Use this three-step approach to get a customer’s email

Should you require people to provide an email so they can download a brochure from your website? That was the debate on a Facebook business group I saw recently, and opinions were divided 50/50, leaving no one with clear answers. So what does behavioural science say? 

Cutting to the chase, these are the three things you need to do to get this type of user engagement right:

1. Right size the reward

   Match the value to your customer to the effort required. The greater the effort they have to go to, the greater the reward for bothering has to be. 

2. Minimise effort

   Eliminate unnecessary friction. Requiring their email address is a point of friction that will see some customers lose interest. Asking invasive questions or including a lot of fields is even more friction, and further reduces the odds they’ll proceed.

3. Maximise reward

   Make sure you are clear about what the benefit of bothering is to them. Make sure you explain it using my ‘Get before Give’ rule. Explain what they get before what they have to give you.

Now that you have my answer, let’s work back to how I got there, starting with the pros and cons of requiring someone’s email.

Pros and cons of requiring an email

The pros for requiring someone to give you their email in exchange for content or gifts — known as a ‘lead magnet’ in marketing circles — are clearly in favour of you as the business. You get a point of contact for a prospective customer whom you can then engage with offers and information.

The cons are shared.

Not only is it a point of friction for your website visitor — a hurdle that gets in the way of them accessing the information they want, it vastly reduces the odds that they’ll bother. 

That means it’s a big con for you because they won’t ever see that magical piece of collateral you spent time and money crafting.

It also signals to them that you place your needs above theirs. Is this the message you really want to communicate?

If I was going to argue the case in favour of requiring an email, I’d say that it gives you the best opportunity to follow up with engaging content. But forcing someone to supply an email doesn’t mean they’ll want to receive one from you. For them, it was a means to an end, not an invitation.

And unless you have two-step authentication — which again, slows the process down for your visitor — chances are many of the addresses you get will be junk, anyway. 

If you are worried that not requiring an email means you’ll never hear from your visitor, keep these two points in mind.

First, if collateral they can download without an email isn’t stimulating them to contact you, clearly it isn’t doing its job. You may want to revisit how it’s been designed so that it leads to the desired action.

Second, I call this the ‘trading hours’ issue. When I worked for the White Pages phone directory, some advertisers wouldn’t want to print their trading hours. Why? Because it forced people to contact them to find out if they were open. They believed this gave them a chance to convert them once they called. 

If their hours were printed, however, they feared the phone would ring less often. Well, yes. They’d get fewer annoying calls with people asking ‘are you open?’ But they’d also stop losing a lot of prospects who didn’t want to call for opening hours and risk being sold to. What they would get is more people turning up ready to do business because they knew they were open.

This is like thinking that just having an email means you’ll convert them. Instead, make dealing with you easy and more people will want to deal with you.

So with that all said, how should you structure lead magnets to neutralise the cons while maximising the pros?

1. Right sizing the reward

   The problem I most often see with lead magnets is not getting the balance right between the value given and the value received. For example, businesses tend to think visitors will readily trade their email just to ‘join our newsletter’. Not likely!

   As with any interaction, behaviour boils down to what I call the Effort vs Reward Equation. 

   When effort is greater than reward, behaviour doesn’t happen. The more we stack the effort side of the equation — like when we require their contact email — the greater the value needs to be for them for bothering.

   So the first thing you should do is plot the value of your content value to the customer (i.e., the reward) against the effort they have to expend (i.e., what you want them to do).

   Some lower-value content should be accessed without having to provide an email, but other more desirable content should require one.

   Once you’ve plotted your content in terms of effort vs reward, the next step is to adjust both sides of that equation.

2. Minimising effort

   The fewer fields you require of your customer, the more likely they are to bother. Ideally limit them to just their email address, and maybe their first name in order to personalise communications. 

   If you need a postcode or phone number, you’ll need to explain to them what the benefit is to them of you having this. For example, ‘So we can give you local pricing’ or ‘So we can confirm delivery if there are any issues’.

   As a rule, the less invasive the required information, the better. For example, requiring their date of birth is sensitive information, and therefore requires a hefty reward to convince them. And no, requiring it just so you can send them a birthday card is probably not enough!

3. Maximising reward

   The key to rightsizing rewards is making your customer interested enough to bother accessing the content without giving something away that they would instead pay for.

   Here are two approaches to use:
   

   Tasty tease: Give them enough content so it’s worthwhile, but withhold a percentage so they are enticed to trade their details e.g., Reveal 5 of your 7 top tips, or give them a  performance score but not what to do about improving it until they join. 

   Get before give: To ensure the reward is most favourably perceived, make sure to explain it from their point of view, leading with what they get (the reward for bothering) before what they have to give you (e.g., their email).

So has that settled the debate?

The question isn’t whether you should require an email in exchange for downloading something from your site. The question is what are you providing that they would want to provide an email to receive?