A friend working on a very cool stealth start-up approached me the other day to talk about sign up forms and the type of questions he should be asking people when they join his soon to be popular site. In a world of Facebook Connect, I first questioned what percentage of his audience would even create their own login on his site but as we discussed further it became apparent to me that whether people signed up directly on his site or they used FB Connect he needed to collect certain pieces of information that would not be readily available through FB but were vital for the marketing of his business. So again, in a world where it is anticipated that most users will log on to the site using FB, how could he capture the three or four (note that it is important to narrow down to at most 3/4 additional questions) pieces of information that would be vital to personalize marketing communications?

While he could certainly use the Facebook profiles of his members to get some amazing social data on their likes, favorite sports teams etc, the information available would vary too much from member to member and further would take a long time to mine given the current Social CRM tools available. So without scrapping Facebook as a login option, what could he do? For me the answer was simple, use a couple of triggered welcome email messages and a clearly discernible incentive. Upon signup with Facebook Connect, a triggered email campaign would begin where the goal was to welcome the member to the site, but the ultimate goal was to get the same three or four pieces of information that would have been captured had the signup occured completely onsite.

With four pieces of information to gather and an on-site credit to offer users who gave all four pieces of information (whether they did so all at once or over the three emails the incentive was the same) a welcome campaign was designed so that three emails would be sent to the user from the trigger moment of a signup with Facebook Connect (those who signed up directly received a different campaign) and the other two sent 24 and 48 hours after respectively. The three emails were designed to both welcome and aclimatize the user with the site but also were to be excercises in info gathering and pushing the user to make thier first site transaction. A complex set of requirements.

So what did it look like in practice? A triggered mini-campaign of three emails to both welcome the user and capture four key pieces of information was launched where the information gathering exercise was tied directly to the incentive offered. While I can’t share the emails themselves, I will give you a bit more detail.

In each email a key piece of the site served as the functionality to be described but rather than use text, it was done using an embedded video. The use of the video engaged people in the email right away and the simplicity of playing the video allowed for the real estate that would have been taken up by that text to then move up the graphics and text about profile completion (answering questions) and the incentive that went along with it.

Another key part of the email design went to the database behind it and using one of 5 possible dynamic questions/phrases (i.e. not asking the user something that you already had the answer to, questions dynamically appear based on the customer profile) in each email so as to gather new information each time and not present the user with anything non relevant or already known. The email was designed in such a way that the last thing the user saw was a dynamic question that got to one of the four pieces of information that was desired. The question was always graphically rich and tied directly to the incentive available for reaching a 100% profile.

While it was expected that it would take two or more emails to get most people to complete their profile, by tying it into the incentive and making the site information part of the email be a video rather than using that real estate for text there was a tremendous amount of users who completed thier profile after just the first triggered email and nearly everyone was done after email #2.

The timelyness of a triggered campaign combined with great design and a smart database have now allowed this stealth company to have 4 tremendously key pieces of profile information about their customers that would have remained unavailable had they simple accepted the information they received through Facebook Connect as the best they could get.

What about you, any great ways to incent your users to share more info with you?


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