Permission Marketing: Opt-in sign-up form with automatic downloading feature
One of the challenges with permission marketing is getting that initial “go-ahead” with your visitors. One way of overcoming that is to entice your visitors with a free gift, such as a useful whitepaper or document, so that they will give you permission to engage with them (i.e. via an email address they provide) for future marketing activities in exchange for this free gift. This “opt-in” approach is much more favorable than the “opt-out” one commonly used by telemarketers, bulk mailers, etc.
Edalor asked how this can be implemented in Office Live Small Business. We cannot use the standard Contact Us module as it does not provide such functionality. What we need to do is to create a simple Business Application List that will store a name field and an email address field. These fields will be used to capture data submitted by a visitor via a form we place on the web page using Form Designer. Once the form is filled out and submitted by a visitor, the whitepaper or document will be provided automatically. Here’s how to do it:
- Go to Business Applications->Team Workspace (we will use this for now, you can use another Business Application or create a new blank application to store your list)
- Click on +Add at the end of the list tabs. Select Custom List.
- On the New page, you can call the list Signup and click on Create.
- When the Signup list is displayed, Click on Settings->List Settings.
- Under Customize Signup, do the following:
- Click on Add Columns from Site Columns, under Available Columns, select E-Mail and add it to your list.
- Click on E-Mail and select Yes for Require that this column contains information.
- Click on Title and rename it to Your Name.
- Now your Signup list is ready. Go to Documents Gallery and upload the document that you want your visitors to download to it.
- Once your document is uploaded, go to the web page where you want to place the signup form and add a Form Designer module to it.
- In Form Designer, select Team Workspace as the Application. Select Signup as the List.
- In the Success Message Box, clear its content and add the following code to it:
<script type="text/javascript">
window.location.href="http://full_url_to_the_document_you_want";
</script>
- Save the form. Now you are ready to test it out!
Click here for a demo.
I appreciate your feedback. I will work on implementing your recommendation. It’s particularly appealing because it is self-contained within the functionality available in Office Live.
I was unable to get this to work correctly, it could be user error. When I tried this it would not provide the download (documents)
This is great thanks. Only one problem, I don’t know how to find the URL for a doc in one of my shared workspaces…. can you advise on that?
Ah, sorry, i had the doc in a shared workspace. Now got it in the website document gallery and have worked it out.
This is what I want for my website. You rock!