This is a guest post by Gravity Forms.
Forms can be a great way to interact with your customers, collect feedback, make sales, and facilitate ongoing communication. But not all forms are effective for engaging your audience.
To capture the attention of site visitors, forms need to be clear, concise, and targeted. Follow these simple tips to help increase the conversion rate of your forms.
ProTip 1: Stand out from the crowd
Context and placement are key to grabbing the attention of viewers and compelling them to engage with your forms. Each additional click a visitor has to make to reach or fill out your form is a point of friction, which can lead to lost conversions.
Your goal should always be to make the process as smooth and simple as possible for the customer. This task begins before the form is even built, when you're deciding where the form should be placed. A contact form buried three pages deep on your website is bound to get less traffic.
Is it short enough to fit in a sidebar or on a high-visibility banner on the homepage? These placement options will help you increase traffic, and conversion rates as a result.
ProTip 2: Create fewer barriers for greater engagement
When utilizing forms, you must balance the amount of data you would like to collect with the number of visitors you want to convert. Each additional form field is another hurdle your audience has to overcome before submitting the form.
This means each field must be evaluated to determine its necessity. A newsletter sign-up form, for example, really only requires an email field and a submit button.
ProTip 3: Start small and collect more data as you grow
What if a handful of fields just aren’t enough to get the job done? How can you add more fields without adding more barriers?
Start by prioritizing your data. What is the bare minimum amount of information you need from a potential conversion? Try creating a form to collect their name and email address, and include conditional options to expand the form so they can provide more information.
Keep in mind that if either your form or fields are too long, respondents may abandon the form altogether. To a respondent, four text fields can look just as daunting as two text fields. The same applies to dropdowns and multiple-choice questions. The more options there are, the more likely the respondent is to experience decision paralysis.
ProTip 4: Use multiple pages to make longer forms more digestible
Sometimes, you just need to collect a large amount of information—but you can still make the experience easier for respondents by breaking a long form into multiple pages.
Presenting a respondent with a long-form broken up into a few pages can make the process feel more manageable. This improves the likelihood of the respondent completing the form.
ProTip 5: Seal the deal with the right call to action
The best way to encourage respondents to follow through on a form is by featuring a prominent submit button with a compelling call to action. A submit button with a custom and relevant message can be hard to ignore.
Less friction means more conversions
As you can see, there’s plenty you can do to tweak your forms, reduce friction, and encourage a higher rate of completion. Gravity Forms is a WordPress form builder that helps you easily create custom forms and capture the data you need to grow your business.
Its intuitive drag-and-drop form editor and ecosystem of add-ons, ensure customers can design forms to suit all their needs. You can use Gravity Forms to create contact and newsletter sign-up forms, run quizzes and surveys, register users on your website, accept payments or donations, and much more. The Gravity Forms extension for Zoho CRM, available on Zoho Marketplace, seamlessly integrates your online forms with your CRM profile, automating your sales and marketing processes.
Work smarter by adding new capabilities to Zoho CRM with business solutions from Zoho Marketplace. Explore Zoho Marketplace >
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