I just read a good post by Guy Kawasaki. He gives 10 things to avoid when trying to promote your company online.
I decided that he must know what he is talking about because websites that make you re-type your email address, don’t let you use usernames with “@” symbols, give you unreadable confirmation codes, and don’t work unless you are on internet explorer DRIVE ME NUTS! If you are learning internet marketing you should read these.
Yet I don’t know if I agree with Guy on is his veryt “do not”: Enforced immediate registration. When we released iMemoryBook in November we started out with a very nice system that allowed you to dive into and create your book without registering. You could create an entire book and it was just saved in your cache. Yeah, we thought it was the greatest idea ever. An incredible 30% of traffic landing on beta.iMemoryBook.com were going right into the online bookmaking application! They would play around, even get started on a book, but then they would forget to click the red call to action: “Save this book” (after clicking “save this book” they would move into the registration process. Because iMemoryBook is so new, many people come to the site, love what they see and then say, “I will do one of these books later.”
Unsatisfied with the registration rates, Ben and I decided that we wanted to experiment with asking for their email before we let them in. PhotoBucket has been extremely successful with this technique and is now gaining 80,000 new visitors a day! The idea here is that when a potential customer comes in for a visit, “just taking a look at our system”, we can continue to keep in contact with them by Email until they are ready to create their iMemoryBook. We want an email list. We also decided that our email list is going to be fun and helpful. We will NEVER generate an automatic newsletter. Each one will be handcrafted to be exciting and interesting.
So to the dismay of Neal, Dwain, and Paul–who had spent an enormous amount of time creating the online bookmaking application so that you didn’t need to be registered to use it, we are now testing the “forced registration”. Thus far conversion rates have tripled! I think it is working well.
Other Possibilities:
I am still not certain we have done it just right. I sometime wonder if we should add an opt out option at the bottom of the registration that says: “No thanks… I just want to look” like Screenit.com? Here is a screen shot (screenit needs a makeover):
The funny thing is that I have never registered for Screenit, but I have used them dozens of times to learn if a movie meets my standards. Perhaps we should create something like zohowiki, a link that says “log in as a demo user”. Here is another screenshot:
Zoho once did this with ZohoWriter(like MS Word but online) and sheets but now it is gone. I wonder if the “demo” user wasn’t working. I thought that they must work, that is what got me to start.
What I like most
I lean to this option because it would give our potential customers the chance to see a book that is full of content. Currently when you start an iMemoryBook there are no photos and they are very generic. I like the idea of them being able to view, edit, and play in a book that has already been started. It might help them catch the vision.
Two Problems
I see two downfalls with the Zoho’s demo plan: 1) This option could possibly make it harder to get emails so that we can follow up. I can see myself, very interested in the service, but because I have now seen the system I don’t have any reason to register because I am not planning on making a book today. It is very important that we have an email to follow up with periodically. 2) Our demo books would have thousands of users on them at one time, I can see that causing a collaboration nightmare.
I am not sure how we will have our registration page in the end. It will take a lot of testing to learn which way is best. If you have any suggestions I would love to hear them.
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