Digital Wavefront

Let’s pretend for a minute that you got invited to a Friday night bash by a close friend. Come Friday, you don your best dress, shoes and accessories and arrive at the party – in style. Now, for a second, imagine if your friend denied any knowledge of knowing you when you made your grand appearance. Wouldn’t that make you feel a bit awkward and leave you wondering if your friend was pulling a fast one on you? I bet you would. You show off your invitation and explain how she had indeed personalized it by putting your name on it, in bold.

Not pre-populating information for invited prospects on an online campaign can make them feel the same way. They may start wondering if the invite they received was in error, because, although the invitation was personalized the campaign landing page wasn’t. It was blank! Just like the look you had on your face at the party.

As part of your campaign strategy, you go through the trouble of compiling prospect data from various internal and external sources. You probably pay someone to perform list hygiene, NCOA, data append services, etc. So, why not make sure you make use of any and all such information to pre-populate your online forms. It shows the prospect that you not only made the effort to put them on the recipient list, but also made sure that when they visited the site, you were at least aware of who they are.

So, when possible, always pre-populate data as it bodes the following benefits:

1. It shows your prospects that you’ve taken the time to invite them into a personalized experience.

2. You’re saving them time when responding to your invite, whether it’s an event registration or a demand generation campaign. You do the hard work and they verify their information. It’s quick and easy.

3. It creates a frictionless experience from the moment the person visits your landing page to the time they register. And, making it easy increases conversions, almost 20-30% higher in some cases.

Imagine landing on a registration page, where most (may be not all) of your information was pre-populated. If it saved you time because you didn’t have to re-type your personal information wouldn’t you be more likely to convert?

There’s a reason why companies ask you to create an account when purchasing or otherwise interacting with them online. It allows them to capture and store this information so they can deliver a personalized “pre-populated” experience on every subsequent visit thereby creating a frictionless experience.

So, leverage your data and pre-populate your forms and let the cash registers ring!