Results of restricting non-corporate domains in an email address field in forms

[Anonymous]

I've seen several helpful posts in the forum that describe the script required to restrict non-corporate emails when a user fills out a form. I'm wondering if there is a preference for B2B campaigns one way or the other for top of funnel list development?  Is there any ROI to demonstrate that more revenue/pipeline is influenced by original source leads with corporate only email addresses? Or perhaps after lead scoring and nurturing corporate email addresses become a high quality MQL?  I'd love to hear the feedback from Marketo Nation smart demand gen folks.

[Josh_Hill13]

Did you mean Personal Domains vs. Non Personal Domains...instead of "original source leads"?

I haven't seen any ROI figures. In depends on the business. I generally don't care who fills in the form, I filter by scoring and other demographic tools. Why stop someone from getting your content?

Now, I might not send some campaigns to Personal Domains or shunt them off somewhere. My theory is that some people hide until they are ready and others may grow into customers.

If you are concerned about junk leads, then filtering at the form level will help with that.

[Anonymous]

Thank you Josh, for your insights. I tend to lean the way you do with personal domains (yes, that is what I meant). I'm especially concerned with the Top of Funnel campaigns running in paid search. I think if we restrict to business domains (non personal domains) then we might not allow the "people to hide" while they are doing some research or discovery.  We can score based on those parameters and watch for their digital buyer signs.

[Kristen_Malkov1]

Hi Lisa,

I think it really depends on your business setup/product you offer. I personally subscribe using my personal email domain for a decent amount of content, because then you don't "lose" your subscriptions when you transition email domains.

Have you had an unusual number of leads that are 'junk' with non-branded domains?

I think another option you could consider would be to use progressive profiling to pop up an additional email domain at a certain point in a nurture (for additional content, etc), and then possibly run a campaign to rewrite the old field? Just an option if you are worried.

[Anonymous]

Thank you Kristen. Some helpful tips. If I create a progressive profile whereby someone enters another email while segmented on the progressive profiling form fill would that lead's email address be updated with the new value? Or, as you say, would I need to write a campaign to rewrite email field (if that is possible)?

[Kristen_Malkov1]

You'd need a campaign to delete then overwrite that field. I think it might be best to just create a secondary custom email address field to see if they'll give it to you. Then possibly running a campaign to write one to the other (if that's what they want?).  You could send an opt-in ish email that said something like "We have these two email addresses for you; would you prefer for us to use ______"

[Anonymous]

Thank you Kristen, I think the latter suggestion sounds safe enough. I had not been aware of applying a feature like that.

[Justin_Norris1]

Lisa Schwartz​

Regarding your original question:

At a previous company, we had data to indicate leads with company domains were significantly more likely to purchase and have significantly higher LTV than leads with generic domains. I don't have access to the data anymore, but it was a big difference.

In that case the target audience was small businesses, and a personal email address tended to mean they weren't mature enough to even have their own business domain. That = lower quality lead.

However, that was very specific to that business context and we had several years of data to prove it out.

Even then we certainly didn't block generic email addresses, it was just a factor in lead scoring that then translated into how much personal attention those people received.

With a more mid-size/enterprise business offering, a personal domain could mean the opposite, a company that is so well-known that they use a personal address to avoid getting swarmed by sales reps. Or someone just researching carefully.

Key thing to my mind is that business context is super important.

I think Kristen Malkovich​ has offered some good ideas for how to manage those leads who do sign up with personal addresses.

[SanfordWhiteman]

I agree with everyone else that there's no hard and fast rule; even as the provider of code to block "consumer" accounts, I wouldn't use the code myself.

To add to the complexity well noted by Justin Norris, in our business (financial industry/wholesale model) there are people with Gmail addresses who are investment advisers to high net worth clients.  They may be sole practitioners working out of a home office, but if they have clients (likely of similar age/demo) with $$$ who don't care where they get their email, we don't care either.

[Anonymous]

Very good points Justin. I tend to agree with your analysis on the lead criteria within the context of company size/intent.