How long should my landing page form be?
When you think about it a little more, it actually makes sense that this would be a big question. After all, you’ve probably been turned off by a product or company that asked for 15 pieces of information just to send you a free report, right?
Landing page forms are a critical part of your inbound marketing strategy, so optimizing it for conversions can have a serious impact on your overall business. But it’s not just about length, but rather, context for the form. Depending on your specific landing page, a longer form may be necessary. Knowing which way to go can increase or decrease the number of leads or sales you get from your landing page.
In earlier reports, we taught you about the six mistakes bruising your landing pages, and then offered guidance on recognizing the right metrics to achieve landing page success. And now, we want to advise you on how you can optimize your landing page forms for better results.
But wait!
Before you start making changes to your B2B landing page forms, you’ll want to do two things:
- Analyze your current leads
- Find out how many of them make it to the marketing qualified lead (MQL) stage, and how many of those have become customers.
- Evaluate the quality of the leads that turned into customers and the ones that didn’t. Your sales team will be able to give you a better handle on this.
- Split test your current forms. Find out what’s working and what’s not will help guide you in your changes and future tests.
Now let’s get back to the landing page optimizations.
1. Minimize the friction
Getting information from your prospects is the start of a relationship, so if you ask for 15 pieces of information right away, you may scare them off. Think of your landing page form as a process, rather than an event. You only need to ask them for the minimum amount of information that’s necessary right now. Reduce the friction between your form and the prospect and chances are you’ll get more signups.
For example, a name and email address is perfectly fine information to ask for if you’re giving away a free report.
2. Always include a privacy notice
Sure, most people have a throw-away email address they use when they sign up online, so a good privacy policy notice helps reduce the friction between you even more, and increases the trust factor. Prospects want to be sure that their contact information is safe. Link to your privacy policy below the most sensitive field, or as a footnote at the bottom of the landing page.
3. Have a strong call-to-action
It’s surprising how many landing pages still don’t have a strong call to action (CTA). The same rules applies to your form? The Unbounce team has a mantra of “Never Submit”, so you’ll never see a form on their pages that just says “Submit”. Get creative with your landing page forms and have a compelling action word on the button (“Click Here”, “Download”, “Sign Up”, “Send It To Me!”)
Also don’t be scared to try out different sized buttons and colors too. Test to find which one works best for you.
4. Reduce the size of the form
That means playing around with the design of your form to take up the least amount of space. Why not try:
- Having two elements on the same line? First Name and Last Name already go together, so put them on the same line to save space.
- Use drop-down menus when you need prospects to select from a list. E.g. Country, Province, State, etc.
- Reduce the amount of space horizontally on the form. That means removing excess white space between elements.
At first glance this Velaro example doesn’t look like a ‘compact’ form, yet it is. Notice that it’s actually shorter than the image and copy on the left side of the landing page. And it’s the minimum amount of information that they require from prospects too, just first and last name, email, and company name. That’s it.
5. Don’t always use a CAPTCHA
There’s no need to have leads or prospects fill out a CAPTCHA for every landing page form submission. In fact, it can scare off prospects at this stage of the game. If possible, only have it appear if there’s been some signs of abuse from the form, like multiple submissions from a single IP in an hour, or a significant volume of signups in a timeframe.
6. Use optional form fields
This is a favourite of some B2B marketers because it gives control to the prospects. If your audience want to give you all their info, they can; if not, they’ll only do the minimum. Here’s an example:
- Name – required
- Email – required
- Country – required
- City – optional
- Phone number – optional
7. Display a channel-specific form
Is your landing page form optimized for mobile devices? Do you show a different form based on how the prospect got to the landing page? Prospects who arrived on your form via a link in an email newsletter would see a longer form than those who arrived on it from a social media message link.
Understanding where your highest-value leads come from will help you make this decision. Shorter is better for lower-value leads, and you can then nurture them along a different sales funnel. Longer works for serious leads and can be nurtured in a different sales funnel. All starting with the landing page form they filled out.
See how your landing page conversions change
When you optimize the forms on them. Split test everything to find out the best combination of tactics for your page, and then let the signups roll in. Try these seven tactics and see how things change for you. What would you add to the list? Anything that works for you better than these tips? Let us know in the comments
