It’s where “the magic happens” for your business.

But for many people filling out a form can be as annoying as one sided toilet paper.

No one likes filling out forms. So you better make it as frictionless as possible.

And that’s what this article is all about.

Giving you actionable tips on how to improve your lead forms. Based on actual data.

The article in a nutshell:

​After reading this article, you know how long your forms should be, where to put your form on a landing page, how to draw attention to your form, how to create the perfect call-to-action, and many more useful insights for creating high converting forms.

This way you know what makes a great form and you can optimize accordingly. Resulting in you having better results.

Let’s dive in, shall we?

What makes a high converting lead form?

Where should you put your form? Above or below the fold?

For those who don’t know what a “fold” is: it’s the place on your landing page that you’ll see when you first land on it.

Everything that’s “below the fold” is the part of your page that’s out of sight when you arrive on a page.

Meaning, it’s the area of a page you have to scroll to.
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Above the fold

If you have a short landing page and your main goal is just capturing emails you most likely place your form above the fold.

Most likely you’re giving something away (ebook, webinar registration, physical gift) in exchange for personal info and the best thing to do here is to position your form next to the image that shows what you’re visitors are getting when they fill out your form.

This doesn’t just show you what you get but also complies with known reading patterns.

Reading patterns? Yes. People have a way of reading/scanning pages.

Research states that we humans read short webpages light on content in a Z-pattern. As you can see below, Facebook built its login page to accommodate this reading pattern. It uses a visual hierarchy to cater to this Z-pattern.
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By being consistent with visual hierarchy you’ll lead your visitor from element to element ending at the final call-to-action or form.

The best way is to put your form on the last horizontal line (where your reading flow ends).

Below the fold
Putting your form below the fold or even at the bottom of your page can sometimes increase conversions. This is often recommended when your form is longer and people need more information.

In an experiment, the form that was placed below the fold converted 304% better than the form above the fold.

When you’re dealing with a longer form you want to give people more info before you ask their personal info (that’s why you place it below the fold).

The page then follows the good ol’ AIDA principle.

You get their Attention by your headline and sub-headline, then get their Interest by summing up the benefits of whatever you’re offering, feeding their Desire by showing social proof ending in Action: filling out your form.

2. Draw attention to your form

Form encapsulation
By giving your form a thick border, you make it stand out. This means more attention to your form! Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any test results pointing at the effectiveness of encapsulation.

Directional cues
By using things that direct to your form, you’ll draw attention to your form.

So, what are the most commonly used directional cues?

In an experiment done by ConversionXL, an arrow drew the most attention to the form compared to all other visual cues (face, triangular, line, arrow).

In another experiment by Unbounce directional cues (man looking at the headline, man + arrow pointing at headline) caused people to understand what the page was all about.

It made them notice the headline faster and thus understand faster what the page was all about.

​3. Form fields

How many?
The shorter your form, the higher your conversions. That’s probably what you heard, haven’t you?

Or this one: longer forms mean more quality leads (because people who put in more effort are probably the people most interested in your offer).

So how many form fields should you use?

First, ask yourself these questions:

1. What personal info do I really need?
2. What is it I’m giving them in return? Is it properly balanced with how much I’m letting them put into the form?

Do you just need their email? Why ask for their phone number?

Are they subscribing to your newsletter? Why ask for their zip code, income, telephone number and city when?

I think you get where I’m going, right?

So, what comes after common sense?

Let data decide, I say.

Test 1: Marketo

Although a long time ago, in 2011 Marketo tested how their conversions and cost per lead would be when they used 9 fields, 7 fields, and 5 fields in their form.

Shortening their forms to 5 fields increased their absolute conversions with 3% and reduced their cost per lead with $10.66!

Test 2: Conversion expert Micheal Agaard

To see if reducing form fields was indeed a conversion booster, Michael Agaard tested out if this indeed was the case. He reduced his form fields from nine to six.

These were the results:

The form with 6 fields was actually performing worse. It decreased leads by 14.23%.

So what happened? The 6 field form missed “time of performance”, “type of event” and “where will the event take place”.

These were fields people actually didn’t mind to fill out. Which in turn led to fewer leads.

The next experiment tested the old 9 form field against a 9 form field where he optimized the field labels (field titles).

Titles were made clearer (from: “Where will the event take place?”, to Location (fill out if you have booked the location for example).

This resulted in a 19.21% increase in conversions when the form had optimized field labels.

Not shortening the form, but making the form more relevant and clearer increased leads.

Test 3: Blivakker
Blivakker, a Norwegian beauty e-commerce store, tested the impact of fewer form fields on conversions.

The e-commerce store tested a form with 14 fields against a 4 field form and a 3 field form.

As you can see below, the form with 4 fields (“skjema light”) resulted in the most conversions.

Blivakker concluded that removing unnecessary fields increases conversions, but when removing too many relevant fields conversions will begin to decrease.

So, what do we learn from all these tests?

First, shorter forms, in general, convert better. Simply because people have fewer obstacles to complete the form. But there’s a caveat here.

Hubspot found out when researching 40.000 landing pages, that conversion went up when form fields decreased, but it really depended on which type of form fields you removed.

According to their study, reducing text area and dropdown form fields, increased conversion rates significantly.

Reducing text form fields didn’t cause a big increase in conversions you might expect:

Learning: not all form fields are created equal. Some fields create more friction than others.

Second, don’t just reduce your form fields because that’s “best practice”. Sometimes longer forms work better, because people expect forms to be longer (and they get asked relevant questions).

Think about it this way: am I asking all the necessary questions? Are there questions that I really need to ask? Is it worth asking more questions so I’ll decrease leads, but get more valuable leads?

Asking more questions means qualifying your leads beforehand, but as a rule of thumb, I would just ask the minimum essentials (aka the things you absolutely need to know).

Save and resume later

Another interesting feature I saw was the feature “save and resume”.

You give your prospect a chance to fill out the rest of the form later. I don’t know if this will increase conversions, but it definitely sounds promising.

The form gives you a link through which you can access the unfinished form.

Formstack and cognito are software tools that provide this feature.

Saving now and resuming later could be a solution for long forms that you otherwise might skip in their entirety.
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​What about multi-step forms?

You’ve read that shortening your forms can increase your conversions.

Saving and resuming later seems like a nice feature, but not many form builders or landing page builders provide it.

And you still need to ask a lot of necessary questions. But you don’t want a epic long-form that causes too many people to leave your form.
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What about cutting your form up into smaller manageable steps? Why not use a multi-step form?

I’d say give it a try. But don’t take my word for it: whatismycomfortzone.com increased their relative conversion rate with 53% by dividing 30 questions long-form into 4 steps.

Taking it a step further, Brokernotes put up a multi-step form where the form fields were clickable images.

Their multi-step image form converted 35% better (from 11% to 46%) than the ordinary form (this might work especially well with mobile, come to think about it).

Another test revealed a 59% increase in form completion when people first clicked a button before getting to the actual form (2-step optin) compared to immediately see the form on the page.

Lastly, a conversion research of Formstack from 2015 reported an average 13.85% conversion rate for multi-page forms. One page forms averaged a 4.53% conversion rate.

So why do these forms convert as they do? I think most people don’t like forms (at least people see them as a necessary evil).

So by making forms that don’t look like forms (by cutting them into more manageable pieces) people may experience them as less a nuisance.

You now have an idea of how long your form should be. What can you do to make the maximum amount people fill out the damn thing?
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Simply put: make it as easy as possible to fill out your form.

Define required form fields

Make it clear which form fields have to be filled out before completing the form.

Personally, nothing’s more annoying than filling out a form (while skipping some questions, because of privacy concerns) and then get confronted with an error message: “Your monthly salary is required” (why do they want my monthly income anyways?!).

Simply adding an “*” to the fields that are required, can take away this annoyance.

Form field validation

Speaking of errors: use field validation!

With instant clarification, you’re immediately aware of the error you made.

This is in my opinion really helpful and helps smoothen the whole “form experience”.

From easy to “hard”

When you need more personal info, ask non-threatening questions first.

Begin with a first name or the function someone has within a company before asking someone’s phone number.

C̶a̶p̶t̶c̶h̶a̶

You want to protect yourself from spammers, I get it. But that Captcha thing that forces me to click on all the traffic signs annoys the sh*t out of me and makes me want to k̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶m̶y̶s̶e̶l̶f leave your landing page.

I predict there are more people who share my annoyance.

So, are there alternatives?

Fortunately, yes!

I scoured the internet and found a technique called “the honeypot technique”.

It works like this: spam bots fill out all of your form fields.

So you make a form field and hide it for normal humans to see.

Everyone who fills out this hidden field is almost certainly a robot.

The next step is to make sure that when this hidden field is filled out your form can’t be submitted.

Nifty, eh?
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So how do you do this?

With Converdy you can easily create a hidden form field within the editor (no code needed!):

5. Headline
Giving your form an enticing headline is important. If you don’t know what to say, try to incorporate one of these two approaches:

1. Ask a question
2. State the most important benefit they’re getting from filling out your form.

Besides this, make sure your headline aligns with your call-to-action copy.

There’s no sure way to know which headline works best. Testing is again the way to go here.

6. Trust

Terms and agreement / Privacy policy
In almost any country in the world, you need explicit permission from people to get their email.

They need to accept the “terms and conditions”.

It’s an essential part of your form. No doubt about it. So yeah, include it.

Also, make it clickable so your visitors can actually read the thing.

​An idea?

Reinforcing privacy statement

Sometimes companies use a reinforcing privacy statement. Something that goes like this: “We value your privacy, we’ll never spam you”.

So, the question remains: should you write a reinforcing privacy policy below your terms and conditions? And if so, what should you write?

I could, of course, give you the “best practices” or whatever. But I like to give you some test results so you can base your decision on actual reliable data.

Let’s look at two previous experiments that were done on a reinforcing privacy statement.
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Test 1: Solution For Diabetes

Solution for diabetes tested if adding a quick line with “We respect your privacy” would increase sign-ups for their report (Diabetes Reversal Secrets).

The result? The privacy policy didn’t increase sign-ups.

It actually decreased sign-ups! Adding a short privacy policy resulted in a 24.4% decrease in signups compared to the form without a privacy policy.
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Test 2: BettingExpert

Bettingexpert also ran a similar experiment with various privacy policy statements.

Adding the reinforcing privacy policy statement resulted in 18.7% fewer sign-ups!

When the word “spam” was removed from the privacy statement, there was no significant difference in sign-ups:

Lastly, they tested a more clear and concise privacy statement where they guaranteed 100% privacy, which in the end increased signups with 19.47%!

So what can you learn from these experiments?

First, a privacy policy can hurt your conversions when it’s not done right. When your privacy statement isn’t clear and concise it will act like a distraction tanking your conversions in the process.

Second, mentioning words like spam near your call-to-action have a negative influence on your conversions.

Third, be as clear as possible. Don’t be vague (100% privacy or “we respect your privacy”), but state clearly that you mean business (“we guarantee 100% privacy”).

In your form, the CTA button is the last action that’s required. There are three things to keep in mind: design, copy, and context.

CTA copy

First off, don’t make your call-to-action say “submit”. Maybe you have heard of this, like, 100,000,000 times but please don’t do this.

Don’t believe me? Check out this data:
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This test was done by Hubspot for signing up for a webinar. You don’t want to use “submit”.

So, what should your call-to-action say?

Well, it should specifically describe what you’re getting when you click. For example: “Get Free E-book”.

When thinking what you should let your CTA say, build your copy around these two questions:
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1. What is your visitor specifically getting?
2. What’s the motivation to click on your button?

Answered these 2 questions? Good!

An easy trick from Unbounce to see if your copy makes any sense is finishing the following sentence with your own CTA copy: I want to___.

Another thing that you should test out, to increase conversions, is urgency in your CTA copy. So instead of “Get Your Free E-book” test out “Get Your Free E-book Now” or “Get Your Free E-Book Today”.

By adding the word “now” or “today” you might get higher conversions.
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CTA design

Quit the whole color testing, will you? Colors on itself don’t really influence people. It’s the way buttons contrast with the rest of the page, making it stand out (influencing visual hierarchy).

By drawing attention the button gets easy to spot. Check the contrast ratio calculator for contrasting colors and choose a contrasting color for your call-to-action button.

Next up: size. “Best practice” dictates that you should make a button big enough. So big, that you can spot it from 2 meters away. Most of the time then.

Want it to really stand out? Put a wiggling button below your form. But please: test it first! Some people might be annoyed by a wiggling button.

The basic idea is that you make it stand out by contrasting and enlarging.
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CTA surrounding factors

As we noticed earlier a badly written privacy statement can distract or turn people of, consequently decreasing your form conversions.

To be safe you’ll want to avoid any distraction or negative words around your call-to-action. But there are exceptions (of course)!

When we spoke of drawing attention to your form, we dropped the term direction cues. You use them to make people focus on something on your landing page (like your form or call-to-action).

Most common directional cues previously summed up:
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* A face

* An arrow

* Whitespace
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Keep in mind that pointing an arrow to your form and your CTA button will be a bit overkill.

What to do if you already have direction cues going to your form?

A way of making your form call-to-action stand out is to surround it with sufficient whitespace. This way your button will stand out and will be easy to spot.
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And what about mobile?

Mobile is huge. Following the most recent stats, 51.2% of all internet users worldwide is on mobile.

So, yeah, optimizing your form for mobile is important!

Getting your visitors to fill out your form on desktop is one thing, but on mobile things get quite more difficult.

Mobile is a fast-paced, short attention spanned medium after all.

Because there haven’t been many published test results of mobile pages (or the results that were published were not split by device), I have to go with some reasonable looking “best practices” on this one.

Asking fewer questions will help converting mobile traffic better.

Only sometimes you need to qualify prospects and you need more info.

What to do?

You just use a multi-step form (which we talked about earlier) so at least your visitors don’t have the feeling they’re filling out a humungous form.

This means when you type something in your form field (for example a service or product) the form will automatically autosuggest what you might need.

Put your fields closer to each other, so your form gets perceived as shorter. Which in turn reduces friction for mobile users.

Put your form where people can actually reach it. 49% of people are “one-handed”.

An estimated 11% of the world population is left-handed, which makes the majority of the people at least right-handed.

Not only does the thumb influence where we should put our form, but also the device size dictates where we should put our form.

On mobile things should scale to your fingers. Meaning that you shouldn’t have any trouble tapping the form fields or the button.

The science of forms

If you’re still with me: awesome!

When I started writing this article about forms I had no idea that it would escalate into the huge article you’re reading right now.

Although there are best practices, there’s no such thing as a perfect form.
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The good news is that you don’t have to guess what might be good practices for your forms.
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Most of the practices are either proven by previous experiments or are just great user experience principles.

But be careful: test them out and see what works for you. You should always be testing everything!