Website design fundamentals
Landing Page Forms 101
Landing pages… read more on our blog pages or our sister company EngineX Design … are incomplete to useless without a form to capture prospects as most of them aren’t going to call or chat.
The key is getting the visitor to actually fill out the form before they get distracted and leave your site.
Nobody cares to fill out a generic form such as contact us for more information or even a form with a promise of sending them a quote or calling them back with pricing or other information they might be seeking. Visitors don’t want passive, wimpy forms that offer no instant value to them and their busy life.
If a visitor is looking for pricing than you better have a form that gives instant pricing after they fill out their contact information with the required phone # and email fields. Boom! They get their pricing and you capture them as a qualified lead. If your industry is sensitive to giving out information such as pricing than you can add a field that will send their cell phone a code which they have to enter before they can get pricing.
Of course pricing is only an example – maybe they want their website analyzed instantly (we don’t use these tools much anymore because they suck) or want to see if they can schedule something… It doesn’t matter but give them what they are searching for only after you have their information.
Some key tips when using forms to increase your landing page leads:
- Make sure the form is – F A S T – It must not slow down your landing page load time
- Consider high-end form plugins that make it easy to create a core structure and have the flexibility to allow custom javascript programming to be done if necessary (or as as your needs grow) such as Gravity Forms
- Avoid proprietary custom built forms. Any custom form you build or have built should be based on a universal form system with code added as needed vs a “made from scratch” form that is marries you to the same developer…forever.
- Keep the initial screen to 4 fields or less with form page breaks – nobody wants to see a long form hit them immediately
- Make sure that form can tie into follow-up programs such as Mail Chimp / Zoho / Hub Spot / etc
And finally… Of course… The form needs to be responsive (mobile friendly), easy to read, and “above the fold” as in on the screen the visitor initially sees. Do not resort to the “Click Here” button as it will get less of a response than a form ready to fill out. Don’t make it a pop-up as they leave your site or enter your site – EVER. Google is starting to penalize websites for this crap and will flush your search engine rankings if it happens to catch this on your site.