Hey, lead-gen marketers, I’m back with another example of what Monetate has been testing on its landing pages.

A big challenge in online lead generation is balancing the need to collect as much information as possible for lead follow-up with not making the form so lengthy that visitors bail before they complete it.

When marketers like you visit Monetate.com, we know that you want to get the information you came for quickly and easily. That’s why we ask for minimal details on our form before delivering the case study, eBook, white paper, or other resource you requested. Our standard fields: first name, last name, company, and work email.

Recently, we decided to test the impact of including a phone number field in the form, in case we could gather this helpful detail a little earlier in the lead management process. We ran an A/B test on the landing page for the Ecommerce Quarterly, Monetate’s exclusive ecommerce research released at the end of every calendar quarter.

So did the prevailing theory that the more information you ask for upfront, the less likely visitors are to fill out the form hold up for this test? Did it ever, with the test page resulting in a 34% drop in conversion against the control.

Of course, the contact detail we asked for is a variable in and of itself; sharing a phone number is more of an investment than, say, a job title or an industry—something the folks at Hubspot have researched.

As always, you have to test to see what content works best for your goals.