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4 Amazing Tips for Building The Best Lead Form

Dots!

Every great marketer understands the importance of a high-performing lead form. Optimized lead forms can make or break your online lead generation and you want users to fill them out so they convert into leads. Sometimes, us marketers get so giddy about great lead forms that we want to fill them out regardless of wanting more information about a product or service. Lead forms are the main way to gather information about your online customers but what does it take to design and optimize a great form?

When you need to collect personal contact information from your online audience, lead forms are the best way to capture their attention and information. Here are some suggestions on how to build the best lead form.

 

#1 Simplicity At Its Finest

Simplicity should be the foundation of your lead form design because nothing will deter a user faster than an overly complicated form on a website or landing page. Your form should look simple and intuitive enough that even the most uneducated user on your page can understand how to fill it out and know what they could receive in exchange for their information.

Business owners often see lead forms as an opportunity to learn everything they can about their audience and tend to overcrowd their forms with too many form fields. First name, last name, address, email, phone, website URL, company name – takes deep breath –  AND job title are all great field options but it’s important to put a limit on the information that you request. Anything more than six form fields can be exhausting for users and you will end up with less information than you ever wanted because users will abandon the form before completing it. Take empathy with your user and think about what they are comfortable sharing instead of thinking about what you need first. If you do need more information about your audience to qualify them as a lead, consider sending them different forms at different times to keep the form from feeling overwhelming.

The best way to simplify your form is to only provide one field at a time and show a progress bar until completion to trick the user into feeling like they are flying through the form with each fill.

 

leadform-progressbar-marketing

 

Our clients have seen their number of form fills skyrocket thanks to using this multi-step form technique and we can’t use it enough on our own landing pages! It may seem counter-intuitive to break down each form fill section individually but to the user, it seems shorter.

 

Multi-step forms trick users by:

  • Removing the intimidating length of the form
  • Reducing psychological friction and creating a more concise first impression
  • Encouraging users to complete the form with progress bars
  • Delaying the ‘sensitive’ asks like email address or phone numbers until the end of the form when the user is more invested in completing the task

 

#2 Beauty Is In The Eye Of Your User

As we mentioned before, an eye-catching form will motivate even the least interested users so give your underwhelming forms a makeover. First impressions matter and you don’t want the main point of conversion to be an eyesore so put serious effort into the design. Forms are an incredibly important point of interaction between you and your audience so in addition to keeping them clean, explore unique colors or button styles to make your form stand out.

One of our favorite forms to admire is from our friends at Flywheel. The simple form plays with bright and subtle colors to keep users engaged — they even include a promise that signing up for Flywheel takes 60 seconds or less! We love the boldness of this design and the copy keeps challenges the user to see how fast it would take them to comeplete it. 

 

flywheel-leadform-marktieng

 

#3 Use Dynamic Calls To Action

If you’re someone like me who rolls their eyes at the dreaded “Learn More” or “Click Here”  then you really appreciate it when someone creates compelling calls to action in lead forms. Calls to action are meant to literally do what they say, call your users to the desired action but how are you going to do that with the ubiquitous “Learn More” and “Click Here”? The answer is, you can’t and your audience will be too bored by your outdated CTAs to fill out your form and abandon your page.

Have fun with your calls to action and get creative so it makes your users feel accomplished. If you need some help developing creative CTAs here are twelve of our favorites to help you get started.

 

12 Great Calls To Action

  1. I Deserve A Free Trial!
  2. Reserve My Seat
  3. Download My Value Offer
  4. I Want 40% Off!
  5. See How You Compare
  6. See It In Action
  7. Join The Adventure
  8. Take A Tour
  9. Try It For Free!
  10. Sign Me Up!
  11. Join The Club
  12. Sign Up! (It Takes 10 Seconds Or Less)

 

uranus-Missouri-form

Here’s a cheeky CTA for our friends in Uranus, MO. Check out their website to see more dynamic calls to action.

 

#4 Put It To The Test

Like most things in digital marketing, we recommend that you perform A/B testing to give your audience options and see what converts. By slightly adjusting one control in your form you can see if your users prefer one CTA or design over the other. Once you’ve found a lead form style that works well you should begin implementing small, incremental adjustments so you can identify exactly what made the difference. A/B testing can provide immense value in fine-tuning your forms and the test results will help you perform a design overhaul when necessary. Reworking your forms based on the number of quality submissions will help your forms perform better and prevent them from turning stale.

 

We hope our tips help make your forms appear more trustworthy and valuable to your audience. Don’t forget that in order to get something good, you have to give something of greater value to your visitors. So keep it simple, make it look good, avoid boring calls to action, and keep testing until you have the perfect lead form.