: Why do you need to keep users engaged through your site? I hope this is an appropriate forum for this topic. If not, I apologize. To rephrase the question, I am debating a new tactic that

@Holmes151

It depends on what you are trying to accomplish. If someone hitting a landing page perceives value in what is being offered then they will not be worried about providing their name and email (real or fake). If there is no perceived value then they will not bother.

The only way to get 'hard evidence' is to do some testing.

First off what is the Product Marketing Manager trying to accomplish? What's the end goal? If it's to generate leads then what you described above is method seen quite a bit. There are also many other ways to generate leads (and to get qualified leads).

Yes, step #5 should exist. It would be considered 'up-selling'. Just like when you walk into McDonalds and they ask 'Would you like fries with that?'

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@Lee4591628

This approach was a bit unespecific.

My question at this point is: is the paper free or not?

If it is free, please, let it be really free. I can agree with a captcha, not with a form for something free. Someone will download the paper and put it on rapidshare, 4shared, or even a rival website, for free and most people will end up downloading with less effort.

If the paper isn't free, then you should ask for registration first and so on (note that risks I mentioned before still exists).

And if you wanna track users for ensure you can inform then later about probably interesting papers, use a newsletter.

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@Jamie184

Kevin, I have a renegade suggestion:

Have them fill out a form with the various fields (first, last, email, etc.), but do not validate the input. In other words, allow a bogus email address still to bring them to a download. You could still do something client-side to test whether the email looks valid. Outrageous, right? :-) I can't predict what your percentage of compliance would be, but by eliminating a step you might get a larger overall base.

To illustrate my point, suppose that loosening up might double the base of users who engage with you, and 50% of them give you false contact info, it turns out to be the same number of verifiable users/prospects. And there's a kicker...

For the 50% who gave you bad data, you might still be able to convert them to a sale, right? They do have the white paper, and if that's a good experience, they'll come back for more. You just can't try to sell to them "proactively" until then. OTOH if the white paper is not convincing, whether they provided a verifiable email or not, you would not make a sale, so it's practically no different.

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@Murphy175

I hate this. I hate it, hate it, hate it. Every time I see a website that makes me fxcking register just to get a fxking download I generally leave the site because someone else is going to offer it for less work.

These sites also stink of marketing-collectors so when I see them, I feel that if I DO sign up, I'm going to get spammed to the end of the world and back.

I know this is just anecdotal, but if you get enough anecdotal evidence that might be enough.

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