Statistically registering interest
April 24th, 2008 by David Stone. 2 Comments »Statistics can take over in a negative way if you’re not careful, they can cause pain as well as gain. That is a more in-depth discussion for another post, these particular statistics are very much a no-brainer, however few execute it well. It’s also very unlikely to gather incorrect information.
Take “holding pages”, they’re often the first place you register your interest about a product/company/event by giving up your email address. Doing that already? You’re interest register-able per se. Take this screenshot taken from LaunchSoon.com’s demo:
This is extremely limiting- you’re left with two statistics: percentage of visitors who “convert” and give you their email address; percentage of fake email address. Sure, you’ll gain a list of potential customers who care enough to be contacted once more, but compare that with the statistics you’d gather from this holding page:
- percentage of visitors who “convert” and give you their email address
- percentage of fake email address
- percentage of podcasters with-in your current reach
- percentage of podcast subscribers within your current reach
- ratio of podcaster & subscribers within your reach
- percentage of podcast subscribers who are also podcasters
If you want to start tracking referrers statistics you can also make an educated guess (careful of those) on: percentage of podcasters that convert; percentage of podcast subscribers that convert. It’s worth noting that the more complex your page the higher the chance a visitor finds a barrier that “blocks” them, these have to be minimized: if they don’t want to tell you all that data, they don’t; if they are both a subscriber and a podcaster, no problem. Checkboxes work here, radio buttons would not. Small barriers, maybe, but a barrier non the less.
Maybe your product is aimed at podcasters more than subscribers, with the first template you could have 90% of email addresses owned by subscribers and never know. To have a list of 10,000 potential customers and on launch day find that only 1,000 are the slightest bit interested is very disappointing, not to mention if you know why a potential customer is interest you can speak to them in their language, e.g. telling a podcast subscriber about audio editing software aimed at podcasters is probably an unlikely convert, they don’t care about mixing levels, compressors, or microphones. They download the mp3.
Further more, if you’re building web applications you’re probably going to run a public beta. If you don’t already have a beta list why not include these users? They cared enough to give you their email address, they were the first people to sign up, they are probably early adopters… well, at one point. Web 2.0 has defaced the term “beta”. These days, I’d probably double check if a customer wants to beta test, possibly another option on your holding page?
Through whatever means, once you have the statistic that x% want to be beta testers, don’t use it as a one off. Beta test every release, allow this select group of customers pre-access, allow them to switch between the production & beta version of your web application.
Holding pages are just one aspect of registering interest. Wherever your copy says “coming soon”, or “at x time and y date”. Even if you can’t gather as much data about potential customers as possible that’s not an excuse not to at all. Start a Facebook Group. Register a Twitter account and allow people to follow you. Have a feed for them to subscribe to. In this day and age I think it’s just common good practice, don’t ask your customers to keep checking back, you’ll get back to them. Register their interest now, don’t increase your drop-off rate.