This discussion over whether to allow public email domains (like gmail, yahoo, etc) on forms is worth a read. And it got me thinking about something my friend Glen wrote about “Your Problem vs my Problem”.
Companies make decisions to gate off public domains for a few reasons. But the ones I’m most familiar with are:
- It’s too hard for sales to make contact with a public domain
- We can’t reliably enrich and route records who don’t give us a business address
- Leads who use public email domains are junk
The decision to validate against these public domains is easy when armed with the arguments above. And implementing it is even easier with most form tech. But in solving your problem, you make it someone else’s problem (that of the user’s).
If I’m interested in your asset, but don’t necessarily want to be immediately hounded by your sales team, I may just use a public email address. It’s not that I’m not interested in your product or offer. It’s that I want to engage on my own terms. Can you blame most users for this behavior, when the best practice culture in marketing has made pretty much any digital B2B interaction pretty darn predictable?
Your sales team may be right – I probably won’t be super responsive to their attempts to schedule a meeting with me. And yeah, your enrichment probably won’t be as effective. But I am still a real, engaged name in your system. I may just not be as ready to go down your strictly defined funnel as you’d like me to be.
The point is – there’s still value to allowing public domain users through the content gate. Most of all, recognize by solving what you view to be a problem, you are then creating a new problem for your users. You can make that tradeoff, but just recognize that it is, in fact, a trade off.