Registration Considered Harmful
Marketing departments spend a lot of time telling you how they need registration screens "for leads" (believe me - a lot of the arguments I had at Cincom centered around that topic). Meanwhile, out in the real world, here's what actually happens:
That's not a rhetorical question -- the answer is 45% of you will just bail out on the purchase, rather than give them an email address, wait for confirmation, click on the confirmation email, etc. When one "unnamed company" decided to finally get rid of that annoying piece of s*** and just let customers shop in peace, they found an extra $300,000,000 in sales by the end of the year. In the first month alone, they generated an additional $15,000,000.
But trust your marketing department - those "leads" are "priceless".
Comments
Re: Registration Considered Harmful
[Randal L. Schwartz] 17 August 2011 4:05:42 PM
You're not pointing at any company in particular, are you? :)
Re: Registration Considered Harmful
[James Robertson] 17 August 2011 8:00:35 PM
Not specifically, no. Most commercial software vendors use registration schemes - probably because marketing craves "leads". It goes far beyond the Smalltalk vendors.