Are your forms working?
Following up on our last article, where we discussed the creation of better converting landing pages, we thought it timely to address the issue of optimizing the forms that appear on your site.
There has been a lot of trial and error, and a lot of research about how to create the best form to obtain opt-ins on your landing pages or website. It stands to reason that the form that works best for your needs is the one that is tailored specifically to your product or service offering. For instance, if your form is intended to invite a prospect to receive a quote or an evaluation of some sort, the form would obviously require more fields than if you are simply looking to gain email addresses for your mailing list through an offering of a free white paper or e-book.
Every day, we are invited to download free reports, e-books, white papers, etc. And, every day, we make decisions about whether we think that the value we will receive is worth the cost of our email address. Just like you, I have either declined the offer or have submitted my email address in order to receive the offering, only to unsubscribe later when I find that I’m receiving too many emails. But retaining prospects and clients on your email list is a subject that is separate from today’s focus.
So, back to making sure that your forms are actually working for you.
Review the following five points to optimize your forms:
1. Make sure that you have the right number of fields on your form. As mentioned above, make sure that the number of fields on your form is appropriate to what you are offering. If you ask for too much information, your opt-in numbers will suffer.
2. Ensure that your forms are fully accessible to users who use a keyboard instead of a mouse. Drop-down options are great, but you have to make sure that if somebody is using a keyboard that their arrow keys are fully functional for the form.
3. Test your forms. Make sure that your forms work correctly and smoothly across all devices, screen sizes, and browsers. If your form does not display properly to some users, they will become frustrated and will give up.
4. How intuitive are your forms? If the user makes a mistake when filling out your form, does it display error messages allowing them to correct the mistake immediately?
5. Is there anything about your form that would discourage the user from completing the process? Let’s face it, we all are looking for forms that are simple and self-explanatory. We don’t want to have to work simply to provide someone with access to our email.
Using online techniques to market and promote our businesses is essential in this day and age. Encouraging people to become repeat visitors to our sites and to sign up for our offerings is an important component of online success. Make sure when you are developing your forms that you review these five elements to make sure that you are making the users experience as simple and as seamless as possible.
Until next time…
Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.
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