5 WAYS YOU CAN IMPROVE YOUR FORM CONVERSIONS

5 WAYS
YOU CAN IMPROVE YOUR

FORM CONVERSIONS

Tips, Tricks and Recommendations

from the Experts

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 5 WAYS YOU CAN IMPROVE YOUR FORM CONVERSIONS

5 WAYS YOU CAN IMPROVE YOUR FORM

CONVERSIONS
Tips, Tricks and Recommendations from the experts

Most sites have a form for one reason or another. Corporate websites use
forms to capture leads or have potential customers submit requests for demos
while retail sites may use forms to create profiles for their customers or have
them sign-up for newsletters. Since forms are such a commonly used attribute
on a website, much has been written on form best practices and ways you can
improve your form’s design.

In this article we will review some ideas for improving your forms to get more
conversions, including eliminating forms altogether!

1 OPTIMIZE YOUR FIELDS FOR USERS’

NEEDS AND EXPECTATIONS—DON’T JUST
REDUCE THE NUMBER OF FIELDS
It is no secret that you should only be collecting only the information you
absolutely need on a form. The most common principle people tend to follow is
to reduce the number of fields you have on your forms to improve conversion
rates.

While this may seem obvious, it turns out that shorter forms don’t always prove
to be the best performing. In Venture Harbor’s article 5 Studies on How Form
Length Impacts Conversion Rates, Michael Aagaard discusses an experiment
he ran for a client where reducing the number of fields from 9 to 6 decreased
conversions by 14%. According to Michael, this was because the fields they left
were the ones that users didn’t want to interact with or fill out.

In a follow up experiment, they had the same number of form fields but
tweaked the labels to be more appealing to the user. The result was a form that
increased conversions by 19%.

While this is a great example of how keeping the same number of fields and
making adjustments to label descriptions and language impacted conversions,
there will be times you want to minimize the number of fields on your form. For
instance, newsletter sign-ups probably don’t need you to collect more than the
person’s email.

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5 WAYS YOU CAN IMPROVE YOUR FORM CONVERSIONS

Partner
tips & tricks

2
”
LOOK FOR
TRUST SYMBOLS AND MESSAGES ARE
INSPIRATION
KEY
If you are a site that
If you are an ecommerce site or business that transacts online, having trust
does not have really high
symbols is key to helping your customers feel secure when giving you their
transaction velocity, it can
information. If you are not familiar with trust symbols, this is a great overview by
the folks at ConversionXL: be hard to test forms on
your site. To figure out
“Trust Logos” or “Site Seals” could really mean a lot of different
ways you can improve
things.
checkout forms on your
They include privacy seals, brand association badges, or site, look at companies
SSLs (secure sockets layers) which actually create encryption like Netflix, Airbnb or
between the user’s browser and the receiver’s server. Here
Amazon to see what they
we generally refer to them as Trust Seals, as they are all logos
are doing and what you
intended to convey trust onto the webpage, even if they differ
can apply to your own
in how they do so.1
site as they run hundreds
You typically see these logos somewhere near where your users may be giving of tests to see how they
you sensitive info like their credit number.
can improve their forms.
But trust symbols don’t always have to be “trust logos”, they can be things like – TON WESSELING,
customer logos or quotes placed on your site or near a form where you are FOUNDER, ONLINE DIALOGUE
capturing lead information. By doing this, you are in essence showing visitors to
your site that others have confidence in your services, so therefore they can too.

Finally, it doesn’t always have to be a logo. Sometimes using text such as

“Checkout Securely” has been shown to improve conversion rates on some of
our customers websites. Using language like this reinforces that you care about
your visitors information, reducing any anxiety the prospective customer may
have when using your site.

3 DON’T MAKE YOUR FORMS LOOK LIKE

FORMS
For B2B, most forms are a series for fields that a user has to fill out, but this
doesn’t always have to be the case. The challenge with this is two-fold:

You are just collecting basic information that the user needs to fill out that
doesn’t tell you much about their needs, and

You will end up needing to qualify your leads after they submitted info,
potentially wasting the prospects time and your own.

1 https://conversionxl.com/research-study/trust-seals/

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 5 WAYS YOU CAN IMPROVE YOUR FORM CONVERSIONS

Partner
tips & tricks

“
MORE INTUITIVE
CREDIT CARD INPUTS
Time and time again
we implement a really
common amendment to
card inputs which is:

Space the card number fields

into blocks of four as it appears
on a card: “●●●● ●●●●
●●●● ●●●●”. This reduces
the cognitive load in checking
Instead of using form fields, use questions to help guide your visitors through
for incorrect numbers.
the experience while capturing relevant information. LeadFormly is a good
Use a bin range check to example of a solution you can use to build a series of questions that don’t use
validate the card but also fields. On their site, you can try it out by clicking “Show Me an Example” and go
understand what type of card through a series of questions to see if LeadFormly is right for you.
they are using and validate

that for them. If they’ve
typed in a bin range for an
American Express credit
card, display a picture of one.
This will build confidence.
Make the expiry date more
obvious and don’t use selects,
they are bad for mobile.
Instead, use a single field
and help the customer lay it
out as expected “__ / __”.
Don’t collect valid from
dates, more often than
not they’re not needed.
When customers follow these
simple steps they increase
conversion rates every time.
4
OPTIMIZE EVERYTHING ELSE AROUND
THE FORM
Your form may be great, but if the content around your form is not optimized,
you may be losing out on converting visitors to your site. Some examples
of how you might be hurting your conversions include having too much
information on the page where you are trying to convert your visitors or
including information that is not entirely relevant.
Maybe you have an ecommerce site and the last step in your checkout funnel
is a form where the customer needs to enter in their payment details. At this
point, you should just be trying to make the process of filling out info as easy
as possible. That said, if you start adding content to this step or promoting
additional offers, you are distracting your potential customer and even worse,
may be preventing them from completing the last step in the purchase journey.

– LUKE FRAKE, DIRECTOR OF

DEVELOPMENT, SPACE BETWEEN

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5 WAYS YOU CAN IMPROVE YOUR FORM CONVERSIONS

Partner
tips & tricks
For B2B sites that use forms to capture leads, it is important that the form the TEST MANY IDEAS AT
visitor is filling out is relevant to the content on the page. When we create ONCE
landing pages on our own site that have content offers, we always like to include
ABUV Media tested
a short synopsis of what the customer will be getting if they fill out their info.
hundreds of ideas on
a single form widget

5 STOP USING FORMS and proved that small

changes can have
significant results. With
One way to optimize your forms for better
conversions is to do away with them completely. a search space of
There are a lot of great options out there over 380,000 designs,
for capturing a visitors through the use of Ascend found a winning
conversational interfaces or chatbots. One design that imporoved
great example of this is how Drift uses their own
converions by 45%.
chatbot when you click “Schedule a Demo”.

”
Instead of being taken to a form page, the With Sentient, what’s
chatbot engages you to ask you questions about different is, if you have an
what you want to use the chatbot for, details idea or a hunch, you don’t
about your website, and then asks for your email have to consider whether
to send you a calendar invite.
a hypothesis is worth the
While this is really just another type of form, the experience is much more effort to test. You can
engaging and allows you to guide the visitor based on their responses to just throw it in and see
questions and can even qualify prospects before you set up time with them. what happens. And that’s
Creating experiences like this takes friction out of the experience for the user been really valuable.
(saves your prospective customer time) and creates a fun and interactive – DANNY GONZALEZ,
experience (conversational interface). DIRECTOR OF CRO, ABUV MEDIA

JOIN THE EVOLUTION

Whether you are optimizing a single form or pages across your entire funnel,
Sentient Ascend can help you accelerate your testing and optimization efforts
to increase conversions. To learn more, contact us to schedule a demo or learn
more about how you can trial Ascend.

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