6 Tips For Improving Conversion Rates On Your Web Sites Forms

We have all seen Analytics reports where 30 people reach the contact form and no one completes it. It must be fairly safe to assume that the people who clicked through to the form were interested, so why do so few fill out the form? This post will give you some of the ways I have discovered to improve web form conversion rates.

1) Remind people why they were going to fill out the form in the first place.
Ever walked into a room and forgotten why you went in there? People surfing the net do it all the time on web pages, prospects have a very short memory once they reach the contact form: they have often partially forgotten the great sales pitch which took them there in the first place. So you need to remind them on the contact us page. For example, if you offer a money back guarantee or if this price is for today only and they need to complete the form today to get the price, tell them next to the contact form. Don’t let them forget why they went to the page in the first place.
2) Don’t ask for too much information
If you are one of the kind hearted souls that answers market research phone calls and participates in the surveys to enter a prize draw, try and think about how you feel when the survey that was supposed to take two minutes begins to run on. Imagine this feeling and times it by ten. This is how people feel with web forms. Most calls to action refer to forms as being “simple” or “quick” so when the prospect sees twenty fields to complete, it not only affects how much they trust you, but also leaves them feeling angry and frustrated. Even if they start the form like the market research survey, they will probably get frustrated and give up half way through. Try to remember, if the form is for lead generation ask the prospect for the minimal information you need to move to the next stage of the sale. Sales men are more than capable of finding out the other information from a prospect: don’t try and replace them with a web form.
3) Make sure the person has the options they need
If you use a drop down menu on a form to save the prospect time, great, but you need to make sure this form has all the possible answers on it or at least a section for “other” if the list would be huge. For example many companies have a section for status, which in my opinion is a fairly pointless question from a sales point of view in most cases. Anyway, often the status options are married or single, now how many people are neither married nor single? There is a whole chunk of the population with boyfriends and girlfriends. These people will be annoyed by the fact there is no option for them. It makes it look like your company is not set up to cater for them.
4) Don’t distract the prospect
Once you’ve got someone to the contact form don’t distract him or her. Why would you put unrelated special offers and adverts on the contact form? It just encourages your prospect to visit these instead of completing the form.
5) Reassure the prospect
People’s personal information matters to them. Make a commitment not to share it with others or Spam them. Try and take the fear factor out of the prospect giving you their details.
6) The double bump factor: don’t make it difficult
In retail shopping there exists a phenomenon know as “the double bump factor” (this is reported in Why We Buy – The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill.) The basics of this is that if someone is looking for something and they get bumped or forced to move twice they become frustrated and abandon what they were trying to look for. The same thing occurs on web forms if the prospect’s form is rejected twice they will in the majority of instances give up. So check your logs to see how many form errors you are getting. Many people could be giving up just because your form is hard work.

I hope you have found this post useful. This post was inspired by an article at http://www.grokdotcom.com blog these guys really know their conversion science stuff so I recommend you take a look.