The obligitory “sign up form” is probably one of the most overlooked opportunities in the entire customer experience lifecycle, the red headed step child of touchpoints if you will.
Why? Because it’s probably one of the first points at which the customer is going to “experience” your company, and the experience is generally at best blah and at worst hostile.
Take for instance what you need to fill in if you want to comment, thats right comment on Bob Garfield’s new “open source” Listenomics (which is of course open source because you can comment on it, right?)
Now a sign up form is not only a chance to make a first impression, it’s a negotiation, you have something I might want, and I have some information you might want. As it is a negotiation the value of what you’re offering has to be weighed against the value of my information and the effort that i’m going to put into filling in this form. The problem here, is ad-age uses the same sign up form for everything, and filling in that form might be a valid proposition in some cases. Unfortunately for Bob, the ability to comment on his blog is not enough enticement for me to fill in that form.
Now, the reason I was even inspired to write this post was because I was filling in the cork’d sign up form and it had me laughing out loud, yes it was funny, not only that it set the whole tone for me with regard to the cork’d brand. The experience was such that I “loved” the brand even before i’d finished filling in the sign up form, yes, loved. If a company has a good enough sense of humor to make me laugh during the sign up process then it sure has made a connection with me.
More to the point, why don’t more companies and brands demonstrate a sense of humor?
Anyway, I think that the problems with many sign up forms are exactly the reason that wufoo.com was created.
You are so right
Companies can not manage signing up experience miss opportunities to take my info. In that situations i basically use bugmenot.com
How funny, I was admiring the Cork’d sign up for myself. Nice.
Interesting. I just spent the day redesigning a registration page. I have the ungodly task of blending seriousness (requiring full legal names!) will friendliness (some folks may not even have email). Sometimes I just want to go ‘SIGH’. But then I think about how awesome it is that my job is to figure out how to introduce people to an online product via the registration page.
Thanks guys! I must say you’ve got quite a responsibility there Abi, the first point of contact, the first brand experience
K-)
Karl,
You are absolutely correct about the sign up pages being overlooked and also being extremely important as a first impression. That’s one of the first pages I look at in site re-designs because the usually need help and when fixed, they provide the most noticeable return.
Ahh, David, thanks for bringing up the issue of return. Could there be a easier place to measure success
The percentage of people that complete a sign up process is just such a no brainer as a measure of success, and usually on of the few metrics that’s easy to ascertain.
An issue I often come across is marketing teams wishing to push their communications agenda during registration processes. Ambiguous ‘Send me your newsletter’ options for example.
What many businesses don’t realise that a customer’s goal is never to ‘register’. Their goal is to use the product or service. Registration is only a means to an end.
So my advice is to make registration as simple and straightforward as possible, focus on creating a seamless customer journey - and most importantly, communicate with your customers at appropriate moments. Registration is usually not one of them!
Here’s a recent example of where I battled with this issue:
http://re-frame.info/blog/index.php/2006/07/05/creating-meaningful-communication-with-customers-using-permission-marketing/
Sign up pages are so critical. In all my years, when clients have to come me with issues regarding pages like this, we take a look at the analytics and see the biggest drop-off occurs on pages like this. Do a little a qualitative research and you find out that people see these pages as barriers.
Thanks for posting these great examples.
Thank You
I’ve just been letting everything pass me by.
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