Forms using company email address for validation are really frustrating.
I assume Marketing or Sales teams are behind the additional requirement with the aim of better scoring and prioritizing 'leads' for an internal Sales team. In theory, company email address would allow for quicker/better estimation of potential deal size based on company revenue, # of employees, title of employee, etc.
As a user, however, requiring a company email address signals to me that in submitting the form I'm likely to receive either a call from a salesperson or a lot of unwanted email. So, I either abandon the form entirely or use a bogus alias at a recognized company's domain. In a way, it does my email/voicemail inbox a favor.
I wonder what percentage of users exhibit similar behavior. It brought to mind the Hawthorne effect, except participant behavior diminishes instead of improves, when I know the observer (Sales/Marketing team) is watching.
There is also the common problem of false positives, as Troy mentioned.
Has anyone out there evaluated the effects of company email validation?
Everything on this list is very annoying and I couldn't agree with this more.
It is however a result of the general mindset (shared by Troy) that all content should just be available for free, which clearly isn't working out for a lot of companies, thus they implement "annoying" things such as described in this list.
The adblocker blocker has been fixed by an anti-adblocker blocker (e.g. anti-adblock killer), I'm sure they'll figure out an anti-anti-adblocker blocker soon enough.
I assume Marketing or Sales teams are behind the additional requirement with the aim of better scoring and prioritizing 'leads' for an internal Sales team. In theory, company email address would allow for quicker/better estimation of potential deal size based on company revenue, # of employees, title of employee, etc.
As a user, however, requiring a company email address signals to me that in submitting the form I'm likely to receive either a call from a salesperson or a lot of unwanted email. So, I either abandon the form entirely or use a bogus alias at a recognized company's domain. In a way, it does my email/voicemail inbox a favor.
I wonder what percentage of users exhibit similar behavior. It brought to mind the Hawthorne effect, except participant behavior diminishes instead of improves, when I know the observer (Sales/Marketing team) is watching.
There is also the common problem of false positives, as Troy mentioned.
Has anyone out there evaluated the effects of company email validation?