Landing Pages — Knowing when to say when.

Seth Godin just wrote an excellent post on designing effective landing or destination pages entitled “Seven tips to build for meaning.”

I would like to add one more item to the list:
Do not inundate your visitors with required (or even optional) fields.

Nothing frustrates me more as a visitor than arriving at a landing page, seeing a massive form and having most or all of the fields marked with the asterisk of death (denoting a required field). Companies who ask for more than a handful of fields in the first interaction are just encouraging drop off.

B2B sales by their very nature are often multi-touch and complex (read: not instantaneous). You, as a marketer, have a lot of time to flesh out your prospect’s profile and each touch point provides you with an opportunity to collect more data. Why rush to get everything up front?

The technological solution to this is using conditional fields. This technology allows you to progressively ask for just one or two data points during each interaction with a prospect, depending on the information he or she has already given.

Example:
Sally Smith hits your landing page and is asked for her name, email address, and company in exchange for a white paper. She is then asked for her job title before viewing your flash demo 20 minutes later. Three weeks later she is asked for her department in exchange for another white paper. Finally she is asked about her buying stage when requesting a live demonstration.

You set up the same form for all of your white papers, flash demos, and live demo requests, but you set them up to intelligently display only the fields that you are missing for a given prospect. Your marketing automation software identifies your prospects and remembers what information they have already given you.

Isn’t that a better experience for all parties?