Web Form Optimization Tips to Maximize Conversions

The beating heart of every sales conversion depends almost exclusively on how easy it is for prospective customers to transition from browsing to buying. The sole determining factor in creating these transitions lies in how usable your forms are and the level of automation involved in completing those forms.

After all, nobody wants to have to re-enter information at every stage of your sales funnel. Whatever portion of the sales process you can automate is going to make that buying decision consistently easier. Optimizing your website forms and landing pages is critical to streamlining your conversions and driving up your click-to-conversion rate. Here are some tips for customizing your web forms to boost your conversion rate and drive sales revenue:

1) Intelligent Web Forms Are The Way To Go

Most websites (and hopefully yours) include common field names on forms that allow browsers to auto-complete them with saved information. Here’s a little know fact about these common fields that can be set to auto-complete: You can actually hide the fields that browser has already filled out, making it even easier and faster for your customers to complete forms quickly and go from shopping around to making a purchase with just a couple keystrokes and clicks.

2) User Rewards Work

Offering special discounts and incentives for completing forms for leads and converting to sales is a staple of ecommerce and other online sales channels. Don’t overlook this proven technique when optimizing the forms on your site.

3) Create Contest Entry Forms

Want to get customers to fill out forms for lead generation and follow-up? Make it a requirement for a contest or drawing. Most people are more than willing to put in a little extra work if it means they could get something for free.

4) Minimize Fields Users Need To Complete

The fewer fields people have to fill out on your form, the better. Keep your fields count as minimal as possible, and you’ll see more leads and conversions in no time.

5) If You Need Significant Amounts Of Information, Be Creative With Your Content for Longer Formsr
There are several easy ways to do this:

-Allow users to save partially completed forms
-Create forms that have multiple steps to chunk content into more digestible pieces
-Organize content like buttons and check boxes horizontally to make forms appear shorter

6) Direct Leads and Potential Customers to Forms During Peak Usage Hours

Send out those sales incentive emails and focus your ads to run during peak access times for most mobile device users (statistically around 10:00 a.m. on Wednesdays). This ensures more people will be looking at search engine pages, social media and personal email whenever your content goes out. If you’re going to get a click, this is when it’s going to happen.

7) Use Web Apps To Test Your Form Layouts

There are significant amounts of research on how the human brain reads and completes forms. This research has been applied to web apps to test the effectiveness of online forms. Run your forms through several of these apps and decide which form is likely to get the greatest number of completions from your test results.

8) Use Web Apps To Verify CTA Effectiveness

Your call to action is what helps seal the deal at every phase of your sales funnel. Keep form buttons to two words or less, use action words like next or continue, and be specific with the function of each button. Customers should instinctively know what they are doing when they click that final submit button.

Following these helpful tips is sure to develop much-needed optimization for the forms on your site. Better still, the more optimized your forms are, the greater your site conversion rate will be. Start reviewing your forms now so you can get the most for your marketing dollars out every click on your email or online ad. You will be surprised how easy and effective web form optimization can be.