Killer Registrations

Presentation by John Greenacre, IPT

Recently, IPT carried out a survey of best practice concerning website registrations and newsletter sign-ups.

It suggests possible routes for sites to make their registration process easier, clearer, quicker and more accessible.

• "Add us to your address book" - if you are sending emails to people, they ought to add your address to their address book to ensure it doesn't get caught in spam filters.   Methods to do this in popular email clients should be given as online help.
• Advertising the benefits of registration/sign-up is key to drawing in users.
• Options for the user to personalise content have been shown to improve sales driven from the site.
• Privacy statements engender trust - they should be on every page and linked in multiple places where appropriate.
• A confirmation of registration/sign-up is essential - there must be positive feedback to the user.
• If you have a website registration and newsletter sign-up, the other one should be pushed to the user during processes.
• Newsletter sign-up pages should contain images of a recent sample image (and if possible the full text) and a full archive of past issues wouldn't hurt.
• Email address confirmation fields need to have the copy-paste facility disabled to prevent a bad email address being duplicated.