Introduction
How many leads are you missing out on?
by Marcus Taylor, Founder of Leadformly
As marketers, we invest a lot of time and budget driving people to our landing pages.
But when it comes to capturing these visitors as leads we too often drop the ball by forcing
them to fill out long, outdated, one-size fits all lead capture forms.
Why?
Well, most lead capture forms are built by IT teams or third party CRMs and email services
that have no concern over your company’s conversion rate. These ‘off the shelf forms’ are
costing us all leads. Lot of leads.
Why smart marketers care about forms
Besides the obvious benefit of capturing more leads, forms sit at the most critical point in
your marketing funnel. A small improvement in your form’s conversion rate has significant
positive knock-on effects, as it improves the results of every marketing channel driving
people to that form.
Having seen the impact great forms can have first-hand, I’m hoping that your company can
use the insights in this short guide to get a competitive advantage and improve your
marketing effectiveness.
Enjoy!
Marcus Taylor
Conversion killer #1:
Outdated design
Form design has come a long way in 20 years. Yet, you wouldn’t know it looking at most sites.
Below is a screenshot of IBM’s lead capture forms in 1996 and 2016. In two decades, IBM’s forms
have got longer and harder to use.
IBM’s lead capture form in 1996
IBM’s lead capture form in 2016
The design of your forms sets the user’s first impression. It communicates how much effort the user
will need to invest to complete the form, and whether or not the outcome is worthwhile.
When HP modernised and shortened their lead capture forms, their conversion rate increased by
186%. How many leads are you leaving behind due to outdated form designs?
Conversion killer #2:
What’s in it for me?
Motivation is the single most important factor affecting a lead form’s performance. After all, people
use forms to achieve an outcome, and the intensity of their desire to achieve that outcome impacts
your conversion rate.
As such, it’s important to make it clear to your visitors what’s in it for them. Why should they use
your forms? Broadly speaking, I’ve found that all lead capture forms fall into one of two categories:
“Me forms” and “Us forms”.
A “Me form”
An “Us form”
“Me forms” are all about your business capturing the lead. Like in the Mouseflow example above,
“me forms” ask us to submit our information without giving us any compelling reason why.
“Us forms” tell us how we benefit from filling out the form – and often give some kind of immediate
value. In the Crazyegg example above, the form explains how we will receive a heatmap and learn
how to make our site better in return for providing our details.
If you’re not clearly communicating why people should fill out your form, I’d recommend and
focusing on that. The results of any other tip in this guide will pale in comparison.
Conversion killer #3:
Asking too much information
I know what it’s like. Your sales team want to as much qualifying information as possible. The IT team
want to add spam captcha boxes. The legal team want to add their disclaimers. The outcome is
inevitable. Your forms get bloated.
To be clear, I am not against long forms. Some of the best-converting forms I’ve seen are over 30
questions long. I am, however, against forms that ask too much information at the wrong time.
In the example above we have two project management tools. The Microsoft Project Pro landing
page on the left asks for seven pieces of information about me on step 1/3. Asana, on the other hand,
ask for one piece of information: My email address.
If you’re not sure whether a question is relevant to include, imagine replacing your form was a real
person on the end of a phone call. If the caller said “I’m interested in using your project management
software”, would you really respond with “I need to know your organization size to get you setup”?
Probably not.
Conversion killer #4:
Treating everyone the same
Most forms try to pigeonhole every lead into a one-size fits all form. Given the different types of
visitors on your website, and their varied needs, this one-size fits all approach is often far from
optimal.
A better approach is to segment your visitors into different categories and hide/show questions based
on their previous answers. This enables you to provide a personalised experience, while shortening
the length of your form for certain users.
In the example above, we can see how CompareTheMarket.com start their lead capture form by
asking the user ‘Do you know your registration number’? The answer to this question determines
which question will be asked next.
The result of this is that CompareTheMarket.com can shorten the form for users that know their
registration number by hiding questions that can be worked out from this piece of information. This
feature is known as conditional logic, and is a great tactic for providing better lead capture form
experiences.
Conversion killer #5:
Ambiguity
Multi-step forms typically out-perform single step forms. This is why many websites in competitive
lead generation industries (e.g. dating, online loans, and online gaming) use them heavily.
When using multi-step forms it’s important to remove any ambiguity. Forms convert best when there
are no surprises, and the user’s expectations match reality.
On the left, we have the lead capture form from WeLoveDates, which clearly displays that there are
five steps to this form and that we are currently on step one.
The example from Match.com on the right is, however, very ambiguous. There is no indication as to
how many steps are in this form, how long it takes to complete, or what step we’re currently on. While
the brand and clean design of Match.com give them an advantage, it’s very likely that the ambiguity
around their form length hinders their conversion potential.
Ambiguity is a conversion killer best avoided.
Taking action
Your forms impact the results of every single online marketing campaign you run.
Without forms, there are no leads. Despite this, few marketers pay enough attention to the quality of
their forms.
I realised this first-hand when an A/B test on one of our forms more than tripled our leads overnight.
Suddenly our results shot through the roof – from our PPC cost per acquisition, to our overall return
on investment (ROI), we had tripled almost all of our marketing results in one fell swoop.
But creating the form that led to that result was surprisingly difficult. We ultimately had to spend a lot
of money on web designers and developers, and after two months, we were still left waiting.
This is why we built Leadformly. As marketers, we know that forms are hard to get right, yet they have
such a big impact on our results. Leadformly is designed to make it easier for marketers to build highconverting lead forms that incorporate many of the insights and principles outlined in this guide.
I hope this guide comes in useful and enables you to generate better results from your lead
generation campaigns. Of course, if you’d like to learn more about Leadformly you can visit:
https://leadformly.com
Marcus Taylor,
Founder, Leadformly