Data Post October 8, 2009 - Forced vs Unforced Registration Test

The proof in the pudding will be 6 months from now assuming that you have action plans in place (i.e. a good drip that touches systematically over an extended period of time and a new listing notification set up for each and every registrant).



You will find that the vast majority of buyers in the world are not impulsive and wanting to hop in the car and go look at property today. In fact, the vast majority are just beginning their search and will be six months or better before being ready to do something. The majority of our buyers in GA were out of towners and the same holds true here on the beach! Want to truly fail at this game, then ignore this paragraph.



Your drip and new listing notifications must thoughtfully extend beyond the 6 month period (mine goes out 2 years at six week intervals and consists mostly of a 2 sentence "just checking in" message). What you can look forward to is your return visitors increasing enormously and your chances of still being in the buyers mind as a helpful resource when the time comes to buy will be increased as well for they will start revisiting the site in short bursts perhaps to look at only a single property from the new listing notification and perhaps inquiring from that when the perfect property arrives at some point way beyond the registration date.



Your analytics will become somewhat skewed as well in that the % new vistors will begin a downward trend and the # of page views and time on site will begin downward declines as well both due to the large number of burst visits generated by the new listing notifications. The effect becomes that the notifications become relied upon to keep the buyer in the loop and they reduce their surfing (on your site as well as others).



If you aren't putting all visitors on a saved search / new listing notification and your drip does not extend far enough into the future, when the 6 to 12 months goes by and they are ready to perform, they may have forgotten about you and end up talking to a competitor. You will have kept them informed and excited until a period of months before they were "ready, willing, and able" only to loose them from thinking short term versus long term.



Using your statistics and assuming a long term touch plan, on the non-registration site at the end of one year you will be touching 416 persons. On the forced registration 2,236 will be on the touch plan. Given a 2% conversion rate, site one will bring in 8.3 transactions and site two will bring in 44 transactions.



As far as the hot to trot ready to go that filled out the inquiry or showing request, site 2 still had a full 75% of what site one did. These become high touch buyers and site two will not suffer that badly in regard to that percentage. However, you will see that the inquiries and showing requests will increase substantially over time for site two due to the increasing nummbers of return visitors.



For the prior seven days I have 111 registrations and 714 return visitors. On a typical day I have from 800 to 2000 new listing notifications go out. The unsubscribe rate is shockingly only 1 to 2 per week and the "We aren't ready yet, but thanks so much for sending us this information, we will let you know when we are ready" notes exceed the weekly unsubscribes by a factor of 2 or 3.



Makes me break into song with "you ain't nothing but a hound dog" when I pass along the inquiries and showing requests to the team every day. And yes, it is still a relationship game and team members that aren't timely and helpful won't win the business.

Cal,



Thanks for tuning in and giving a great analysis of the data! I agree, without a proper follow up plan and hard working team members our efforts will fruit nothing. Building relationships and giving great customer service to the consumer will always be key in our business.

Wow guys, I'm really impressed by this (the experiment and both of your analyses of the data). Can't wait to see where it'll go, especially as of 1-2 years into the future. It may be tempting to lose steam by that point, but I hope you will persist.



I also hope other markets will be sampled, since it would be expected that user reactions to forced registration will differ amongst different population samples.



For instance, if I were a granny, I would probably be more inclined to register when prompted, whereas a more savvy user might expect to find another site without forced registration, with identical properties and a similar functionality. However, some markets will LACK such competition....



Is there a means/plan to track user who bounce (without registering), and who later return and register? Those numbers would be novel, though perhaps not useful?

Thanks for the amazingly detailed post! I'm intrigued, and look forward to following your progress.



I'm surprised that forced registration only yields about 5 times as many initial leads. From my testing (Years ago), it yielded more like 8 to 10 leads.



We saw similar numbers in the fact that non-forced registration produced more "now" leads, but felt that in the long run, building a relationship over time produced far more leads in total.



Again, thanks for sharing such fantastic information! I look forward to seeing how you do with more testing.

There are too many places to get info for free for any educated surfer. Forced reg is just hard sell. If they reg with your site, they will reg with a dozen more. Automated emails do not equal a "relationship" - it is s substitute for customer service. The proof is in the SERIOUS leads - showings and immediate requests. The "but somedays" are buy from SOMEONE but PROBABLY not you. The close rate will be much higher vs chasing cold leads.

@ Joe: Thanks for participating and posting your comments. I too thought that forced registration would produce low quality leads and create a situation where we would be chasing cold leads.



If you read the other blog posts on this topic, you will find that the unforced and forced sites actually produce nearly identical "Serious" leads. Even more shocking, we are starting to experience higher volume of "serious" leads on the forced site now that we are actually marketing to the registered leads and encouraging them to return to the site. Time will tell and I hope that you keep following the results of our test.



You might be correct that these same leads will likely register on various other websites. All this means is that we need to do a better job of following up with these people so when it comes time to make a purchase, they will contact us. If I was afraid that our clients might be talking to other agents to gather information for their home purchase or sale, I would have gone out of business about 9 years ago. People shop around, that is the way the world works. I am confident that if we have an opportunity to share our knowledge with them, a vast majority will feel comfortable with using our team.



Our goal in performing this test it to determine the best way to promote our websites to the public. We feel that our real estate team offers the best customer service in the industry and we want to share our experience and knowledge with the home buyers and sellers in our area. If we do the best job we can for our clients, our business will be successful. And the more people we are able to talk to about real estate, the more people we will find that will benefit from the exception service that we provide. It's a simple as that!



One last comment: If you really want to contribute on this topic, I encourage you to use your real name instead of hiding behind a fake identity. Blogs and forums are a great way to share your opinions and debate the questions of the day...BUT come on, you have to at least own up to your comments!