S.S.S.S. – Keep It Simple, Short & Sweet, Stupid! Every online marketer should have engraved on their foreheads that especially in the mobile age, the best registrations are the ones that are comprehendible at a glance and are able to be completed with the lowest possible number of gestures, clicks, and keystrokes. Overcomplex forms will chop your successful registration in half, or worse!

The entire paradigm of online marketing is to make every single phase of the customer experience pleasant, easy, and foolproof. So go fix your registrations now!