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Earlier this week, I discussed abandoned carts, but today I’m going to discuss abandoned forms. Abandoned forms are similar to abandoned carts, but they don’t have to exclusively be when customers are making eCommerce purchases. Form abandonment just refers to when someone starts to fill out a form but they never finish it.
Now, this could still refer to customers who are filling out forms when they are trying to purchase an item. But it could also refer to companies who are not selling products but are using a website to advertise their product. For example, you could have forms for registration for a free class, a customer service survey, a job application, etc. All of those examples are important and you would not want someone to leave your website without filling it out completely.
So how do you reduce form abandonment on your website? Well, there are 5 mistakes you may be doing that might be increasing form abandonment. Today, we’ll tell you what those five mistakes are and how you can correct it.
1. Your Form is Too Long
Problem: People can’t/won’t take the time to finish your form.
Everyone’s time is precious. We all only have so much time. So the longer your form is, the more likely it is that people won’t be able to finish your form.
The first thing you can do to fight this is to make your form shorter. Try to find any unnecessary part of your form and take it out. See if you can combine any parts or get by with just some of it. For example, depending on your business, do you need first and last name? Could you get by with just asking for the first name? This may seem like a small thing, but things like that add up.
But what if you go over your form and you just can’t make it shorter? Sometimes, a lot of information is needed, like with a job application.
But here is something you can do if you use WPForms for your forms. WPForms is one of the best, most professional options you can choose if you use WordPress and create forms. There’s a WPForms Form Abandonment add on you can add to your website. With this, you can capture partial form entries so that if people do abandon the form, you can at least capture some information. From there, you can target them in emails to finish up the form.
Solution: Shorten your form if possible, and get the WPForms Form Abandonment addon
2. Your Form is Hard to Read
Problem: The design of your form is hard to read and so people end up not finishing your forms.
Your content could be amazing, but if the design of your form is poor, it may be hard for visitors to read the form. This can happen if you are building a form from scratch. But if you use the templates offered by WPForms, this won’t be a problem. Using their templates makes it not only cleaner looking, but it’s a lot less work for you!
Solution: Using the templates from WPForms to create a form.
3. Your Form Doesn’t Speak to Your Audience
Problem: Your forms don’t resonate well enough with your audience and so they’re not as inclined to finish them.
You could have written an amazing form, but it won’t matter if it doesn’t speak to your audience. Every website I have ever designed has had a unique audience. Something that works for one website won’t for another. Even if you properly research your audience ahead of time, you can always be in for surprises.
But what you can do is test out forms to see which is working best. You can use Split Hero for A/B Testing for WordPress. You can then check to see which forms have the best completion rates. You can then use that form.
Solution: Use Split Hero to A/B test your forms.
4. Your Forms Aren’t Mobile Friendly
Problem: Your form isn’t mobile friendly making it hard for anyone using a mobile phone to compete your form.
As using mobile devices to go online becomes more and more popular, this becomes more and more of an issue. Sometimes your form can look great on a desktop or laptop computer – but terrible on a mobile phone. And forms certainly weren’t made for mobile phones, since mobile devices are so small.
But there are ways to fix this. If you use a company like WPForms for your forms, this really helps. For starters, with WPForms, all forms are mobile friendly. Period. So you don’t have to worry about testing it out. And you can use WPForms’ dropdown menu form fields to make sure customers don’t have to keep scrolling down and down.
If you want to make it even better for mobile users, you can also consider using conditional logic for your forms. This is a feature that is available for WPForms. I personally love using conditional logic. With conditional logic, certain fields are hidden and only appear depending on what the visitor types. This is great because customers will only need to see information relevant to them (this helps with form length, too!). So, an example of this would be billing & shipping information. If you fill out billing information, pop up screens for shipping information would only appear if the customer checks off “shipping information is different from billing information”.
Solution: Use WPForms to make sure your forms are optimized to look great on mobile devices.
5. Your Website Doesn’t Look Secure
Problem: People are worried their information won’t be secure so they quit filling out the form.
Studies show that the biggest reason people abandon their online forms is over security concerns. One reason for this when customers don’t have an SSL certificate. An SSL basically creates a secure link between your website and your website visitor’s browser. I have seen so many websites neglect to purchase an SSL certificate and it makes me not want to fill out their forms. A lot of hosting companies (like WP Engine or Kinsta)give you an SSL certificate for free. But not all hosting companies do. So if you don’t have one, you’ll need to purchase one. A cheap way to do this I have found is through Namecheap.
