The goal of co-registration marketing is to build qualified, permission-based lists of potential customers with a genuine interest in your product or service.

These leads most often are generated via Web sites that present a series of offers from various marketers after a site visitor has submitted a registration form. If the visitor elects to opt in to a marketer’s offer, the marketer pays the cost-per-lead price that previously had been established with the site owner. A marketer only pays when leads are generated, making this a highly profitable channel for both the site owner and the marketer.

Co-registration marketing has emerged from a sweeps-based marketing channel to a true arena for marketers looking to generate qualified leads and achieve database growth. The key change that has let this channel evolve has been the acceptance of major Web publishers allowing co-registration programs to run on the various sites they control.

The other major shift in co-registration marketing has been the explosive growth of the business-to-business side of the marketplace. In the last 18 months, more than 300 new, significant business-site owners have begun using co-registration and cost-per-lead offers — a more than 100 percent growth rate. Site owners are looking for additional ways to monetize incoming traffic, and business marketers are looking for new ways to connect with potential customers.

As response rates on traditional direct marketing channels continue to head downward, programs such as co-registration allow marketers to take a lot of the guesswork out of the marketing initiatives they’re executing. The hurdles that marketers have when launching these programs often deal with how to utilize the leads that come in. Because there are times when customers are filling out forms that are not located on the marketer’s site, the information they are providing can be limited and can create difficulties when trying to incorporate these records into overall response databases.

What the future holds for co-registration
In the next two to three years, I project that the availability of co-registration programs will grow by more than 500 percent. This will allow the channel to mature and become another extension of a marketer’s overall mix. We’re beginning to see the testing of e-mail programs coordinated with cost-per-lead initiatives, and this emerging multichannel technique will allow for even further growth in the years ahead.

A race has begun to organize and centralize the information related to co-registration and cost-per-lead marketing. Many top list organizations appear to be taking the lead in this emerging channel, which will be helpful to marketers who rely on these vendors to execute other campaigns utilizing various direct marketing channels.

Similar to how e-mail marketing evolved more than 10 years ago, the world of co-registration is just now starting to gain critical acceptance and awareness. Both vendors and marketers need to learn the terminology, metrics and various media options that exist in order to navigate these waters properly. Similar to e-mail in its early days, co-registration is filled with a minefield of poor options for marketers — sites created solely for the purpose of registration as opposed to true content-oriented sites that have loyal readership, for example.

Understanding these options and issues will allow marketers to achieve success in this
rapidly growing medium.

Co-registration tips
A few key things to keep in mind when executing a co-registration program:

• The more fields you want to collect, the more expensive the program will become.
• Auto-responders after form completion increase response rates by more than 38 percent.
• If you don’t contact the leads you receive from a co-registration program within three weeks of receipt, expect to see response rates fall.
• Cost-per-lead marketing includes co-registration, whitepaper syndication, click-to-call, event attendance and more. Many names and variations of programs exist in this emerging channel.

What about pricing?

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