Learn How To Optimize Contact Form Coversion Rate for Your Site

A contact form is essential for any business that wants to grow in terms of attracting prospective clients. It is one of the most important elements of a website but is easily overlooked.

As digital marketers, we work on strategies to create lead generations that convert our users to customers but we forget about the importance of optimizing and modifying our contact forms for utmost conversions.

A poorly designed contact form may lead to loosing prospective clients, whereas, an optimized contact form can attract users and improve conversion rate.

Contact forms are a staple for online businesses, optimizing them can be a significant step towards growing your business, whether it’s earning new customers or seeking their feedback.

A lot of factors play an important role in the form’s conversion rate. So, in this article we will look into researched based guidelines that will help us in this process.

11 Ways to Optimize Contact Form Conversion Rates

1. Use a user-friendly form layout

The foremost important factor is that the form should be easy to use and familiar.

Familiarity ascertains a sense of comfort with the user and avoids confusion.

It should include:

• Labels should be placed at the top of each field; wordings should be easy to understand, what you are asking for.
• The size of each field should be according to the expected answer.
• These forms should always be placed above the fold, placing it at the end of the page means majority of the users will never see it.
• Placement should be such that it stands out from other elements on the website. Ideally the best place is right in the beginning to gain optimal page placement.

2. Limit the number of fields

Putting too many fields can reduce the conversion rate drastically, as it take up too much of your visitor’s time. Eliminating unnecessary fields can increase the conversion rate of your form. Your contact form should be simple.

In a study by Hubspot, it showed the eliminating only one field from a form of four fields increased the conversion rate by half.

For example, taking a visitor’s phone number is completely unnecessary and can also deviate the visitor away as most people are not comfortable with sharing their personal information.

3. Upgrade the form for mobile users

As we all know that mobile users are increasing outrageously. Hence websites developers need to understand the importance of adjusting to this industry.

If your contact form is not working on mobile devices you seriously need to reconsider making changes to your website because most users will not visit your desktop site to submit the form – thus costing you conversions.

The best practice is to create contact forms for mobile interface first, as it has limited space, which helps you to eliminate all unnecessary fields resulting in a cleaner interface design. Mobile forms need to be more limited from width of the screen to the length of the fields to input text.

All website developers should invest in optimizing fields for mobile usage, as everyone is now part of mobile-browsing industry and if you want to be successful in user conversion you need to focus on this industry first.

4. Using the correct label for the button

It is even important use the correct words for the submission of the form. The final submit button in any form can lead to either making or breaking form conversion rate.

As research shows that easy to understand words (such as “Click here”, “Go”), they have more conversion rate than the word “submit”, in fact using anything else other than the text “submit” can increase the conversion rate.

Basically because words such as “Click here” or “Go” or “Submit registration” inform the user what’s happening next.

5. Use the correct color for the button

It is true, that colors do make a difference when submitting forms. Visit digaptics to understand the color psychology when choosing colors for Call to Action (CTAs) – buttons.

Another research by Hubspot shows that purple CTA buttons performs better than green CTA buttons by 21%. The CTAs should always be clear and prominent on your contact forms.

6. Ask for only relevant information

Users prefer not to disclose their personal information when filling out any forms such as phone numbers and address.

7. Make sure the errors are highlighted properly

If the user makes a mistake, make sure the form clearly shows what the error was by highlighting the specific field in red and also stating in a small sentence describing what the error possibly was.

8. Eliminate distracting elements

Users can easily get distracted by the different elements outside the form. These distractions can cost you conversions. They may also end up making users leave your page.

Eliminating these non-essential factors like footer, site navigation, site wide notification or a timed pop-up could improve form conversion rate.

9. Reduce friction

Reducing friction should be an on-going process when designing a contact form. Let’s look at some elements that you can implement in your form to reduce friction.

• Tab Settings: The user should be able to quickly and essentially move from field to field without having to do the task themselves. For this the developer should set the Tab settings in a way to allow users especially mobile users to easily move through the fields.

  Make sure that when the user reaches the end of the form the tab setting right after the last field should be the “submit” button and not the “cancel” button, as in many cases, the tabbers expect “Submit” to be the next option; this in turn would really frustrate the user and cost your conversion rates to drop.

  

• In-line Validation: Another way to reduce friction is to provide in-line text to make it easier for the user to understand the format they have to enter their text in.

  Some Javascripts also provide error highlighting on each field to make it easier for the user to identify where the problem lies.

  In some cases, when the user enters an incorrect email address, the javascript can inform the user even before they submit the form to save them the hassle of hunting down the form to check where the error lies.

• Field Highlighting: Highlight the field where the user needs to enter their information. Highlighting fields lets people know where they are in the form currently. Incase if the user gets distracted or if the form has too many fields, they will be able to easily identify where they left off.

  Basically while designing the form, try to reduce as much friction as possible and then watch how the conversion rate increases. By providing help throughout the contact form you can make sure that the user make it through form submission.

10. Provide a follow up

Explaining the user what happens next, basically a Thank you Page to put some consideration into all the effort and time the user have put in to fill the form.

It can be either an inline message letting them know that their form has successfully been submitted or they could also be redirected to another page with a little extra message “Thank you for taking out your valuable time and filling out the form, we’ll be in touch soon.”

You can also avail this chance to engage your hard earned users. Provide them with an extra offer or promotion. Users that have made it to your thank you-landing page will interact with your brand further.

11. Test Everything – Run A/B Testing

There is not hard and fast rule to conversion rate optimization. What may work for you, may not work for someone else’s site. It may even differ from product to product.

A/B test; your forms and collect information over time and come up with your own best practices. For example, even placing the Call To Action (CTA) on the sidebar or under the content makes a difference to the conversion rate.

Conclusion

Contact forms are an interface between your company and the outside world. To increase your conversion rate, the best practice is to reduce friction. Formatting the forms to reduce friction and create such a user experience that they reach the finishing line is actually the main purpose here.

The total number of form fields included in the form is just one of the factors that influence the conversion rate. The clarity and consistency of the design layout all impact on the number of people who will fill out your form.

Hence designing for mobile users reduces friction and improves experience for desktop users as well. Also try to be more human, design your forms so they give a feeling of having a face to face conversation instead of users trying to deal with robots.

A growing conversion rate on your contact forms is an important aspect of successful online business. The above mentioned tips are all easy to implement and will make a huge difference on conversions.

About the Author!

John Lawson from Digaptics web design & development is enthusiastic to write about different industry topics specifically on internet marketing and web design & development, he have written many topics that are engaging and informative for the users, he always welcome others in my niche to share their ideas so he can cover those topics with my thorough research.