Most of us go about our online actions without stopping to think about how we are interacting with branded content, websites, and landing pages. We visit a site, find what we are looking for, go through the steps to get it, and then go about our day.
But as marketers, we have to look behind the digital curtain to reverse-engineer and optimize this process. We have to take a step back to see how online forms work, why they work, and what they can tell us about our potential customers.
Here’s A Basic Step-By-Step For How Online Forms Work:
1. Potential customers navigate to a landing page with a form and input information about themselves.
2. The form responses are captured via marketing automation and each individual is placed into a contact pool.
3. The form responses inform a scoring or qualifying system that identifies where each person is in the buying process.
4. Each person is now a known, categorized contact, and can be identified as they progress through the sales funnel.
5. Contacts are grouped into drip campaigns or outreach efforts based on their scoring and subsequent actions.
This is by no means the only process for how an online form works, as each company and brand will have their individualized process. However, it’s important for every marketer to understand the touch points for each person who completes an online form. Here are a few things every marketer should keep in mind…
1. Create Your Optimal Form
In a perfect marketing world, marketers could attempt to have dozens of form fields to capture all of the information they need in one form. But the marketing world is far from perfect, and you can’t expect potential customers to exert the time and effort to give you all the information you want.
The number of fields in an online form is indirectly correlated with its completion and conversion rates. Eloqua published a great study a couple of years ago on the optimal number of fields for online forms; they found that forms with 5-10 fields have 40% average conversion rate.
Another functionality of a form that could be easily overlooked is the Call-to-Action (CTA). This CTA can either boost or distract from overall conversions. There have been multiple studies on the color and effectiveness of CTA buttons, and most show that red buttons have the highest conversion rates.
I agree slightly that the color of the button can have an effect on your conversion rate; however, changing your CTA’s color isn’t the only variable you should consider to boost conversion rates. Take into consideration the content of your CTA, where your CTA button is placed, the overall messaging in your landing page, and the activation energy required for someone to successfully complete the form.
2. Is The Form Hard To Fill Out?
It should go without saying, but if your form is hard to fill out, then you will have lower conversion rates. If you want to learn more about who a potential customer is, then you have to make it as easy as possible for them to tell you that information.
Whether it’s decreasing the number of form field or adding in social sign-ons (which have shown to have 8.5% increases in conversions), the form should be something simple for the potential customer to fill out and submit.
3. What Are You Offering?
Just having a form isn’t acceptable and potential customers will more than likely just pass right over it. Pairing content with your form, however, can help the potential customer see the value in completing the from based on what you can offer them in return. By giving the form some context, you can reinforce the pain point or product offering that lead someone to your landing page in the first place. Creating valuable content for form submissions also helps to increase a potential customers’ trust in you, so that they don’t feel that you will spam them with irrelevant messaging.
4. Where Will These Potential Customers Land In The Funnel?
In their form field study, Eloqua goes on to state that when creating an online form, you should identify the potential customer’s stage in the funnel. Marketing funnels are far from functioning like typical funnels. Flow through the marketing funnel is not always simply top to bottom; rather, the order is determined based on who the buyer is. Targeting and tailoring the content and fields in your forms is important for your lead scoring process. Most marketing automation systems have a progressive profiling option set-up so that you can find out even more about this potential customer, while making it easier for them to submit their information as well. Overall, treating forms like a nurturing process can help you create targeted content and messaging for these potential customers, so that they become your own customers faster than you think.
5. Segment Based On Responses
After obtaining a potential customer’s information through a form, it’s important to recognize that you now know who they are. Granted, you don’t know their life story, but you should have gained some insight into their various qualifications are and how they fit into the buying process. This is essential in developing your contact lists and identifying what you do next. Based on their form responses, most of these potential customers will go through some type of nurturing cycle. But rather than assigning everyone a one-size-fits-all nurturing campaign, you can segment your pool of contacts and send targeted messages their way. Mailchimp found that segmenting contacts by interests, signup dates, and activity increased email campaign performance with better open, click-through, and bounce rates.
Understanding the generic process behind online form submission can help you approach your own process with a more critical eye. Are there too many fields? Are your conversions suffering because of the design? How is the information processed and scored? Every marketer wants to know more about their potential customers, but the only way to improve conversion rates and customer rapport is through an in-depth understanding of how you are endeavoring to gather that information.
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