120% Better Lead Gen Forms through A/B Testing and Good Website Design

• Replacing the ‘Submit’ text on your form Call to Action button can increase your conversion rate by at least 3%. The best performer is ‘Click Here!’, with over 30% in Click-Through Rate.
• To increase your conversion rate by as much as 120%, simply whittle down the number of form fields from 11 down to 4.
• One company nearly doubled their conversion rate, up to 80%, just by adding the word ‘optional’ to their phone field.

“Gah, not another Internet form!” Like it or not, that’s what most of your visitors are thinking when they stumble upon a page section chockfull of little boxes and fields, all asking them for private, or otherwise sensitive information.

There’s an implicit sense of dread to the lead generation form on the part of the user. What will you be using the information for? Can they trust you to disclose it? And why do you need so much info anyway?

The single differentiator that sets a successfully converting form apart from a bad one is its perceived value exchange. In plain English, your lead needs to believe they’re getting something out of this trade-off. You’re trustworthy enough to have their data and your product or service seems legit.

How do you build this sort of trust and conversion efficiency? Through good design and targeted A/B testing, of course! Here are our tested-and-true conclusions regarding the improvement of conversion rates for lead generation forms:

#1 Never Submit!

The above is actually a quote from Unbounce’s own Ryan Engley.

In turn, this mantra for form designers and internet marketers everywhere originated from a 2010 HubSpot survey of over 40,000 landing pages. Those whose forms featured the ‘Submit’ text on the clickable button at the end converted at a rate of only 14%. The same rate stood at 17% for forms with other actionable text buttons.

‘Click Here’ had a Click-Through Rate of over 30% and was closely followed by ‘Go’ (circa 20% click-through). The poorest performers were ‘Download’ (15%) and ‘Register’ (10%). Oli Gardner from Unbounce advises testing against a more specific Call to Action, like ‘Click here to register for our webinar’.

Image source: JMDigital.co

#2 Trim down the number of fields

There’s a lot of lip service being paid in content marketing to the issue of length. Marketers seem to agree that the shorter route is for the visitor, the better. They apply this principle to landing page copy, as well as to lead gen forms. Moreover, their views seem to be substantiated by a split test performed by Imaginary Landscapes (see image below).

When the company reduced the number of contact form fields by 64%, their conversion rate improved by 120%. By upping conversions from 5.4% to 11.9%, they also became convinced that they really didn’t need that much information about their leads anyway. The quality of their conversions didn’t drop by so much as 0.1%.

When Imaginary Landscape reduced the number of Contact Us form fields from 11 down to 4, conversion quality stayed the same, but the number of forms submitted and the conversion rates both increased.

Image source: Imagescape.com

But what if you need all that information after all? We’ll come right out and say that you might be wrong in believing this, but grant you the benefit of the doubt anyway.

For necessarily longer lead generation forms, try multivariate testing by this method: strip the number of form fields down to the bare minimum, then add all the variants you need to test against it, and also introduce a middle-ground version. Find out which form converts best, then weigh those top results against the supplementary data you’ve collected in the process.

And don’t forget to ask yourself: How much of that data will you actually be using for marketing to the completed conversions?

#3 No, you really don’t need that information

You don’t have to take our word for it. Heck, you don’t even need to believe the data collected in the infographic below. But if Neil Patel is any authority on the matter of Conversion Rate Optimization (hint: Amazon is on his list of clients, whom he helps make more money), then you might believe him.

On the Quicksprout blog, the entrepreneur recounts taking out the ‘Revenue’ field from his lead gen form. His conversion rate shot up by 26%, simply by reducing the number of fields from 4 down to 3.

Patel’s visuals also explain that a company managed to increase their conversion rate from 42.6% to 80% by simply adding the word ‘optional’ to their phone field. Previously, 37% of their leads had abandoned the form at that precise cut-off point.

Outtake from Neil Patel’s infographic on contact form optimization

Image source: Quicksprout.com