Forming Your Leads

Most websites have forms, but how can you maximize their benefits?

Forms are an integral part of how you gathering information from visitors to your website. They can be used in a variety of ways including account registration, product / service inquiries, pools / surveys or for a simple request for direct contact.  Take your Real Web Solutions website for example.  There are forms to request listing details and photos, free reports, to spec out their dream home and even to register an account on your website, which creates a guest profile.

So there are many types of forms, but what do they do for you? How can they help grow your business?  Simply put, a well-constructed form is the most efficient way to generate leads from a website.  After all... whether you disguise it a survey or a request for a free report, your entire business is all about generating leads, right? 

All that sounds great, but let’s be honest... forms can also be a daunting task for anyone to complete if they are poorly designed. Yes, there is a right way and a wrong way to design a form. Redundant fields, unnecessary questions and a poor field structure are some of the most common traits of unsuccessful forms. How can you avoid these stumbling blocks on your own site? Let’s break down the elements of a successful, well-crafted form. This should help you to better understand how you can get the best return on investment from each field, while facilitating easy and quick completion for your website visitor. 

Helpful Form Guidelines:

• Use left-aligned fields – We read left-to-right so by having the fields left-aligned, you provide a natural path for our eyes to follow.
• People will typically scan over a form before completing it, gauging the level of effort vs. resulting benefit, so make sure your form asks only relevant questions to help encourage submissions by keeping it brief.
• Clearly indicate what fields are ‘Optional’.  
• Use a Bold font to represent mandatory fields.
• Group related fields together and provide a logical flow on how they are ordered, i.e. Name, Address, Contact # and E-mail. Avoid having a mishmash of fields that don’t relate to each other, for example Name, Desired Price Range, E-mail, Number of Kids, and I’m Thinking about Moving.
• Remove unnecessary fields and avoid having multiple fields where one would suffice, such as First and Last Name instead of Name (or Full Name).
• Explain how you will use the data, such as referencing your privacy policy, as this will help provide them with a reason to trust you.
• Explain how they will benefit from submitting this form. Provide a ‘reward’, be it a simple post-submit ‘Thank You,’ a file to download or loading them to another page that contains the requested content.
• If you want someone to register for your newsletter, include a sample of your latest newsletter above the form.  Once submitted, provide them with the option to read (or download) the full version of the newsletter, and have the date of when your next newsletter will be sent out.

If you consider the guidelines above when creating new forms on your website, the likelihood of the form being utilized will dramatically increase. Give it a try for yourself – design a form based on these guidelines, send it to a friend or colleague and get their feedback. I am sure you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the outcome.

Authored By: Bryan Coughlin, Client Relations