Some people hate forms. In fact, nearly everybody hates forms. Fill this in, give me your details, do not pass go until you’ve told me your mothers maiden name. How rude. Personally I love forms. Why? Because I get to write about how annoying they are and how to make them less so.
My biggest pet peeve (pet? let’s say “form” peeve), is when people don’t express what the button will do when it’s clicked, but thanks to some studies done from the infographic below, we can see that using the dreaded word “Submit” as your form CTA copy, reduces conversion rates by around 3% . For that reason I’m bringing back the image, a quote written by Unbounce’s Ryan Engley. Never Submit.
What can you do to optimize your lead gen forms?
Every marketer wants to optimize their forms to get more leads, but how do you do it? Let’s look at a few ways before you dig into the infographic:
- Test the button copy: Apparently “Click Here” and “Go” are the most successful. Personally, I’d like to test this against a very specific CTA – such as “Click here to download your ebook,” using the power words of “Click Here” with a more descriptive element.
- Form length really does matter: If you want to increase form conversions, you must consider reducing the number of fields. An example presented in the infographic highlights one company that increased conversions by 120% by reducing their form from 11 fields down to 4. Clearly it’s worth sacrificing that extra information to get such a high conversion rate. If you really need extra info, consider doing an a/b/c test where you compare all of your fields with the absolute minimum and a half-way version to determine which converts best – and then weigh it against the value of the extra data collected, and see how it will impact your post-click marketing.
- Don’t call me: An average 5% dip in conversion rate by including a phone number field. Unless your business is based on post-click sales calls, avoid this field at all cost. Not many people like to have someone call them (unless it’s critical to their personal success).
My advice, test your forms constantly – and use the advice from the infographic below as a starting point. You might also want to tweet about some of these cool stats with the Tweetables at the bottom of the post.
Tweetable Tips
You can change what gets tweeted before it goes out, so don’t be afraid to click.
- Forms using Submit have an almost 3% decrease in conversion rate
- Expedia eliminated ONE field (company name) resulting in a $12 million profit
- Asking for a phone number causes a 5% dip in conversion rate
- Imagescape reduced their contact form from 11 to 4 fields, gaining a 120% conversion increase
- Left aligned labels increase the readability compared to right aligned
Comments:
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wpveteran.com
Great info.
Learned 3 things from it. Specifics CTA, Less Field Forms, Don’t ask to much, Try to put your forms on right sidebar.
Thanks Oli
Chase
Interestingly enough, I tested two versions of my landing pages: one with a form in the right sidebar, and one with a big CTA that took visitors to a second page with a form. The pages with the CTA had double the conversion rate. It’s a high value product so that obviously affects things, but it was definitely interesting.
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Ashley F
Fantastic summary in visual form- Infographic!! I recently wrote about choosing the right plugin for wordpress, so I think linking to this will really help my readers even further!
Great job Oli
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Chase
Do you know what I want to know: what ELSE to put on your contact page to optimize it. I can’t touch the fields on our forms or the Sales team will kill me, so that option is out the window. However, I have control over all other elements on the page, especially sidebar items.
Funny thing is, I can’t find a single article online about how to optimize this space, or what other kinds of things you can put on the page with your contact form to increase conversions.
We have about 15 different contact forms in 15 different languages. All of them look the same and yet conversion rates range from 7% to 40%. There must be ways I can optimize the page around the form to increase conversions.
Raul
I never thought that the word “submit” could reduce conversion in contact forms, but it really makes sense, I think that people prefer words that they associate better with sending a contact form
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Better Contact Form
Oli, I agree with you. An user friendly contact form will help to increase the conversions.
That is the reason we made our contact form simple, easy to use and responsive. http://bettercontactform.com
Also, we don’t use CAPTCHA as it is hard for users and may put them off. We use real SPAM patterns and user behavior to verify and stop spam. Eg:
– Users can not enter and submit form less than 10 seconds.
– Users can not submit form without click on Send button or type “Enter”
– And many other spam patterns…
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Nassir Khodesh
Oli Gardner cannot be trusted.
I repeat: Oli Gardner cannot be trusted.
His optimization techniques are unproven.
Run for your lives. Women and children first.
Quickly, everyone. Quickly.
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Ish
Great tips on how we can optimise forms. I still feel it is very difficult to fill forms on mobile and that has got nothing to do with how the forms are designed. It is a basic interface problem and part of a larger problem of input data collection.
ps : we are trying to think of a new interface for mobile forms – hellotars.com
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