#28 – Online Form Optimization Tips

Marketers, optimizers spend a lot of time preform and then when it comes to the form, they just throw it to the development team and they think, okay, well that's enough. I'm going to figure out how to get people to the form and then they just leave that to the developers. And that is absolutely horrible way to do forms. You might as well be throwing lots of your work away. My name is Kalis Sladeh and I love to talk about conversion rate optimization.

I'm Simba and I love asking questions about conversion optimization.

This is CRO Live App A show all about a B testing, experimentation and conversion rate optimization.

Each episode Khaled amazes me, answering some of the difficult CRO questions, dropping insights like it's no big deal, while pretty.

Much every episode will take on a new set of conversion rate optimization questions that are not easy. We will talk strategies, we'll talk process, and we will talk tactics. Simba will be bringing all the questions.

Oh man, I bring tough questions like do a B testing results fade over time? How do you go from low to high testing velocity? How do you measure the success of a conversion funnel? And how do you align your CRO program with a growth strategy? Yeah, Khalid, these are very, very tough questions.

Yes, they are, but we always answer them here. And if you love conversion optimization like we do, and certainly like Simba does, subscribe to the CRO Live Hour podcast today wherever you listen to your podcasts. Another episode, CRO Live. We did not have a CRO Live last week because I was on vacation for the first time in many years. True, true vacation when I've taken some few weeks off here and there. But you run a business or the business runs you. So I've always checked my email, looked at slack. Last week I checked slack or email five times in a week. That is a world record for me. So I was excited. Although I have to say I don't think I'm designed for a seven day vacation. I'm just not. Five days is kind of the absolute limit for me because I get really anxious and I get bored and I just didn't feel like reading. So it was interesting. It's good to be back at work this week. It's good to be back in the CRO Live Hour studio as well.

So how was your first week back after vacation?

Good, Very busy. I'm making up for all the time off that I took last week. Things with INVESP have picked up a lot faster than I anticipated and things have been picking up with figpi so that has always been good. But I think FICPI had gone on overdrive since mid February. Basically the number of signups for fake buy quadrupled and week after week and just is growing constantly. I'm not complaining. I will take busy over not having anything to do anytime, but that means also trying to make sure that the ship continues to run smoothly. With invesp, that means like, you know, if always trying to improve our services, we restructure the teams every now and then. And with figpi, we've just added a new resource to help us with some of the email marketing that we do. So that also has been good. How about you? How was your week?

Just the same, busy as usual, but busy in a good way because like in the past few weeks I've been teaming up with the FIGPI team and we've been trying to build some campaigns, build some pages. Because if you look at like the FIGPI page in the FIGPI website, there's a lot of pages that we're missing there. We are working on and hopefully like maybe by end of next week we'll have finished all the pages which are needed there. We have also been working on a number of campaigns for figpi and it's been quite an interesting learning journey for me because every time like we do like a certain cabin or every time we bring in like maybe an agency to come in and help us with something, it might be maybe email, it might be maybe ads, I always like get to learn one or two things from them. So yeah, it's been a good week. It's been a good week.

And this is fascinating to me, by the way, because we run an agency and we run a Software, a SaaS platform. It's been fascinating hiring other agencies and see how they do things. Sometimes you learn, sometimes I just hear the agency doing things and I'm like, no, no, no, no. Okay, this is not a good way of doing things. But yeah, it's been very interesting. I think one of the interesting things is we've hired an agency to help us run some Google Ads. This is the second agency we hired to run Google Ads and I don't think they were that successful. I mean, they tried to do their best, but then one of our CROs, absolutely amazing when it comes to Google Ads because He had about 8 years experience running ads. And the time that we've spent with him yesterday and how we managed to express and articulate the issues that we're running into in our Google Ads was fascinating because I listened to him for five minutes and I'm like, oh, now this makes sense. That's exactly what we need to do. So yeah, it's just been quite interesting. And so today we're talking forms. Why do you choose forms by the way? That's kind of an interesting, interesting topic.

I think, like it's one of the topics that we really haven't touched on, but it's also one of the most important topics because most websites have forms. So I just thought maybe a lot of people might be interested in learning or hearing you speak about forms because you have optimized a lot of forms forms. So you might share your thoughts on that as well.

It's funny because most websites do have forms, regardless whether you're E commerce or lead gen and lots of marketers, optimizers spend a lot of time preform and then when it comes to the form they just throw it to the development team and they think, okay, well that's enough, I'm going to figure out how to get people to the form and then they just leave that to the developers. And that is absolutely horrible way to do forms. You know, you might as well be throwing lots of your work away because developers sometimes don't think about visitors and customers and how to create the best forms to actually entice them. But yeah, forms can be a gold mine for any company.

Yeah. So we have about two questions about forms. We're just going to follow like our usual structure. I'll ask you like the first question, then you just go on uninterrupted and then the second question will be more like a discussion. But if like there are any other follow up questions to the first one, I'll obviously ask those soon after you have explained.

I like that. Shoot your first question, my friend.

Sure. So my first question is what are the do's and don't when it comes to form optimization?

Do's and don'ts when it comes to form optimization. So Here are my 12 tips for creating the best online forms that will help you convert every visitor, that will help you persuade visitors to fill out this form. And as usual, I'm going to keep my best tip and my best secrets until the end. So make sure that you watch all the way. Number one, you need to start with a good headline. Number two, you need to add credibility. Number three, think about the form length and how much you need to have in that form. Number four, think about the required fields and how you handle those in your forms. Number five, think about the form validation because you will need to have Some of that. Number six, think about how you do input confirmation. Number seven, the auto fill, how do you use that to ease the visitors in some areas? Number eight, privacy. Number nine is cta, which is the thing that everybody talks about when it comes to form. We're going to keep it until number nine. Number 10, we're going to talk about watching sessions. Number 11, we're going to talk about form analytics. And number 12, the top secret, we're going to keep it until the very end of the video. How does that sound?

Sounds good. I'm just waiting for you to go on.

So let's start. Number one, start with a powerful headline. Now notice that this is something that is not part of the form. However, it really plays an important part in convincing people to fill out the form. What are the benefits that people are going to get from filling out the form? What are the promises that you are making them? Lots of times I look at forms and they start with a very poor headline. Contact us today. Fill out this form. No, no, no, no. Let's throw this standard headline out and let's come up with a powerful headline on the end result that your visitors are going to get. Let's take an example. Let's say you are a lead gen type website and you run some sort of digital marketing. Instead of saying fill out this contact form, how about start exploding your sales today. Start increasing your SEO ranking today. Improve your conversion rates by filling out this form. So we focus on the benefit of filling out that form. A very powerful headline. I like to use some bullet points under that headline to really emphasize the value that the company brings. Number two, add credibility. Lots of times people add credibility. They add social proof throughout their website. But when a visitor gets to the form, those credibility factors, those credibility signals don't exist and they don't display them on the form page. No. We need to remind visitors why you are choosing to contact us, why we are credible, why we are the best option to help you solve the problem that you have. So if you have some of those social factors, if you have some client logos, whatever you have, put them in a good way, present them on that form page. Number three, think about the form length. You cannot imagine how many forms I look at and I look at the number of fields that are there and there's absolutely an horrendous number of fields. I have seen forms with 15, 16 different fields in them and I always ask, do you really need all of these fields? And lots of times I get the answer. Well, not really. I don't really need all of them. Well, why did you add them there in the first place? Well, somebody added them at some point a year ago or a couple of years ago. I don't know. Even worse, sometimes I ask them, are you doing anything with that information that you're asking visitors to fill out? And they'll say, no, I'm not doing anything with that information. Sometimes it is lazy marketing because you can get some of that information by doing a little bit of research, right? You can look at the information that the visitor had filled out and you can just go to their LinkedIn profile and get a lot of that information from them. To me, I only need the name of the person. Their email phone number is questionable, and the name of the company or the website. That is the absolute minimum. Every field that you add to your form means you will lower conversions. So just keep that in mind. Number four, make sure that your required fields are clearly marked and think about those required fields. Do you really need them? And as visitors are filling out those different fields, they need to understand that this is a required field. So whether it's an asterisk or any other type of clear design that communicates to the visitor that this is a required field, make sure that you do. Number five, let's talk about form validation. You will need to validate the input that the visitor has. Now, typically, typically I see two problems with field validation. Number one, sometimes some developers start the field validation as somebody's inputting their information. So let's say I have a field in the form that asks people to fill out their email. I'm just starting to type out my email and I'm filling K H A and the field validation is already kicking in. And tell me that there's a problem with my email. Yes, there is a problem because I didn't finish typing up my email. Let's wait until the visitor fills out the field and clicks out of it and then you can do validation. Another problem with field validation that I see quite a bit is that you submit a form and the form comes back to you telling you that there is an error, especially when it's a long form without highlighting the particular error. So it will tell you that there's a problem, but it doesn't tell you which fields you have a problem with. Even worse, sometimes there are multiple fields with multiple problems in them, which can cause a huge issue because now how do you highlight those fields? I was just filling out the cart. I was placing an order with GoDaddy just to register some domains And I filled out my credit card information and I'm ready to submit. I filled it out completely. I was ready to submit and I could not find the submit button. So there was an error. But they didn't tell me what the error was. And I was just looking at the page, puzzled. I'm like what just happened here? Why isn't there a submit button? I went back to the credit card area. It turns out although they saved my information, they required me to fill out the CVV again. Nothing on the page told me that I need to fill out the cvv. There was an error but was not clearly highlighted. That is a major problem and I wonder how much business that they are losing because I was patient enough to to look through that credit card form again and figure out that that field is missing. That's number five. I'll just mention an additional tip over here. If you do use what is it called? Capac captcha. If you use captcha, really think do you really need to use it? For many, many years we refused to use captcha on all of our forms because we just wanted to fill out the form and then we can manually go through the different form submissions and mark them as spam or not. Lately I had to submit and agree with our marketing teams that we're getting a ton of spam for a ton of spam submissions. So we added captcha. However, we only display captcha for visitors coming from particular countries. So although we are using it, we are using it in a very narrow focus for visitors coming from specific countries. Number six, confirm inputs. Now this is an additional bonus. If people are filling out a particular field correctly, you can highlight that field in green telling people that you've inputted the information correctly. It's an additional bonus. It's a nice thing to do. It's not a must do, but I think it takes your form to the next level and this is very powerful. Specifically if you have account creation forms where people have to fill out passwords. So it will be nice to know that whatever password I've used have actually met the criteria that you require on your website. Now a side bonus as well, if your form requires people to create a password, make sure that you state the requirements very clearly and you highlight the different requirements that are met as user are inputting those different requirements into the form. Number seven, auto fill the forms. If you already have some information about the visitor, you might have the city that they're coming from, you might have the country that they are coming from, you might have some of Their personal information saved because they are an existing user on your website. Don't ask them to fill that information again. Auto fill it from your CRM, from your platform. It will make their life easier and they'll appreciate that. Number eight, make sure that you state very clearly your privacy policy. Nowadays, visitors expect that their information is not going to be sold, it's not going to be shared with another third party. If you have a policy otherwise different than that, make sure that you state clearly. If that is your policy, make sure that you state that clearly in a good language that people can understand that assures them that information is not going to be sold or shared with anybody else. Number nine is the cta. Make sure that your CTA is very clear. I should be able to tell the CTA very clearly on the page. It should stand out, it should have the right size and it should use the right language. I hate CTAs that use the word submit. Let's just use something a little bit more creative. Get started, you know, contact us today. You know, start on your journey. Just get a little creative. Spend 5, 10 minutes thinking about the text that you are you're going to use in your CTA. Number 10, do watch session recordings for visitors who are coming to the page where you have your form. Watch them watch at least 50 or 60 sessions both on mobile and desktop, and try and figure out if visitors are struggling and filling out some of those fields. Number 11, do install some form of form analytics software. The power of form analytics software will show you if there are specific fields where people drop off. 100% of your visitors are filling out the very first field. But then there's a drop off in the second field or the third field that is a goldmine. Because then you'll need to ask yourself, why are people dropping off over here? Are we asking them for too much information? Can we remove this field all together? And number 12, my secret that I promise, split your forms. If you do require a lot of information from your visitors, start with the very basic information, basic contact information in step one. All the other additional information that you might need should go to a step to an additional form that people can fill out. The beauty of doing this is you already have the visitor's contact information. You have their name, you have their email, you have their phone number, and they have their website. Maybe you already have that. And even if they choose not to fill the second form, you already have a way of contacting them. So even for us at invesp, we'd like to Split the forms into two step process. If somebody chooses not to fill out the second step, no big deal because we can still contact them. We can do a little bit of research on LinkedIn and we are done. However, I already have their contact information. The conversion rate for US on the first step on the contact us page is around 15%. The conversion rate on the second step is somebody fills out the first step, they've already committed. The conversion rate is close to 80%. So most people will be willing to fill out that second step if they are serious. Some companies would not fill us out, but it's no big deal because I already have their contact information. Can I add another tip for those who have watched us all the way? If you use some sort of a calendar software calendly HubSpot where people can book appointments directly, consider adding that on the very first page of the form, kind of in parallel to the form. Or on the second step if you are using a multi step form where people can book the appointment directly, that might help you increase your conversion rates. There you go. We are done here. What do you think?

Yeah, those are really good points because usually most of the time when people talk about form optimization, they forgot to mention about the headline and that was like the number one thing that you stated. It's very important for people to know what they are getting. And I also think that maybe one other important point to also mention is to say that make sure that whatever promise or outcome you are promising on the other side of the form is valuable. Because I believe that people always like fill out a form no matter how long it is, if it's something that they really need. For instance, like I can say that, okay, if you fill like this form which is about 50 fields, at the end of the day, you get a free Tesla. Everyone will fill out that form.

Oh, I will fill it out. Yes. 50 fields, that's. Yeah, we can even do 100, you know, how about that?

Yeah, so I think like at the end of the day it's just about the outcome. If it's motivating enough, people are going to feel. So you just have to put like a lot of thought into whatever promise you're giving people. Make sure that it's valuable.

Yeah, I agree with that. I mean it's funny because. And maybe moving a little bit away from this because lots of times people focus on CTAs especially on B2B websites. Correct? Oh, you don't have enough CTAs or the CTAs are not clear and I tell them, I don't want to take away from the importance of CTAs. Give me a page with no CTA. That's just absolutely stupid. Stupid. Correct. But the CTA is not going to do the heavy lifting. The heavy lifting is done first by the copy, second by the design. And its job is to persuade the visitor to contact you. And then the minute they decide to contact you, the CTA should be obvious and clear. But don't expect that your CTAs are going to be the secret to taking you from a 1% conversion rate to a 5% conversion rate. No, they're not. I still remember some lady who used to run CRO back in 2008, 2009, and she called herself a CRO guru. So I'm like, oh, I don't recognize the name. Let me just check out her website. So I go to her website and I click on it and my God, she must have had 20, 30, 40 CTAs. I mean, everywhere. I was like, just a spaghetti of CTAs. Contact me, contact me. And I'm like, dude, okay, this is overwhelming. It's just fascinating to me how people sometimes can take a concept and just go overboard with it to the point that it becomes too salesy.

Yeah, I totally understand that. Sometimes maybe they don't have to be so overwhelming. But if the CTA maybe was taking you to the same landing page, doesn't it make sense at some point to kind of like overemphasize it?

Well, explain to me the question a little bit more.

You say you visited like one website, right, that had so many or multiple CTAs on it. Doesn't it make sense at some point to have many CTAs, maybe especially when the landing page is quite long on mobile. Something like that.

Yeah. So this is fascinating because we've ran lots of AB tests around CTAs, and this is something is different between mobile and desktop, at least in the testing that we've done for the particular websites that we've tested this on desktop, you don't have to have that many CTAs. I usually say every a couple of screen folds correct as people are scrolling. I want to have a CTA and we're talking specifically about B2B or SaaS on desktop. On mobile, it's a different story because browsing on desktop is really easy going up and down. I have a mouse and it's easy for me to find the cta. Now don't do something silly such as having a single CTA. I don't like that. I like sticky CTAs. By the way, as people are scrolling either on top or on the bottom, the CTA is there. That is good. On mobile, if you're not going to do a sticky CTA, then make sure that you have multiple CTAs on the page. Because going up and down and trying to find a CTA on a mobile device is not that easy. So your mileage might vary based on your website, based on your visitors, but keep that in mind.

Yeah, that makes sense. So I want to take you to point number three about form length, which also touches like on the next question that I was going to ask you today about the length of form. So as you were explaining, I think what you were saying is that like when it comes to form length, less is more.

I agree 100%. I like how you put it.

Yeah, less is more. But I've read like some of the case studies that say the rain tests where a form which was longer performed better than a form which was shorter. So what's your take on that?

This is something I would definitely test, but it comes within the context of what is the visitor contacting you about? What is the business all about? The higher the investment is. Sometimes you want the visitor to be a lot more committed. Sometimes if somebody is filling out something that is very expensive, we make it a little bit harder for them intentionally because they need to invest. And visitors also understand that. I'm going to give an example from E commerce and then we'll go back to forums where sometimes you want to make it more difficult. You want the visitors to be more invested. Most of the time when it comes to E commerce, we want to simplify the journey for the visitor to make the decision of buying the product very easy. There are instances where we might want to make the process a little bit more involved because we want the visitor to be invested. I was talking to somebody who sells very high specialty wines and I don't drink wine, so I don't really appreciate the example, but I can understand it. To him, the process of selecting a wine, especially for those people who absolutely love wines, is a very lengthy. There's time investments in it and they intentionally made the process a little bit more difficult. Another example, ebay. And this is ebay. Long time ago, the search functionality on ebay was intentionally not so easy because the goal was not to give you the particular item that you had that you were looking for. But the goal was people look through multiple listings. So there is a philosophy behind that. Now we go back to our typical forms. Yes. If you want people to invest, if you want them to think about the product. Yes. If this is an item, let's say somebody is filling out a contact form for enterprise software that's going to cost them anywhere between, I don't know, a million to 5 million to $10 million. There's this fine balance. Correct. Between actually having them fill out the form, because that's ultimately is our goal number two, making sure that we qualify them so we're not just merely getting junk leads or leads who are not qualified and at the same time getting the right information for our sales team. So when they walk in, they know that they are talking to the right person. So I think it's a fine balance. If somebody is contacting a business, I want to contact a plumber. Correct. I need to get something fixed in my house, and he's asking me for a million things. He's asking me for my address. He's asking me if I had to deal with that to fix a sink in my house. That contact form asked me for what kind of faucets I. And I'm like, I don't know. Faucet. Oh, I know it's leaking water, man. And they're like, oh, if you go under the sink and you take a picture there. And I'm like, really? And I actually tried to do that, and I took several pictures, but I think the faucet was too old, so I couldn't even figure out the name and the manufacturer. Now, I had a very pressing problem because I had a faucet that is leaking water. So I really needed to get it fixed. And that's the reason I was willing to go through the hassle of trying to find out what kind of faucet I had. Now, another plumber had a very smart marketer. All they needed was from me is my name and my phone number. The minute I filled it out, somebody contacted me right away. Which, by the way, might bring us to a different form optimization. Tip. I know we'll still talk about short and long forms, but sometimes you have highly, highly optimized forms. But you need to make sure that your sales team will follow up really quickly. I remember Brian Eisenberg, who used to run FutureNow, one of the very first CRO agencies, told me once that they've made sure when people filled out the forms, they will get somebody calling them within seven minutes. So he said, more than seven minutes, the chance of closing the deal is much smaller. And mind you, we're talking about multi tens of thousands of dollars deals. He said if we wait for two, three days, then there's no chance of closing the deal. We just signed company today to actually start working with invesp, a new client and they had reached out to several companies. One of them is a well known competitor of ours. And I said, hey, how is it talking to so and so. He said, you know, surprising because I filled out the form and they never contacted me. I waited for six days and no response. That's not a marketing problem, that's not a form problem. That's a fundamental business problem that you need to make sure that things are followed up on really quickly. Correct.

That makes a lot of sense. So I just want to put you like on the spot just before we go. I know you answered I don't like.

I don't like to be put on the spot. Go ahead, go ahead.

I know that you have answered this question a lot. You've just been talking about it. Long or short forms? So my question is. And the answer shouldn't be. It depends. It's either yes or no. So okay, sure. Shoot away.

Sure.

So do you think like long form perform better than shorter one? Yes or no?

Long form Shorter. No. No. Yeah. No. Short form will perform better in 99% of the cases. You'll have outliers. That's fine. Outliers make for interesting case studies and interesting questions in CRO live hour. But they are outliers. Is Liverpool going to do worse this season? Yes. Do we have outliers and beat Man City and Man United? Yes. But those are outliers. We're sucking. Okay. So our short form will perform better than long form. I really think that. But again, look at your business and see what makes sense. And I would test this. This is a really great a B test, by the way, to run. I'm not a big fan of saying, oh, you should test this, you should test that. You know how much I hate that because I think you need to do lots of the analysis. But this is a good candidate for a good a B test.

Okay. Yeah. Just to wrap up like this session, what are some of the tools that you recommend when it comes to form optimization? I know that you have already mentioned session recordings. Are there any other tools that come into mind when it comes to form optimization?

I mean, by the way, I love using analytics, whether it's Google Analytics, Universal or GA4 because you and you can configure all of this stuff in your Google Analytics. And I love there's so many martech tools nowadays to do form optimization, to do any type of thing. But the problem with most of those tools is people subscribe to them, then they forget about them and they don't use them. So I like to use one platform for as many things as I can, but that is just me. Now, the downside of using a single tool, it's like, oh, I'm going to have everything in GA4. The downside of that is not going to be as good as a tool that specializes in form optimization. Before I answer your question. Fascinating to me. Hotjar, for example, at some point, form optimization. Correct. Form analytics. And then they dropped it completely because most people were not spending time looking at the form optimization in hotjar. Same thing, by the way, with fikpi, we're looking at doing the form analytics. And then we said, you know what? Not important for the customer segment that we're going after. It's not a priority. Session recording software. There's a ton. Of course, FIGPI offers you session recording software. Hotjar is the space leader and the enterprise side of things. Content Square, which acquired hotjar altogether. Microsoft Clarity. But it has its limitations. Most people don't know that, but it does have its limitations with different browsers and whatnot. I'm trying to remember the name of the form optimization software that we've used. You might remember. And I've done actually even a joint webinar with them, which is absolutely horrible. I forget the name.

Zuko.

Zuko. Okay, there you go. Zuko is a good form optimization that we use with some of our projects. So I guess I got to a point. I was talking to my mom earlier today and she was complaining to me about her memory. And my mom, God bless her, she's in her 70s. And I'm like, I understand. And I'm like, mom, I also forget. It's horrible. I'm like forgetting all the time. How about you, Simba? Have you seen any good form optimization software that you might recommend?

I think like, maybe the two that you mentioned are the ones that I'm more familiar with, like the Google Analytics one that we usually use. And also, I wouldn't say like Google Analytics is a form optimization, but that's the one that we usually use. And also Zuko. Yeah, I think those are the two that come into mind.

So if somebody's listening to this episode and you do like some other form optimization software, do mention it in the comments because we'd love to hear from you. I think that's it for our CRO Live next week is going to be interesting because I'm going to start fasting, so we'll see how much energy I have. But we will keep the CRO Live hour going. And with that, until next week. Unless you have anything else. Simba?

I'm good. I think that's it.

Okay, awesome. Thank you, everybody, for watching. We'll come back to you next week.

Sure. Bye.