Three ways to optimise your contact form

I visited a client a few weeks ago with a presentation on how to improve conversion rates for their web contact form. The next step was to implement some of our suggestions and run an A/B test to collect the results.

The top three elements to consider are:

Fewer form fields lead to greater conversion

Contact forms should be simple. Shorten the length of your form, regardless of whether you sacrifice data collection. Collecting data like “country” or “budget” may stand in the way of the user completing the form. The goal is to generate the lead and collect the data when you qualify the lead.

Why does this matter?

If you want more conversions it is the right thing to do. There is also a lot of data supporting the decision to take action. A good example is a blog by Dan Zarrella who analysed 40,000 landing pages to see how their forms performed. The take-home was using as few fields as possible and be careful when using select boxes.

How could we do better?

We advised that the contact number is made optional. Our view is that users may not always want to start a conversation by phone. Creating a bottleneck by making the phone number compulsory, or any field for that matter is costing our client conversions. That will be the next test if I can get it signed off!

What else?

I would like to further optimise the submit button copy and colour. It is already a great CTA, although slightly too long. The colour is a brand colour but could in my opinion generate more conversions if it was punchier.