The Debate is More Than Just Forced Registration
Posted by Milan Cole on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 4:13pm.I think this site and the discussion that it will encourage is about more than just forcing registration; it's about how we use the Internet to market ourselves as real estate agents. One of the things that is unique and special about Internet marketing is the unprecedented degree to which marketing ideas can be tested and measured. Since I think it is fair to say that most real estate agents hope to profit from their Internet marketing efforts, it seems to me that we would all want to maximize the bang for our buck that we are getting.
Now if anyone can demonstrate using meaningful statistics that it's possible for an agent to generate more business from not forcing registration on their website, then I would love to hear about it and see what you are doing. In our case, my testing has indicated that forcing registration results in a substantially greater volume of leads and that these leads are very similar in quality to the leads we received without forcing registration. Here is the results of a recent 6 month test that we ran:
Now if you look at the curve of the chart it follows the expected seasonal variation. So if we average out the 3 months for seasonal variation then we find:
3 months with unforced registration (April/May/June) = average 196
3 months with forced registration (July/August/September) = average 649
So we are roughly averaging a 231% increase in leads since switching to forced registration.
The question remains though, "How can we do better?"
To answer this question, we are going to try to improve our conversion rate, which currently stands at 4.5% of visitors or 6.6% of unique visitors. To do this, the first thing that we are going to do is to test different variations of the registration page text. The reasoning being that this is our initial sales pitch to prospective consumer, and my hope is that if we can do a better job of communicating the benefits of working with our company and the power of using our website then they will be that much more likely to want to register with us.
Print
Share1 Response to "The Debate is More Than Just Forced Registration"
Leave a Comment
Recent Blog Comments
- Week 5 Data Results: Forced vs..
-
Hey Matt,
Thanks for sharing your findings with all of us. Much appreciated. :)..
Share your thoughts
- The Debate is More Than Just F..
-
You are correct Milan, this is about more than just collecting leads...it's about converting them at the highest possible rat..
Share your thoughts
- REW Blog post - Forced vs. Unf..
-
Even before our REW site we tested with forced vs. non-forced registration and the results were so telling that we do require..
Share your thoughts
- Week 4 Data is In: Forced vs. ..
-
Good information to eliminate the age old question to know what is the right approach. From my view, if they are only tire k..
Share your thoughts
- REW Blog post - Forced vs. Unf..
-
Actually, Tim... I was one of those folks up until about a year ago... with a brokerage site that fed leads to 110 agents and..
Share your thoughts
You are correct Milan, this is about more than just collecting leads...it's about converting them at the highest possible rate and meeting their needs with improved customer service and talented agents. Your 3 month results are staggering! On the registration page front, we have tried some things using Flash with our registration page with the hope of increasing registrations. Maybe when we are done with this test we will look at testing some registration page ideas and share our results. Thanks for contributing here and we would love your feedback about what we have done with our registration page!
-Brandon
Posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 3:01pm.