Get Your Lead Form in Shape: Tips for a Higher Conversion Rate

In lead generation, the lead form is king. As marketing and sales organizations, we tend to view the forms on our websites in terms of dollar signs. Each form submission represents a very valuable source of potential revenue; each field within a form submitted represents a possible way to monetize a lead or to more effectively persuade a prospective customer. What we sometimes overlook in our fervor to supply leads to our sales team is how our customers feel about our zealous efforts to collect their personal information.

Have you asked yourself this question lately: how many of the customers that reach your website are dying to fill out a form? How many of them are eager to impart their personal information to your sales team? You can bet the number is not high.

It’s an uphill battle in persuading internet users to volunteer their time and valuable contact information to you. The easier you make the process for them, the more likely they are to participate. In general, the following principles are best applied to lead form design: keep it short, keep it simple, make it as painless as possible.

In our years of optimizing lead forms for own sites and for our customer’s sites, 360Partners has seen many examples of optimal and not-so-optimal lead form design. We offer the following suggestions for improving the conversion rate on your own lead forms:

Make Your Form Seem as Short as Possible

Note that we use the word “seem”, because the task is not only to shorten your form, but to make it appear short; perception is what matters. To illustrate our meaning, we offer a daunting snapshot of an actual lead form from a telecommunications provider that we encountered on the web:

 
There is much to critique here: the fact that they have inserted the entire form onto a single page exacerbates the lengthiness of it. An entire quarter of the page is taken up by the Service Information section- most of these fields could be hidden under a link (e.g. “add more locations”). Better yet, they could leave it to the sales team to collect this information and not burden their users with it. There are other extraneous fields that could be eliminated, such as “Current Service Provider.” The contact information section looks longer than it actually is, because fields are labeled at the top rather than to the left, and there is a lot of white space in between. In brief, the form looks much longer than the amount of information it is actually collecting, and users are likely to be put off by it.

There are several lessons to be learned here on creating a perception of ease for your users:

•    Eliminate unnecessary form fields. Collect what you absolutely need to know to make contact with a lead, let your sales team do the rest
•    Divide your form into multiple pages if it is a long one
•    Minimize white space and other elements that contribute to the length of the form

Eliminate Unnecessary Steps

In the previous section we recommend separating a long form into multiple pages, but this must be taken with a grain of salt. Each additional page in your form process increases drop-off substantially. The point is to seek a balance between the amount of information on each page and the number of pages in the form overall, while eliminating steps that don’t absolutely need to be there. Consider the following example:

 
The image above shows a single page within a lead form process that collects only a zip code and an email address. The zip code field is pre-populated from a prior page where the zip code was collected, and is redundant. The email address, in the meantime, could be included on the contact information page that follows, and thus this page could be done away with altogether. Considering that drop-off rate per page can range from 5-30% (or more), the simple step of eliminating this page could result in a substantial increase in conversion.

In addition, you can take other steps to reduce the amount of effort for your users:

•    Pre-populate fields (e.g. zip code) that have been previously collected
•    Use smart defaults for radial buttons, drop downs, etc.; e.g., for a geography drop-down box, if most of your users come from a particular country or state, it should be set as the default

Improve Your Error Validation

The goal is to create such ease of use for your users that they will never skip a field or input an incorrect answer, so that error validation is never required. That said, mistakes still happen. If you do not clearly and politely explain to your users how to fix their mistakes, they will become frustrated and may even abandon your form.

The following example illustrates how non-optimal error validation can put a burden on users:

 

 
Note that the form in the image above contains fields for both mailing and shipping address. Though the error message does clarify that the missing field is located in the shipping address, there is potential for confusion with the billing address, especially since there is no indicator on the page to point out the missing field. In addition, the validation only checks  one error at a time. If there are subsequent problems on the page, the user must hit “submit” multiple times to discover them. Placing graphics on the page to point out the problems, and using validation that checks for multiple errors at once would significantly reduce the cognitive load on the user.

In fact, we recommend for many of our clients the use of in-line validation that checks for errors immediately and notifies the user as soon as they skip a field or make an error, rather than waiting until form submission to notify them. This reduces the occurrence of multiple form submissions.

The screenshot below illustrates an application of in-line validation that was put in place of the problematic validation from our previous example:

 

 

In this case, a user receives positive feedback in the form of a green check mark upon the successful completion of each form field. When a field is skipped or filled out incorrectly, a red error message immediately appears. The user thus has the opportunity to fix the problem on the spot, and the placement and color coding of the messages makes it easy to identify the location of the problems. Our test of this solution suggested a nearly 100% increase in form completions.

In summary, we recommend the following best practices for error validation:

•    Provide a clear, polite list of all the problems on the page
•    Use on page graphics (preferably including red font) to point out the errors on the page
•    Use in-line validation to immediately point out problems and missing fields

Conclusion: Streamlining Makes a Difference

As mentioned above, our recommendations stem from years of experience testing and refining our own lead forms as well as our client’s lead forms. We have seen simplifications to lead forms and improvements in form validation that have substantially boosted conversion rate- anywhere from 15% to 200% (or more). In short, we think it is well worth the effort to optimize your lead form.

360Partners is more than happy to offer advice on your lead form design and lead generation campaigns.

Contact us at SearchMarketing@360Partners.com for more information on how to improve your conversion rate and increase your lead flow.