Making people to submit a lots of data

[csanadbanhegyi]

Howdy Moz Community,

I'm working on a financial product and looking for best practises or case studies on how to make people submit lots of personal/sensitive data which are needed for making calculations. Do you have any technical, UX, CRO etc. experiences how to guide people through of that 10-20 minute long process?

Your help is much appreciated! Thanks!

Your help is much appreciated! Thanks!

[csanadbanhegyi]

Bryan, Chris thank you for your help! It ensured me that there's no golden rule for this problem. The problem is, that I'll need people to add quite boring data (e.g. demographics, car and real-estate conditions).
I'm considering to split it up somehow and slowly but surely make people submit all the needed data. Capturing an email address and then guide the users through a personalised program making them fill everything, seems reasonable.

I was just surprised that I hardly found anything in this topic on the interwebs. Maybe I'll write one our of this case.

[ChrisAshton]

Great tips Bryan! The only thing I'd add to this is to be realistic about your sales funnel expectations and how you structure your site.

Almost nobody is going to spend 10 - 20 minutes submitting personal information (or even generic information for that matter) on their first visit. Tailor your landing pages toward new clients without completely neglecting the returning ones. Capture at least an email address from those interested new users then use a combination of quality content, social presence and email marketing to build that familiarity and rapport to a point where they're comfortable in giving you their personal info and they see the benefit behind it.

You can't just tell someone your product or service is good and expect them to believe it, you have to provide an environment where they can arrive at this conclusion by themselves.

A good example of this being Moz vs a small SEO website. You're far more likely to spend 20 minutes completing a survey and providing contact info for Moz than you are a small firm you've never heard of because they do this stuff very well.

[Lumina]

No one can really answer a question like this without knowing more details about your product. However, generally speaking, I would say to try to do the following:

• Break the process up between at least several, related steps.
• Keep the design simple, and the clutter and/or extra content to a minimum during the process.
• The more a user can click rather than type, the better. Drop downs are generally preferable to text-input fields.
• Keep the design, headings, and placement of items consistent.
• Ensure that, if customers are inputting sensitive data, that the entire site or section is https (getting an SSL certification). That way their data will be secure.
• If you're worried that people may not be willing to spend 10-20 minutes, consider having a preliminary amount of data necessary for sign-up / login / etc. and then allow them to add more information before accessing the product directly.

These are just some general tips, but I hope they're helpful nonetheless.