Hey Marketers – Here’s some gyaan on building landing page forms which will help increase your conversion rates efficiently. 9 tips to build a great form.
Length of the landing page form
They all say the shorter the form the better – but that’s not really helpful ’cause marketers would like to maximize the information they collect about any visitor or lead. You can manage this trade-off by considering the objective of the landing page:
> ToFu, MoFu, BoFu. No no.. this isn’t baby talk, it’s sales funnel talk. Most Landing Pages are focused on Top of the Funnel (ToFu) rather than Middle or Bottom (MoFu or BoFu). However, if your landing page is aimed at lead engagement (MoFu), you should use the landing page form for progressive profiling. Get your visitor to provide further details that will help you in getting the visitor one step closer to BoFu and the final sale.
> Higher the incentive, the more questions you can ask. Example, if you’re offering a very targeted niche white paper as a free download, chances are the visitor is going to be willing to provide their personal and professional details. So in that case go for a longer form.
> Nature of product – Is your product qualify as a high involvement product? Is it high margin? Do you have a long sales cycle with several touch-points required, then it’s probably best for you to minimize the questions to maximize lead generation. You can always follow up with your email, phone, SMS triggers to start cultivating the leads.
> Go for Zero. How about a form with zero questions? That’s exactly what social logins help you to do. If you get the visitor sign up through a facebook/ google+ login then there’s information that you can easily retrieve from the service provider. But yes, that means you’ll need to have your tech team setup the APIs and integrate with your system.
At the end of the day, you are going to want to test out all of your assumptions. So it’s best to be conservative on the number of questions but start the page quickly. You can run A/B tests on it to figure out what is working better.
Position of the form
You must have read about the science of page layouts. The human eye goes from left to right and top to bottom, so it make sense to keep the most important elements to the top left of the page.
However, certain standards have emerged over the years. Your brand identity is normally in the top left following by a navigation on the top right or centered below. So people have started skipping over these sections and jumping to whatever next catches their eye.
So – while placing your form on the landing page, make sure you give it enough real estate and try to position the form ‘above the fold’. That’s tough for mobile versions, but you get the idea.
By the way, our drag and drop landing page form builder makes it super easy to position your form.
Contrast for Conversions
Once you have an optimal position for your form, do your best to make it grab the attention of the visitor. You could use the standard tricks of contrasting the background color or giving a thick border. Here are a couple of examples of how to get the visitors attention towards the Call to Action.
The eye automatically goes towards Shop Now button because of the contrasting color arrow.
This is a clever use of a stock image to get the user to look to the left.
Mobile Responsive forms
The biggest trouble with mobile interfaces is that they are not ideal for extensive interactions. This has promoted mobile apps where buttons, forms, text and the overall UX is simplified for repeat use. But the first discovery of your website or landing page is most often through search (organic or paid). This means, app or not, you have no choice but to optimize your landing page for mobile.
Here’s an example from a third party blog of how annoying non-responsive forms can be.
You can build a responsive form like the one on the left in just a few minutes with our responsive form builder.
Form Button Interactions
Designers are good at designing buttons – color, size, width, text, rounded corners, alignment and font-family, font-weight as well as font-size. However, very often, they ignore the post-conversion interactions. Once the visitor has expressed interest in your product, you’ve got their full attention. It’s time to turn up the charm!
Write a custom thank you message. It’s an opportunity to re-assure your prospects that they’ve made the right choice. You can maximize your cross-sell and up-sell. You can request for a social share or you can re-direct the visitor to the next page in the purchase journey.
Most importantly, remember to set up an email trigger to shoot out a welcome email to your new contact. Email marketing has one of the highest ROI among digital channels, so make the most of it.
Form Conversion Content
It’s isn’t enough to plonk your form on the page. Give a compelling reason for your visitor to fill in the form. When it comes to writing for conversion – you should remember some of these key points:
> Make the benefits crystal clear.
> Create an urgency through a scarcity message. This could be driven through a limited period offer or a limited set of incentives.
> Provide social proof and validation through testimonials, trust certificates and encouraging imagery. Most people need a nudge while making a purchase decision – make your user feel safe for choosing you.
> Don’t forget to give the right conversion text on the button.
The example below is an awesome example of compelling content.
Pretty cool, huh?
Spam bots
Spam bots come rushing to a newly published form like moths to a flame. Here’s where it really makes sense to use a form builder or a landing page builder so that you can count on spam filters without losing any leads.
In case you are doing it yourself, there are a bunch of things to consider such as banning certain IP addresses, forcing users to register and verify their email before posting, using CAPTCHA images, manually moderating or approving posts, using hidden fields and honeypot techniques, using human friendly but bot-unfriendly language, using session tokens, changing form URLs etc.
There are third party services like Akismet that track known spammers and help you block them out. You’ll need to evaluate whether it is worth the time, budget effort of integrating their service.
The best approach is to use a combination of the above methods.
Form data capture
The data from filled forms is the main outcome of your campaign. You can take the data for the next steps to make the sale.
Lead form data is often immediately forwarded as email notifications. It’s best to store the data in a database or as an update to the company CRM. Email can be unpredictable at times and don’t want to lose or delay that lead data.
Make it easy for yourself to have a simple excel/ CSV format file that you can download.
Use a landing page form builder
Form builders are designed to make your life easier.
Add and edit form labels
- Add popular fields like name, email, phone with one click
- Create custom fields using options such as radio, checkbox, dropdown, URL, text area etc.
- Take advantage of pre-validated fields with appropriate error handling.
- Format the form with font-color, font-family, background etc.
- Select which fields are mandatory.
Responsive Form Layout and Styling
The form on the landing page is responsive to mobile, tablet and desktop devices based on the bootstrap framework. You can:
- Drag and drop, order or re-order the form fields.
- Drag and drop the form on the landing page and re-size the form.
- Edit the form background color, margin padding, border, border weight and border color.
- Set up the initial configuration and edit settings in one place instead of two different places.
- Build form boxes/ fields with rounded corners as well as change their height.
- Build multiple forms on the same page.
Remember, compelling headline, few questions, strong CTA message on button, re-assurance and visual cues – take care of all these and you’ve got a winner form.