How to get information from your user minimizing the risk of losing them

Do you deserve my information?

Asking for information to our users is always hard. It’s usually one of the main concerns of every UX designer over there. If you ask for the email too early the user might leave the site as it’s not providing enough trust to give it their email. If you ask for it too late they may already get the whole value they were looking for.

Sometimes this information is crucial for your business. If your company catch most of the clients by email campaigns, you should optimize getting emails from visitors. Every visitor you don't get their email is a potential loss. It could even be a real loss if you are paying for leads.

That's why you should always ask yourself if the value you propose to your users is fair for the information you are asking for it. It's a subtle game of trust that has no real answer, you should adapt it to your needs and your users.

Some practical example

It's really important to find the right place where to add this new friction, let's say we are developing an online car selling application. Your application allows users to:

• Pick a car: Select a car by model, colour, age of manufacturing, etc.. Read details about the car: Specific information about the car itself.
• Check availability in their area: Sellers in your area offering the car they want.
• Buy the car: End the transaction by filling your personal information and finally buying the car.

Everything is about timing

First of all, we need to detect where we are getting the biggest drop, it's probably between checking availability in their area, and buying the car, which makes sense. At this point, we are letting all those users leave without asking anything about them, there's no possibility to re-engage them by marketing campaigns, nothing.

That's why we are going to make mandatory filling your email at some point of the flow. Now the question is: where should we add this friction? As we discussed earlier, if we do it too early we might lose most of the traffic.

Now it's time to think about what differentiates your product adding the biggest value, in this case, it's pretty visible that checking availability near you is a pretty big value, saying this we are going to ask for the email in exchange for showing availability in their area.

This way we also allow users with low intent to interact with our page building trust by reading details about cars, so when they are ready to make the next step they can do it. Every user is getting value from your applications, it's important to not exclude lower intent.

Iterate the way you ask for information

We'll ask for the information inside a modal, but there are different ways to do it, let's first see a pretty simple way of asking for the email in a basic modal.

This first iteration is lacking some important stuff, it's not clarifying what the user is gaining by giving you their email. Why would someone give you information for
free? It's important that you explain the value for giving their email. In this case, they'll be able to check sellers in their area and finally buy the car.

As a last minor change, we can improve a little bit that call to action, continue doesn't catch your eye really, we can also add some hierarchy to the continue and the back buttons, making it catchier to press continue. These are small changes that might help to get the user attention wherever you want it to be.

Now our modal is adding value to our user and making it clear what to do. You should also add some legal stuff about they accepting your policies, or make it clear you are GDPR compliant if you are in the UE.

Some extra tips

• Make the input field easier for the user, for example, if it's an email make sure you add the type to the input. These improvements affect a lot the user experience.
• Play it smart, most of the time when users see these dialogues they just try to avoid them, so you need to be smart, an easy thing to do is for example not disable the main call to action but once they click it if they didn't add their email just autofocus into the input and add some small message/display error to make it clear that's mandatory to continue.

Conclusion

Asking for information is not easy, you'll have a big drop off rate, but sometimes it's better to filter your users to a certain point. But most importantly, you should never forget about making it clear to the final user what they'll win by trusting you.