Your contact form is one of the most important elements of your WordPress site. This is how users get in touch with you and gather their details to enable you to reach out to them. Your forms are an essential touching point for communication with your users, and they’ll enable you to build leads and convert these into revenue.
Forms are often neglected, leading to low conversion rates, encouraging further neglect. Turning your forms into conversion engines will supercharge your business. Let’s take a look at some tips and tricks to help you optimize form conversion for WordPress.
Optimize Your Layout
Conversions are immediately damaged if your contact for design is crude, confusing, or ugly – you want to reduce the barriers to people inputting their details. To this end, your contact forms should be designed to be visually appealing and instantly recognizable.
Don’t try to reinvent the wheel – innovation is great, but web users are experienced and have expectations about the form layout. Ensure that your forms are intuitive for users and keep the fields sized appropriately to the information users will be giving.
Make Your Forms Efficient
If a user has been tempted to provide you with their details, you have their attention. This is a valuable and ephemeral commodity, so use it wisely. If your forms have too many fields, requiring, for example, date of birth, employment area, and so on, users may start providing their name and email address before drifting off as filling out your form becomes laborious.
”Whilst gathering as much data about your users’ demographics as you can is going to bolster your marketing efforts, you don’t want anybody to be put off by the length of your forms. Trim the fat so that only truly essential details are being collected,” says Adam Jackson, a WP expert at LiaHelp and Essayroo.
Highlight User Errors
If your forms need fields to be filled in correctly, then make it clear to users what went wrong if their submitted form couldn’t be accepted. Many users won’t have the energy to fill your form in twice without a nudge – making mistakes cause stress, which diverts their attention away. Too often, an error message causes users to abandon a form altogether.
Use bold fonts and red highlights to circle whichever field went wrong for your users – it should be immediately obvious what needs to be changed. If your forms have been kept brief as they should be, users won’t need to scroll to find the error.
Ditch The CAPTCHA
CAPTCHA is great for reducing spam, but the downside is that it also damages your form conversion rate. For every few spam efforts, one user will abandon the form when the CAPTCHA pops up – this is another barrier in a process that should be as easy as possible for your users.
Whether your CAPTCHA is a math equation or a puzzling piece of text, users don’t want to be tested to submit their information. Ditch the CAPTCHA and deal with the spam.
Limit Form Length
The more fields your form has, the less likely a user is to complete it. Research has shown that once a form exceeds five fields in length, there is a rapid drop off in conversion – as few fields as three could be optimized for your processes.
“If that means you have to abandon a couple of fields of information you’d ideally like to gather, take the hit. Form conversion is a priority at this stage to generate leads – you can gather more information further down the marketing funnel when it becomes really relevant,” explains Daniel Larson, a tech writer at State Of Writing and OXEssays.
Color Matters
Color is a crucial element of design, and choosing the right colors for your forms and the button they’ll submit with can make a big difference to your conversion rate. Some colors have an immediate impact on human psychology.
Coloring your CTAs accordingly will boost your conversion rate. One study from HubSpot showed that a red button increased conversions when compared to green. Be prepared to experiment with your coloring to find the optimal arrangement for your user psychology.
Label Your Buttons Right
Not all labels are created equal, so you should check in with the latest research on how button labels are performing. Old favorite ‘submit’ has been demonstrated to perform worse than more commanding labels such as ‘go’ and ‘click here.’
Don’t assume these will stay stable, though – web culture changes quickly, and as CTAs gravitate towards ‘go,’ this can be disrupted by trendsetters reverting to ‘submit.’
Think Mobile
Mobile users are growing faster than ever – the future is mobile. That means more users than ever before will be visiting your site through mobile browsers and viewing your forms on small screens.
If your forms aren’t scaling correctly, mobile users will abandon, and your conversion rate will suffer. Optimize your forms for mobile and test for a variety of screens and browsers.
Find The Right Place For Your Forms
Finding the optimal position for your forms can have a huge impact on form conversion rates. Place your forms at the top of the page, ideally no lower than 600 pixels from the top of the screen – your forms need to be one of the first things your viewers can see.
Keeping the area around your forms free of clutter can ensure your form stands out, and people easily find the fields. And remember that your forms can exist on multiple pages across your site, ensuring maximum reach and maximum conversion.
Wrapping Up
By optimizing a few elements of your forms, you can see conversions boosted overnight. Combining design and form placement with a few subtle psychological nudges in the language and colors you apply to your forms can greatly impact conversions. Form conversion is essential to the growth of your business. With better leads and more subscribers, your reach and revenue will grow together.
Author Bio:
Katherine Rundell is a conversion writer at Boomessays.com and Academized.com. When she isn’t pursuing innovative digital marketing solutions, she can be found tending the vegetable patch in her garden – Katherine is a fan of growth in all areas. She is also a proofreader at Essay Writing Services.