Looking to Capture High-Quality Leads? Give Your Lead Form Some Love

The number one challenge for marketers for a number of years has been lead generation. There are lots of factors that go into this, but one that isn’t talked about enough is lead forms. You might have a great marketing campaign that generates lots of excellent, high-quality traffic to your site, only for prospects to be put off by a lead form that’s too complicated, unattractive or unappealing.

Luckily, this is something that can be easily fixed. There are a few aspects of lead forms that can be tweaked, with surprisingly effective results. Here are some of the best ways to give your lead forms some love in order to capture your company’s top-quality prospects.

Change up its placement

Where is your form located on your webpage? There are a range of options here, but for most marketers the choice is simple: do you place your form above or below the ‘fold’, the section of your site a user sees before they scroll down? It might seem obvious to place your form above the fold where it’ll be seen straight away, but another train of thought is that this might be too aggressive a sales tactic and will put users off.

There are other placements as well. More than three-quarters of marketers utilize pop-up forms rather than embedding forms in their sites, which is a more eye-catching option. As with most of the tips in this article, it’s best to utilize A/B testing and experiment to find out what works best for your user base.

Use calls to action

It should go without saying that calls to action (CTAs) are a necessary part of marketing in 2021. Even simple anchor text CTAs can boost conversion rates by as much as 121%, so it’s crucial for you to tell your users exactly what you want them to do when they fill out your form.

There are a number of ways you can make a CTA more effective. For example, offer your user something specific. Instead of a simple “Sign Up” button, highlight what they can expect to receive once they fill out the form. Focus on the benefits for the user, not just the action you want them to take.

Consider multi-step forms

If a user loads up your site and is faced with a form with dozens of boxes to fill, it can be extremely intimidating and make them less likely to want to fill it out. However, keeping your forms too light limits the amount of information you can collect, and prevents them from being as effective as possible. The solution is to split your forms into multiple, manageable steps.

The results of this can be extremely impressive. Venture Harbour found that this tactic enabled the company to convert 53% of its site visitors into leads. Another of the firm’s sites saw its conversion rate increase from 0.96% to 8.1% - representing an increase of 743% in total - thanks to multi-step forms.

How many fields?

How many fields should your form include? Over the years, the accepted wisdom in this area has changed. It used to be thought that fewer fields would be more convenient for the user and thus increase conversions, however that’s since been shown not to be the case. Compilations of several studies show that sometimes adding more fields actually increases the conversion rate.

Like many aspects of lead generation, it depends on a lot of factors. For example, a common problem is getting rid of the fields people are happy to fill out, leaving the ones they don’t want. It’s better to focus on making sure the fields you include are as relevant to your users as possible than aiming for an arbitrary number.

Keep your CAPTCHA up-to-date

For years, the standard method for avoiding fraudulent or spam users was CAPTCHA technology. However, this was inconvenient, especially for visually impaired users, and often reduced conversion rates as a result. Since then, the technology has improved and reCAPTCHA is now the norm.

This is much more convenient for users, as it often requires little more than checking a box. Google has just released reCAPTCHA Enterprise, which offers more customization. This means you can match your levels of security and convenience to your specific forms, ensuring you keep them as effective as possible.