Are Your Forms Collecting the Right Information?

When it comes to planning your post-click marketing strategy, you want to ensure your roadmap is clear from pre-click to post-conversion.

Are you asking for enough information?

A common conversion best practice in post-click marketing is to pair down your form as much as possible to get the form filled out. However, when slicing down your form, you want to consider what you’ll be doing with the details. If you’re just looking for a generic way to contact new leads (high-quality, low-quality and everything in between), simply asking for an e-mail address may work.

The important thing to remember here is that simply asking for an e-mail address places a very, very low-barrier to conversion — potentially too low. You may be bringing in a lot of low-quality leads that will opt-out of your email campaigns quickly, or never reply to your sales team.

If your lead form is part of your conversion content marketing strategy, remember you didn’t create the content just to collect email addresses. You did it to collect leads — leads are people not e-mail addresses. You need to be able to build a profile around the lead to determine if sales should follow up right away, or if you should add them to your nurture campaign, or something else. The point of all your marketing efforts should be to increase conversions in some way — whether long-term or short-term. You should never just be creating content for the sake of creating content. That provides little business value.

By including a few form fields such as full name and company name, the hurdle to conversion is still low, but you now know so much more about the lead. You can personalize all follow-up communication, score your leads based on the information you know about the company, and provide your sales team with more detailed information to help them in their selling process.

The more form fields you add the higher the hurdle for conversion, but also the more qualified the lead (in theory). I’m not suggesting you add 20 form fields, but asking for a name, email address, company name (if necessary) and phone number (if necessary) are pretty standard and few people will balk at them.

Have you tried the multi-step form?

If you want to further qualify your leads with more form fields, try using a multi-step process. For example, Anthem makes step 1 and 2 in this form only one field. Then in step three, once the visitor is already engaged, they ask for more qualifying information. This allows themselves to collect great lead information without overwhelming the visitor with many form fields at once.

Test it!

And of course, one great way to determine the optimal number of fields that your visitors are willing to fill out is to test your forms. Depending on what you’re offering in return for the information, visitors may be willing to divulge more about themselves.

The key is to test to find the perfect balance between getting all the information you need without creating a barrier to conversion.

How do you determine what to ask for in your forms?