I’ll bet that one of the most important parts of your site is one you think about the least.
It’s your forms. Any form.
And that’s too bad because the thinnest space between your company and a prospect is the form on your site. If your site is like many sites that we monitor at Sales Growth Group, most prospects that come to the page with your form (most likely a “Contact Us” form) on it don’t complete the form. In fact, we often see abandonment rates as high as 98%. That means that only 2% of the visitors that got to the page with the form actually filled it out.
That’s a lot of window shoppers. Imagine a brick and mortar store where only 2% of the people who looked in the window eventually went in the store.
So why don’t more people fill out the forms? We know for sure that the more fields you ask the visitor to fill out, the less likely they are to complete the form. We offer free website analysises and our web design teams sees a lot of extraneous fields on forms when we review sites. For example, does your site ask people for their fax number? Are you in this day of email and text messaging, really ever going to fax one of your clients?
Just having that one field collecting information you will never use is costing you customers. As we study web design, we definitely see changing trends in form design. In fact, it probably is one of the areas on your site where you probably need to be doing the most amount of experimentation. The form that is working well for you today, will probably not work as well just months from now.
So if you want to get more out of your website, simply watch your form.