The Pros and Cons of Making Users and Visitors Register
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Making a user, visitor or customer register is a quite a big decision for any site, as there are advantages and disadvantages of doing so. When weighing up the decision to provide a registration facility, you first need to ask yourself is it really necessary for you to make this step.
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If you are selling products or offering sensitive data, of course you should offer a registration facility, but if you are simply looking to gain visitors data for up selling or marketing, the decision becomes a little more difficult, as more and more web visitors are refusing to register with sites, due to the large increase of spam and cold marketing over the past five years.
Advantages of User Registration
Capture Data - Arguably the main reason most websites ask their visitors to register is to capture their data, specifically email addresses and phone numbers. This then allows for the website or company to advertise future products and services to anyone that has registered.
Make Money - If you are looking to charge for some content or offer different levels of access for users, you can use registration as a way to make some money. You will of course need some kind of payment processing, but this is often used when looking to upgrade listings or offer premium content etc
Control - By making visitors register, you can control the content each access group can see, which means you can release new content exclusively to members, giving visitors a reason to register. It can also mean only the people you want to see any sensitive data are the ones that have registered and in effect been vetted.
Feel Exclusive - Even in this day and age, offering content to only registered users does attract a little bit of interest and some people do seem to like this exclusivity of only registered members being able to see this content or access this area.
Disadvantages of User Registration
May Put Some Users Off - A few years ago it was not that hard to get users to register, in fact, people seemed to want to have the odd email from the company or website they visited. But, thanks to the influx of spam, users are now very reluctant to register for anything that they do not see some benefit from, so you might need to give something away to make most register.
Data Protection - If you are storing visitor's data, their names, emails or anything to do with the visitor, you need to make sure you are abiding to the Data Protection Act, which is vital to protect yourself and your users. Also make sure your Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy are strong.
Security - Make sure that any data you do collect, as mentioned in the Data Protection Act is secure, as many companies have seen major issues due to not storing the data correctly. Also, make sure you have a back up of registration as there is nothing worse than asking thousands of people to re-register!
Of course, there are many more reasons why it can be a good idea and also a bad idea to make users register, but the ones above we have heard the most consistently from our clients. If you feel the user will benefit from registering, then go ahead and ask them to, but you do need to make sure you give them a reason to do this, maybe give away a free guide, enter them into a competition or just make the content good enough to warrant registering with you.
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