Why Don’t People Sign Up? Optimize Contact Us Forms!

Do you think your registration or contact form is perfect, but for some reason people just aren’t registering on your site? It may be that you haven’t done enough work to optimize that registration form after all. If you have so many fields for the user to fill out that they feel like they’re applying for Social Security benefits, most users are going to run screaming into the night instead of signing up on your site.

Instead of trying to make them suffer through something that reminds them of standing in line at the DMV, consider these six facts about registration forms:

• 60% of users have more than 5 unique passwords to remember
• 40% of users have to use the “forgot password” option at least once a month
• 50% of users hate having to create a new password
• 86% of visitors will leave a website when the signup request is too long
• 42% of users think online registration forms are too long or too invasive
• 77% of users prefer to use their social media logins to register

The fact of the matter is, the best conversion rate happens on a registration form when the number of fields the user has to fill in is limited to three fields or less. In 2008, a study deployed two “Contact Us” forms with 11 fields and later with 4 fields, and found that submission and conversion rates improved by 160% with just 4 fields.

Here are a few things you can do to make the process of filling in forms easier for your users:

• Use OpenID login credentials like Facebook or Twitter to improve the chances of signups greatly
• Offer free and unlimited access instead of risk free signups – this will improve your conversion rate by around 113%
• Put your forms on the right side column of the page; the easier access to the form improves the chances of signups by 24.6% compared to those on the left side
• Use backend processes to fill in things like State/Province and District/County, based on the ZIP code or postal code
• Minimize fields that users are going to think are inappropriate. Visitors will likely just put bogus information there, anyways.

The next important step is to think hard about the design of the form itself. These six factors of form design will greatly improve your conversion rates.

1. Device Optimization – Make sure your forms will work well on tablets and smart phones.
2. Simple and eye-catching design – Users scan the form before they fill it out, so keep it simple and to a single column to make this scan easier.
3. Large size. Visitors are much more likely to fill in fields that are visually large than those that are visually small.
4. Use a natural or logical flow. Make sure your form fields adhere to a logical or natural flow, such as putting city after address and so forth.
5. Make sure all questions are precise and leave no room for ambiguity, or provide examples when there is some chance for ambiguity.
6. Make sure that the site returns to the form retaining all of the filled out information when catching input errors, marking the incorrect fields with an “X” mark.

If you keep these facts and design characteristics in mind, you’ll find your registration forms are much more successful in converting visitors into members. In order to optimize contact us forms it is imperative to make sure you’re following these tips in order.

Comment below if you have any questions or comments. Also, if you want additional information in regards to the topic, here is direct access to my calendar to schedule a free strategy call.