“I f**#ing hate forms! They ruin everything.” — Denis Suhopoljac
That was the reaction from our art director the last time we designed some landing page templates.
Unfortunately, forms are a landing page staple, and because they represent your conversion goal, your ability to understand their nuances is the key to success.
You should remember this statement:
Friction is the barrier to entry (effort) that your form presents to your visitors. Friction falls into two categories and has one solution:
3.1 Perceived Friction
This is the shock factor of suddenly being faced with a long form. The perception of having to fill out such a long form can be daunting and cause people to change their mind. A solution to this can be to either shorten the form or split your form over more than one page.
3.2 Actual Friction
This is the time and trouble it takes to actually *fill in* the form, and it can cause pretty serious abandonment issues if it’s not considered. Things that can slow down – or cause frustration during – the process of form completion include:
- Too many open-ended questions that people have to think about.
- Dropdown menus that don’t include a viable option for the visitor. An example of this is the commonly asked “What industry is your business in?”. If there isn’t an answer available and you don’t provide a way out (like an “Other industry” option) then frustration can occur.
- Captcha security input fields. This is when you have to read strange looking words or letters and type in what you think they say in order to proceed. Anyone not hate those?
3.3 The solution: reducing friction with conversion lube
You probably thought that was a passing reference. Nope. Conversion lube is whatever you can give to your visitor to ease the transaction.
Method One: Ask the data for help
One approach to improvement is to analyze the results you get and adapt your form accordingly. When looking at your form data, ask yourself:
- Are a high percentage of dropdown results the first option in the list? If so, you should try to make the answers as short and clearly distinguishable as possible. If people can easily/quickly read the option that applies to them without lots of hunting/scrolling, they will be more inclined to select it.
- Are the responses to open-ended questions actually real answers? Or are they nonsense (such as “asdfasdf”) designed to get through the form as quickly as possible? If so, you should make the questions more direct and easier to answer. Examples would be: “Tell us about your biggest marketing problem” (requires a short story as an answer) vs. “What is the biggest barrier to your marketing success?” (which could often be answered in a few words like “Not enough traffic.”).
Method Two: Apply some balance
“The prize” is the incentive you offer up in exchange for personal data. Your goal is to balance the size of the prize with the amount of friction.
There are many incentives for a user to give up their personal information: Digital documents: Ebook/whitepaper/report, webinars, newsletters, consultations for professional services, discount coupons, contest entries, free trials, product launch notifications.
The rule here is: Don’t be greedy.
Only ask from your visitors what you would be willing to give up if the roles were reversed.
Okay, be a little more greedy than that, but not much.
For instance, if you will be sending an automated newsletter to registrants, email or email/name are all that’s needed. Whereas if you have a product/service that requires a follow-up sales call, you would want more information to qualify the level of interest, and sometimes extra friction can actually help to remove the looky loos from your funnel and improve lead quality. Like I said, it’s a balancing act.
When in doubt, don’t get ahead of yourself. Remember that you should always start by asking for a kiss before trying to take it a step farther.
I just got a sad feeling.
I don’t think I’ve done enough to make you fall in love with forms.
You should take a trundle over to this page where it’ll all fall into place.
How to design the ultimate lead gen form
Now we’ve covered some of the theory behind forms, you might be wondering exactly how to go about creating a rockstar form. We can do this by designing our form as if it’s the only thing we’re allowed to put on our page.
Your form consists of the following elements:
- A headline to introduce the reason for the form
- A description with bullets to highlight the benefit and contents of what you’re giving away upon completion
- The form with descriptive form fields (original label names and questions can capture attention)
- A Call-To-Action
- Trust statements or links
- A closing urgency or context-enhancement statement
Below is a sketch of how a form designed using this method might look:
How was that? All loved up on forms? Not yet?
Maybe we need some real examples. Below are some examples of lead gen landing pages (#withforms) that I happen to like.
The short and sweet signup form
The ebook download form
The request a callback form floating over a guy’s crotch
The super-long form with a happy guy at the end
#formlove
From: https://moz.com/blog/most-entertaining-guide-to-landing-page-optimization
Chapter 3: How to make friends forms and influence people
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