What benefits are you offering visitors for registering? How clearly are you communicating these benefits? You need to thoroughly convince your site visitors why they should bother to register with you at all.

It's better to add solid promotional copy and associated links that let the visitor know what additional, appealing items s/he can access as a registered user. Provide more information on a subsequent page. Positive, prominent copy points emphasizing the benefits of membership will help keep your visitors motivated to register.

There is a trade-off between knowing as much as possible about your site visitors, and getting them to finish (or even start) the registration process. Marketing managers usually want to know more information than many site visitors want to provide in the initial registration process. You may want to gather some of this valuable user information at a later stage (for example, through an interactive newsletter). Gathering additional user information at successive stages of your relationship with your site visitors - and as their trust in you grows - is an effective way to expand your knowledge of your users.

What personal or contact information (besides e-mail) do you really need to know about your users? Be especially cautious about asking for sensitive information such as age or income. Questions like these should rarely be required, and even as optional data fields, may scare off potential registrants.

Re-examine what you're asking the visitor to complete on the registration form, including the total number of data-entry fields and pull-down selections. How many steps or pages in the process are there? Multi-page forms can be daunting.

The single easiest way to improve your registration form is to delete fields. This means taking out everything extraneous or duplicative.

Do you really need the address, city, state, and ZIP or will a ZIP Code alone do? Do you need to know if someone is a Mr, Mrs, Ms, or Jr? The shorter the form, the less time it takes to complete.

Two common mistakes we see in online registration are:

1) Requiring an overly restrictive data format. Use a flexible, alphanumeric format and don't require "one each" of numbers and letters for the user name or password fields. Visitors like to set up their user names and passwords in a familiar way between sites; putting restrictions on the format may prevent them from completing the form, or from coming back.

2) Asking too many security questions. On some sites we've seen requests for multiple security questions, including password hints, mother's maiden name, city of birth, etc. Choose a single field for a password "hint" or use a pull-down menu for hints. Keep it simple or your registration form will appear not worth the effort.

After you've made updates, it's a good idea to test them. Recruit three to five "friendly users" who are unfamiliar with your registration form, and ask them to try to register online. Sit with them and have them talk to you as they register. Note where they pause. Are you requiring information they don't easily have on hand? Afterwards, ask them how they feel about the overall length and difficulty of the process. Were all prompts clear? If you find there are still issues, go back and fine-tune some more; then test again with a new group of "friendly users."

Positively communicating the benefits of registering on your site, and simplifying the number of fields, pages, steps, and security questions can help fine-tune your online registration and improve your completion rates. Testing revisions with friendly users is an effective way to get feedback on your efforts and ensure the best possible results for your online registration process.