How To Make High Converting Detailed Forms

What do you do when you require more information from your customers than their email address? Discover how to gather more details without sacrificing conversion.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 3:23 — 3.2MB)

Topics discussed:

00:07 – What if you need more than an email address
00:49 – A two-step form
01:34 – Use LeadPages to collect email addresses
01:47 – OfficeAutoPilot is recommended for the second part
02:04 – Take it a step further – use VWO to test
02:31 – Get help from ATLWeb.com

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Transcription:

James Schramko here, and I’ve got a website conversion tip for you today.

So a lot of work we’ve been doing lately for our customers is helping them with their opt-in forms, and this is particularly useful when you have a situation where you need more than just an email address. You might need a name, an address, and then certain fields.

This comes up a lot in legal matters, it comes up a lot with lead generation, where you need more details. You might want to know the age of a student, if you’re selling coaching products or training products. You might need to know the experience of someone if you have athletic products.

What To Do
Now the problem is, a lot of fields on a form can really slow down the number of opt-ins, so what we do is we do a two-step form or a multi-step form. So the first option is just to enter an email address, and then they continue on. And then the next part, we actually pre-populate that email address, and perhaps the first name, then we ask for the next stuff.

And this is where the cool thing happens. If people don’t fill it out, we can then follow them up because we have their email address. We can use some of the special sequences in shopping carts like OfficeAutoPilot, where we can actually start tagging people as a shopping cart abandonment, and follow them up until they fill out the rest of the form by sending them an email where the rest of the form is. Now of course, once they complete the form, we take them off that sequence and we no longer follow them up, so it’s all very clever.

A two-step process

Things You’ll Need
But how do you do this? Well, you’re going to need a few things. You’ll need something like LeadPages to collect the name and email address. That’s a really beautiful, works on any format form, and it’s easy to create, plus you can use it in Facebook as well. That’s for Part A.

Part B, you’re going to want to use something like OfficeAutoPilot, where they have this system called PURL, which is Personalized URL, and it can actually pre-populate the second part of the form. Now you might need to use the second domain name for Part two of the form, but that’s ok and easy to organize. Also if you really want to go for gold, start split-testing your forms using Visual Website Optimizer.

In Summary
So just a quick recap. We ask people for the minimum amount of information possible, but including an email address. We split test that form, and we’re using LeadPages. We use Visual Website Optimizer for that split test. We then fill out the second part of the form, and if people don’t make it all the way, we’ll follow them up until they do.

So I hope that’s helpful. If you need help with any of this, we actually do this stuff over at ATLWeb.com. You can order a 5-hour pack, where we’ll actually set up this stuff for you, just give us your logins for LeadPages, for OfficeAutoPilot, and your website, and we’ll make it happen. You’ll be building your multi-step forms much faster than trying to get all that information in one big, ugly old form.

I hope this has been helpful. I’m James Schramko, and I’ll speak to you soon.

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