What are the most important conversion rate secrets for a web form in 2016
In this post, I'll try to give my 2 cents about conversion rate optimization and how we built FormTitan CRO engine.
The rise of the CRO
In the last 2 years, 2015-2016 there has been a lot of buzz about CRO. For you who don't know, "CRO" is an acronym for conversion rate optimization , in simple words :
Trying to increase the % of leads or sales.
And if trying to simplify it even more...make the site’s visitors communicate or purchase more.
You can learn more about CRO here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_rate_optimization
Conversion, conversion , conversion
To understand CRO better you first need to become familiar with these 3 terms:
views = the number of form / web page views
lead = an actual submission sent by your form(contact, survey, order… etc)
conversion rate = leads / views
For example, If you had 100 visitors in the web page containing your form, but only 20 filled it out, this means your conversion rate is 20/100 = 20%
I can CRO !
1- Hire a CRO expert to improve your form to get more leads. for example :
2- DIY - Searching , learning and trying to apply the CRO rules yourself.
A good example of where to start :
3- Use online tools, that specialize in CRO to assist you. For example:
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/14-conversion-rate-optimization-tools-every-expert-needs/114912/
Accessible CRO , power to the people
Until formtitan's recent launch in may 2016, there were no other tools in the market of online form builders that could really help you dramatically improve your conversions and get more leads. There were (and still are) a few form builders out there, that offer limited optimization capabilities such as an A/B Testing option, however, this is really a partial solution which does not address all aspects of the form and does not guide you during the form creation process.
Back to the past
Let me go back in time... (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1560382/) to when this all began for me...It was 2005 and I was young and clueless (my wife will say I still am…)
I wanted to build a form builder, one that will give you flexibility. back in those days there were only a few players in this field and all were quite the same - very simple, automated, with limited design abilities.
We got to work and built FormLogix. a free WYSIWYG tool, drag and drop, free layout with no restrictions and simple to use.
Back to the future
As for the forms themselves, in those days every form you made with almost any form builder platform was considered "good enough".
Today however, in 2016, "good enough" does not cut it anymore and making a nice looking form doesn't really mean users will fill it in.
The name of the game has changed - and "Conversion" is the new player on the block.
The higher your conversion rate is, the more money you will save on marketing and promotions.
You must understand that the conversion rate is not a FIXED number. It is based on many factors. For example:
The quality of your audience
A Responsive layout,
Your form's structure and more...
Since We can't compare apples to oranges we also can't compare conversion rates, different type of application or forms will have different recommended conversion rate value.
How did we come up with our innovative CRO engine ?
Even before FormLogix launched in 2005, we’ve seen tens of thousands of forms, assisted thousands of users, and slowly began to see the bigger picture: Our users wanted to know how to get more leads.
They could handle the form builder, the technical part was easy, but they didn’t know why they got a small number of replies. Did they make any mistake in their form? What if the form was smaller? Would that help? Should they have asked for a phone number? Or made all fields mandatory?
The questions were just flooding us, and so we started to look for answers.
We read a lot on what conversion rates experts were thinking, doing and recommending and we started gathering the information.
It took us 8 months to gather the information. We had to cross check it and extract the data which we thought would be the most beneficial to our users. For this process we also paid a few good CRO EXPERTS to give us they're thumb rules on optimization.
They could handle the form builder, the technical part was easy, but they didn’t know why they got a small number of replies. Did they make any mistake in their form? What if the form was smaller? Would that help? Should they have asked for a phone number? Or made all fields mandatory?
The questions were just flooding us, and so we started to look for answers.
We read a lot on what conversion rates experts were thinking, doing and recommending and we started gathering the information.
It took us 8 months to gather the information. We had to cross check it and extract the data which we thought would be the most beneficial to our users. For this process we also paid a few good CRO EXPERTS to give us they're thumb rules on optimization.
The information was now in our hands - we ended up with 200+ important rules - and we thought that if we could just share it with our users - they would benefit so much. However, there is too much information and no user in his right mind would want to go through it all. We had to find a way to automate it and provide the user with relevant recommendations based on what he was doing. We needed to give our users the guidance they needed in real time: while they were actually creating their form.
This was how the CRO Engine came about.
So what are the most important conversion rate secrets for a web form in 2016?
As i said before - it is going to be long... so please stay tuned for my next post….(already working on it).
Roger, Out.
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