You’re a good marketer. And you know that collecting first-party data about your audience gives you helpful insights to market well.
This real need for data has an unintended consequence: creating website forms that go on…
and on…
and on…
and on.
There is an inverse relationship between the number of fields on your forms and the completion rate — the less fields on your form, the higher percentage of viewers will complete it.
You can improve your form completion rate by removing unnecessary fields.
Here’s an example: requiring people’s job titles. If you have someone’s business email address and their name, you will be able to find out their job title on the company site, or even LinkedIn. This data is accessible! So don’t create a barrier to having someone reach out to you by requiring information you can easily find.
Other examples:
- Telephone number (are you actually going to call?)
- Company size
- Business type (B2B, B2C, etc)
- Mailing address
Any piece of information you could discover in a few seconds on their website should not be a required field on a form to get in contact with you.
“But wait!” you might be thinking. “Requiring all these fields keeps spammers from submitting them.” That is frankly not true. Just today I received a form submission where every field was filled in with the first sentence of the website. 😳 Spammers and hackers are not dissuaded by more form fields.