How to Not Ask for E-mail Addresses

I was looking around for furniture in San Francisco and came across a site called “yourfurnituteoutlet.com.” The site sounded promising so I clicked on the link and was taken to a page that looked like this:

The furniture from the pictures looked good, there was only one main problem.  I was asked to enter my e-mail address before I was given access to the site.  Keep in mind that this was not an optional field, entering an email address was a requirement to view any content, so I did what anyone else would do, I clicked the back button.

I’m all for getting e-mail addresses from people but there is a right way and a wrong way to do it.  The right way is to make it optional for the visitors to input their e-mail addresses.  It is then up to the person collecting the e-mails to provide something of value to the subscribers (and not just spam them).  The wrong way to collect e-mail addresses is to make it a requirement.  If you force visitors to input their e-mail information then usually one of two things are going to happen.  Either the user will leave the site, or the user will input a fake or junk e-mail address that they don’t use anymore.

A far better approach for the furniture website would have been to allow visitors to enter the site and then offer special discounts or bonuses for inputting in their e-mails.  Not only does this make it more user friendly, but it also means that the users are already showing a sign of commitment.  The second you bring in a “requirement” into the equation you begin to cause doubts in the visitor’s mind.  I mean why should I or anyone else visiting the site waste their time putting in their e-mail address to a site that is going to most likely spam them with content.  I can just hit the back button and go to another site that will let me view their information for free.

Attention is a valuable currency don’t abuse it by making requirements, you are there to help the visitor not the other way around.

Do you have a subscriber base? what do you find to be the most effective way to get users to input their e-mails?

thanks for reading