“Keep your subscribe form as short and simple as possible.” I’ve seen this advice a score of times, in various ebooks and articles. Most websites I encounter follow this mainstream advice (as does Solo-E).

So I was a bit surprised when I signed up for the Get Entrepreneurial newsletter, and was confronted with a form that asked for my gender, industry, year of birth and country. That’s a lot of information! Curious, I wrote the website owner to ask about their strategy — and got a lesson in turning conventional wisdom on its head.

Using a short form makes logical sense from a number of perspectives: the less information you request, the simpler the form. Visitors are more likely to subscribe if you make it easy for them. And there is a bonus: the shorter your form, the less room it takes on your website.

But there is also a drawback — the only information you have about your subscribers is their email address and maybe their name. If you want more data, you have to rely on voluntary surveys or other market research tactics. A longer subscribe form lets you easily get additional subscriber data upfront.

For GetEntrepreneurial, as a relatively new online company, having demographic data about their early subscribers was important. More important, at this stage of their websites growth, than growing their list quickly. It’s cheap market research and a good strategic tradeoff.

GetEntrepreneurial plans to switch to a shorter form when they are ready to ramp up subscriptions. By then, they’ll have collected the data they need, and will probably leverage it in their subscriber growth strategy.

So, yet again, I was reminded that “conventional wisdom” is, well, conventional. It’s what works for the majority, but not all. And so we should always be on the lookout for when that wisdom doesn’t apply for us — because we are in a different growth stage, our market is unique, or our sales process is a little different. Never be afraid to try things a little differently!

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This entry was posted on Saturday, November 10th, 2007 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Market Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.