Why Getting Rid of White Paper Registration Forms Is a Good Idea

Louis Columbus

Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions

If someone is interested enough to seek out your company through Google or any other means, I think you should make yourself as easy to learn about as possible.  This includes over-balancing the scales and delivering knowledge about how your products, services, platforms or applications uniquely solve tough problems for customers.  Eliminating registration forms takes down a major hurdle to being better known as a solution to potential customers’ problems. It can even help a company become a thought leader, as long as the content is exceptionally strong and useful.

Marketing departments however are more required than ever to generate measures of performance regarding campaigns.  Because of this, registration pages stay up, some of them longer than applications to get into the college of university of your choice.

A recent post by Michael Stelzner on eliminating registration forms provided insights into an innovative solution to this conflict from Docmetrics.   

I gave their Docmetrics a test-drive to see how the underlying technology works. 

Basically it allows you to get a few pages into a white paper and prompts you for only for your first name, last name and e-mail address. Docmetrics provides analytics of which white paper is downloaded and a series of other metrics.  Marketing gets their metrics, and the prospect gets an instant download with just a few questions presented into the PDF.

Michael Stelzners’ blog entry comments had mixed reviews of this approach.  I’d say that the approach from Docmetrics is a good compromise between taking down a registration page on the one hand, and requiring prospects interested in your company have to fill one out on the other. 

The bottom line is that hurdles need to come down in sharing information, and getting away from those lengthy and tedious registration pages through more interactive solutions like this one is a step in the right direction.          

Comments

[Louis Columbus]

Dale,

Thanks for your comments.

Quite frankly, it was easier for me to get a license through the California DMV than it is to get downloads from some enterprise software companies, LOL!

I am just against those registration forms that are so detailed and granular that they begin to be more detailed than a 1040. Having a single sign-on is definitely a step in the right direction.

As for opening the blog for comments, I think that’s a great idea.

The Web is all about leveling the playing field when it comes to communicating and sharing knowledge. Restricting opportunistic blog comments and solitications, whom I like to compare to those annoying door-to-door magazine sellers, just keeps the blog more readable for everyone

[Dale Wolf]

Louis,

The "to register or not to register" dilemma has been with all of us since the Internet became a big deal. Some people resent giving any information about themselves. Others just don't like taking the time to register ... and I agree with them on this when registration is required every time you want to download a document. Others, like me, don't mind sharing information with companies that sell products that I am interested in. I want these companies to communicate with me. Yes, it occasionally results in more email or voicemail than I have time for at any given moment. But then I always have the delete key.

What we have done at Cincom is to make registration simpler. We have installed Eloqua, a fantastic marketing automation system. Our internal programming team also developed a "single sign on" feature. Now, our web visitors can register just one time and the next time they want additional whitepapers from us, they can get an immediate download. We still capture information so we can communicate to people who have an interest in a Cincom product. Hopefully, everyone wins.

[Dale Wolf]

Louis,

I was somewhat embarrased after reading your post on eliminating registration to realize I had set up our own blog with a registration requirement before anyone could comment on a post on our blog. I discovered this when I went to comment on your post "Why Getting Rid of White Paper Registration Forms is a Good Idea."

So I now have turned off the required Typekey Registration form. We want everyone to easily comment on articles posted on this blog. We did, however, leave in place the requirement to type in the code letters revealed in the CAPTCHA block. Sorry if this offends anyone. We do not capture information but we do want to stop the spammers and self-promoters who can make comments useless to read.

Please join in and turn our blog posts into conversations instead of monologues. Your ideas are very important to us and to the readers of this blog.