Marketers and sales people will do crazy things to get your information.  Technology has made it easier to find new and creative ways to do so… visit a web site? Your email may be grabbed without you even knowing it.  In meatspace, your credit card can be used to link together your personal data into a mailing address (and other things). 

Before you all call the tinfoil hat police, let me explain.  Like a crack addict jonesing for a fix, sometimes marketers lose perspective on what lead capturing is all about.  In your rush to meet some sort of misguided sales goal, marketers take heed:  just because you can track a customer, or potential customer, it doesn’t mean you should. 

It’s become commonplace nowadays for all of us to have a few plastic dongles on our keychains for supermarkets, record stores, and wherever you crazy kids shop nowadays.  We accept this. For a few cents off canned peas, we’ll let them track everything about all our purchases to be scrutinized and analyzed for greater sales yields.  (It annoys you that you’ve done this, don’t deny it.)  What about permission-based lead capture on ‘the interwebs’?  To me, there is nothing worse than traveling through a series of tubes, only to be blocked by a page requiring me to enter my name, my email, my income, and my bank account number -  for the Prince of Nigeria for all I know. 

What good marketers should be asking is: What do we lose when we ask for this information?  How many customers are turned off from a brand because the lead you are squeezing out of them for that drop of content is just too much?  Forcing users to sign up before reading an online newspaper article, forcing users to give information before you can access any sort of web content: it’s bad for usability and it hurts the overall brand experience.  Wouldn’t you rather have people visit your content, be completely excited about it and forward the bejeezus out of the link?  This would be bringing you more ad revenue, but not more precious leads.  Well, let me remind you:  quantity does not mean quality.  Wouldn’t you rather people like your content so much they voluntarily subscribed to an email newsletter about related content?  It may be fewer leads, but they would be more relevant.

Let me put it this way:  For a user of your site, it’s like showing up for the free day at the state fair and then finding that there’s a $10 cover charge.  You end up going, “Aww, man…” and then you and your friends go wander around the Wal-Mart for a couple of hours instead.  There will be sites out there that get it, employ laissez faire lead capture and ultimately have a better user experience and more return users.  Isn’t that what it’s all about?