White Paper Suggestion: No Registration!
For the past several weeks, I have been posting a weekly update called, “The Free White Paper List”. It’s a compilation of white papers that have been posted on Twitter over the course of each week that do not require registration or personal information. So far my idea is gaining traction. An increasing number of people are telling me that they are interested in reading FREE white papers and receiving my list.
On the other hand, if I find a white paper that requires registration, it does not make it to the free list and does not get promoted.
Why?
If you’re like me, my email Inbox is FULL of promotional emails, newsletters, suggestions, and blog updates. When you add all the other marketers that my email address has been sold to, my spam filter has a difficult time keeping up. I’m sure yours is as well.
It seems that my sentiments are not alone in this area. I found an interesting blog post that echoed my position. It’s from B2B Rainmaker, entitled “Registration – When is enough enough”. One of the more potent comments on this blog post reads as follows:
I tried to look at their product brochures, white papers, and case studies. Same result. I couldn’t get any information about this company without giving all of my contact information. Yes, I could have made up some bogus information and register, but why bother?
If I have to register to find out about your products and services, let alone read your customer testimonials, I’ll first click to the countless others in your market and look at what they have to offer. You’ve lost the chance to make me your prospect.
Like most things on the Internet, a good idea over time eventually grows stale. When the ability to register a web surfer first came out, it was a novel concept. But over time, it has become as common, boring and irritating as being called by a telemarketer at dinner time.
White paper marketers need to know that continuing the practice of requiring registration will only generate diminished returns with fewer people willing to sign up and read your white paper. It is far better to give your white paper away without the registration requirement and let the quality of its content be the determining factor that promotes your company, product, service, or idea.
Sounds nutty? Not really.
Like everything on the Internet, it’s all about exposure. If you have a good looking white paper with quality content, it WILL get noticed, read, and re-distributed on social media such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Plaxo. The better the white paper the greater the exposure.
Remember when software companies in the 1980′s like Lotus 1-2-3 copy-protected their software? After a while the backlash from that idea slowly contributed to Lotus’s undoing and made Microsoft Excel king of the hill. The same can be said for white paper registration.
It’s time to let that bad idea slowly fade away into the sunset. Free your white paper from registration bondage.
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May 11th, 2009 at 3:42 am
This post could not be better timed as I was thinking about this yesterday. I’ve been reading David Meerman Scott’s World Wide Rave and am changing the way I think about white paper registration. While I had thought requiring registration is something a company typically should do, I now think the opposite. Unless you have a stated objective to generate leads and build a list, I don’t think it makes sense to require registration. In addition, there are so many leads that marketers (and sales) aren’t handling effectively. If you take an honest look at your lead process and know that you don’t have a good mechnism for follow up, I would give the content away without registration. Great topic, Jonathan!
May 11th, 2009 at 7:29 am
Hi Michele,
Thanks for your comment.
I hope this idea catches fire and becomes the new standard. It will certainly bode well for the white paper medium as a whole.
Jonathan
May 13th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
I hate obnoxious registration forms as much as anyone. And I’ve seen numbers like Red Hat getting a 79% jump in white paper downloads when they removed the registration. So I’ve often argued against registration.
But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, folks! Many companies DO want to build up their house list of prospects, and have designed nurturing campaigns that are helpful and informative. It all depends what the goal is.
Sure, give it all away when the company is just starting out and has no sales force… or if you’re trying to build mindshare like Red Hat. But consider asking for three or four fields of information (not mailing address?!) when the company is bigger and has some salespeople who need prospects to chase. Blanket statements for or against registration are not helpful…it all depends is the best answer.
Gordon Graham
http://www.ThatWhitePaperGuy.com
May 14th, 2009 at 8:50 am
Gordon,
Thanks for your input on this issue.
As we can all agree, the primary goal of any marketing organization’s use of white papers is to have them read by as many potential customers as possible. Requiring registration, in my opinion, makes that goal all the more difficult.
If I had to bet dollars to donuts, I would say that the vast majority of people who submit their email address in order to obtain a white paper, opt out of that mailing list after they have obtained the file. One has to ask the question at that point: Why bother?
I see white papers and registration as a “pre-sale” versus a “post-sale” proposition. White paper readers are primarily for “pre-sale” prospects that have not made up their mind whether they are going to do business with that firm. On the other hand, registration is best with a “post-sale” audience that has already conducted some form of commerce with the firm and wants to maintain contact for additional information.
If the goal is distributing white papers to as broad an audience as possible in the pursuit of farming prospective customers, it’s far better to give it away rather than requiring registration. You’ll probably create more good will as a result.
Jonathan
October 19th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
I agree! That’s why I created http://www.whitepaprs.com . Check it out and let me know what you think…