optimising your form

An interesting article on NetImperative about how to optimise opt-in forms, which comes in very handy when running online marketing campaigns.

A few good advice in this article:
1) Have a privacy statement: it is common practice, and reaasure the potential prospect
2) The more questions you ask, the less subscribers you'll receive: MarketingSherpa demonstrated that conversion was increased by 50-75% when reducing the number of required fields from 20 to 6. a good rule of thumb is to keep your form to no more than 5 to 7 fields for the visitor to fill out.
3) Test, Test, Test: run split Testing (or "A/B testing") to inscrease the conversion of your form (an exemple of test result here). Don't assume anything, and spend too much time trying to figure out what is the best design for your form - just try a few of them, and keep the winner. If you are running adwords campaigns, you may want to register to Website Optimiser, which is an excellent interface to support your split testing activities.