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Registration - Identify Advisors without Discouraging Their Participation

By Helen Gurina

In the age when information gets distributed freely and rapidly from user to user, an asset manager can find it challenging to strike the right balance between public and private pressures on information access. On the one hand, an asset manager needs to feed the impatient social community or they'll miss out on opportunities to disseminate ideas, drive traffic to their site, and build customer relationships. On the other hand, an asset manager must be careful not to break industry regulations, lose the ability to track individual advisors, or diverge from broader company strategies such as promoting proprietary tools. In an ideal world, all needs could be met simultaneously, but in practice something has to give in the juggling act. One area to re-examine is your Web site's registration and log in process.

Registration is perhaps the easiest area to quickly alleviate some of the hindrances to a quick, accessible experience that advisors have come to expect from online interactions. Though it is imperative for an asset manager to identify which advisors are using their site, how they are using it, and to ensure that they are who they say they are, many of these large security and performance issues can be addressed in a subtle way. Streamlining this process can go a long way to alleviating frustration advisors can have over filling out dozens of long forms and remembering a myriad of passwords for all the sites they visit.

Image: Password Hell by Ron Bennetts

You can verify an advisor's identity and gather the necessary data without sending them running to the public site or off your Web site entirely. Guide them through the process gently so that they may not even notice they registered.

• Demonstrate why they should register - Illustrate reasons for registration. Tease them with additional content that is locked unless you're registered. There is a reason you're making an advisor jump through hoops to get your content -spell it out.
• Try to make the registration form disappear - If you can tell who an advisor is without filling out any information or with just an email address - perfect, don't make them enter anything. If you can identify their record in your CRM with just an email address, let them in. Give each click and field that you require of an advisor to register login very careful consideration, and throw away anything you can live without. Is it really impossible to remove the extra fields or just tricky?
• Make login disappear - If you have the advisor cookied or otherwise identified, don't ask for their password again. If they arrived from a clicking a unique url in one of your emails, cookie them and be done. Advisors have to remember dozens of passwords and your login form might be the straw that breaks their patience.
• Make password recovery easy - Some of your advisors will forget their passwords or login names, or both. Make it easy for them and for your team to get the advisors back on track.
• Gather information afterwards- Just as you have to ease into registration, ease into data gathering after you establish a relationship where the advisor is hooked on the value your web site it providing. You can figure out their email preferences, mailing address, product interests, and favorite color after you have them engaged. Tucked away under account settings, implied from clicks, and surveyed topically - there are many ways to build an extensive profile. People are willing to disclose a tremendous amount of information if you show them the benefit - just look at how much data Facebook gathers.
• Don't leave them hanging - Hold the advisor's hand the whole way by illustrating how long the process is going to take and reward them for every step accomplished. Always have the next action in mind, so once you have them registered, reward them with a graphic and show them around. Guide them around the key features for which they registered.