You are about fill out a long and detailed web form that will allow you to check out and order the book that you were looking for. You realized that some of the fields on the form don’t really want to cooperate with you. Yes, you entered your zip code correctly, but maybe you should check that once again. Here comes another red error message saying that you need to set your password at least using one capital letter, base 10 digits, non-alphanumeric characters and some other requirements that will make you consider closing that tab and never return.

As a business owner, you just lost a lead!!!

Also check out 11 Steps for Creating the Best Converting Registration Forms

(Source: google research blog)

Web forms are vital for websites when it comes to converting customers. They are used to signing up to a website and entering shipping or credit card data to order a product or/and register for a newsletter. If you are a data-driven researcher, marketer or a business owner, web form testing may reveal many pain points to you that would cause your prospective customers to bounce. By testing your web forms, you can learn which fields are causing most of the form abandonment, which fields take more time to fill in and which fields are often revisited by customers.

A research done by Google in 2014 shows that modified web forms had an increase in successful first-trial submission and higher user satisfaction. The study focused on the format specifications of the web form which were the positioning of the fields. User interviews revealed which guidelines were most important to improve. It turned out that putting labels above rather than on the left side of the field had a large positive impact on the user experience. In conclusion, the total amount of people who left without completing the form was reduced.

Another research conducted by cxpartners focuses on the ease of completing a form and the user satisfaction of it. The quality of the form design was the main key they were inspecting. They used the forms of major websites such as: Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and eBay. Each participant was provided with the forms and asked to fill the forms as if they were registering for those services. They have come up with the following outcomes:

1. Vertical layouts are always better than multi-column layouts
2. Labels that are aligned to left tend to be more visible and clear
3. When placing more than one field in a line, it’s best to put them closer to each other
4. Emphasize the titles if you want your users to read them

As a result, they were able to point out the pain points and come up with guidelines.

(Source: cxpartners)

So, how can you test web forms?

Basically, there are some tools out there which let you create your own remote test projects.

Here are some useful remote testing tools which will help you to test out your web forms:

Formisimo

Formisimo provides a tool that analyses what users are doing in online checkout, registration forms and enquiry forms. It also measures the abandonment rate of a website. In order to install it, all you need to do is place JavaScript on your website. Formisimo works with most popular platforms such as WordPress and can make testing web forms easier than it looks. It’s also worth mentioning that Formisimo comes with a stylish user interface that is easily understandable.

(source: formisimo)

 Read More: 6 Conversion Optimization Tools Every Optimizer Should Use

Lucky Orange

Lucky Orange offers combined tools along with form analytics. By using form analytics you can gather key metrics such as abandonment rate, drop off statistics, conversion rates, repeated fields and more. The advantage here is that after completing your form test you can use Visitor Recordings to watch specific customers and learn from their behaviors on your website.

(source: luckyorange)

ClickTale

ClickTale form analytics offers users the ability to discover which fields take too long to fill, which are left blank and which fields cause your visitors to leave. With this tool, it is possible to get different types of reports on your form testing. Those reports include: conversion report, drop report, time report, blank field report and refill report. You can also combine form analytics with visitor recordings to get better insights.

(Source: ClickTale)

Read More: The Ultimate AB Test Checklist

Formstack

Formstack is another tool for measuring the important metrics such as conversion rate, abandonment rate and unique views. It offers in-app analytics that shows not only the web form test results but also website statistics as a whole. You can integrate Formstack with Google Analytics to reach more detailed metrics.

(Source: Formstack)

Inspectlet

Inspectlet enables you to track a variety of form metrics. By using Inspectlet you can measure the engagement rate, the form validation fail rate and the time spent on the web form. The tool comes with a simple design that makes the testing process even easier. Installing Inspectlet is a breeze, because all you need is a piece of JavaScript code on your website.

(Source: Inspectlet)

UsabilityTools

UsabilityTools is the combined set of tools that is designed to improve both conversion and user experience of a website. You can use one or a few of the tools to reach better results. Web form tester is one of the tools that lets you analyze metrics like form abandonment, time spent and field refills. You can activate web form tester by simply placing a JavaScript code to your website and you are done.

(Source: UsabilityTools) 

By using these tools you can get a deeper insight on the effectiveness of your web forms. Since web forms are one of the most important elements of your business, conversion rate optimization (CRO) will definitely be an important investment. However, the tools listed above all have different pricing. If you want to start testing, a majority of form testing tools offer free trials. That way you can choose your option before committing yourself to any one.

Do you think that testing web forms is crucial for your conversion rates? Do you test web forms? Which tools do you use? Let us know in the comment section below.

Read More: How to Convert More Customers Using 4 Basic Personality Types

 

Sezgin Hergül is the marketing manager at UsabilityTools, a B2B SaaS company that provides UX and Conversion solutions. Focused on growth, he and his team are on a mission to save the world with #ContentMarketing.

Did you know that in average, content featuring images has 94% more total views than content without images*?

According to the picture superiority effect, images are better remembered than words. This effect has been demonstrated in numerous experiments, and the effect becomes more dominant with age.

The power of this fantastic effect allows you to use images in your website to increase user engagement, improve SEO, accelerate sharing on social networks, increase brand awareness and increase conversions.

Check out these 5 ways to increase revenue using images on landing pages:

 

• Know your targeted audience –Since images affect people differently, an image that might convert one user, can be repelling to another. So make sure you understand your target audience and use images that fit their characteristics. For instance check out these outstanding differences between men and women’s viewing process on gaze plot.

 

• Use good quality images – allow your users to interact with your image by using a 360° view, zoom, and detailed, colorful and good quality images.

• Draw attention – images draw attention; use that to your benefit in order to draw attention to the product, service or copy. Use your image to guide your customers to you call to action buttons. For instance images of faces can be used to guide people around a website or an ad. Check out this eye track heatmaps and how the focus on the text changes according to the where the baby is looking at. Heatmaps in general are a great way to get to know your users behavior, check out our latest post on the subject.

 

 

• Use images to create trust – a 2002 study found that images (even irrelevant images) increase likelihood of accepting something you read as true. This is why it is a great idea to use different images as trust icons, for example: client logos, product images and other logos.

 

• Use images to stimulate emotions – Most of our decision making is irrational and has an emotional base (learn more). Those emotions can be triggered by using emotional-evoking images. First, understand what emotions you want to get your users feeling, then figure out what emotions will help increase sales, and choose your images according to the emotion you expect them to evoke.

 

So, as you’ve seen, an image can go a long way. Can you think of other ways images can increase conversions? We would love to hear from you.

 

*According to MDG Advertising.

A while back we discussed “Anchoring” the emotional trigger used by Steve Jobs, that increases conversion rates time after time and helped sell millions of iPads. Similar to Anchoring, there are many other psychological triggers that affect our decision making process we aren’t aware of. The one we’ll discuss today is Loss Aversion, “discovered” by the same researchers whom determined “anchoring”  Tversky & Kahneman.

Loss aversion refers to people’s tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. Some studies show that losses are twice as powerful psychologically than gains. It implies that one who loses $100 will lose more satisfaction than another person will gain satisfaction from a $100 gain.

Loss aversion is used a lot in the world of marketing as people will make an irrational decision to avoid the loss. For example, manufacturers of books, washing machines etc. send out their products without requiring prepayment. They say, “Use them a week, and if you don’t want it, send them back.” Most people don’t.

Increase conversion using loss aversion:

• The world of free trials: Loss aversion is the exact reason companies offer full free trials for a limited period of time. It’s based on the fact that once you have this product and you get used to it, you’re not going to let a little thing like a payment issue, get in your way.

• In the 1970’s cigar salesmen used to give packs to their customers and tell them to smoke 10 of them. If they don’t like them, they can send them. I wonder who sent them back..

A good example from the online world is Kaspersky. Dealing with your computer security, once you’re protected, you’re not going to go back to the insecure world…are you?

• It’s all about timing: A limited time offer with an expiration date on it triggers that exact emotion. People are people, and they do not want to be the ones losing out on an amazing one time offer.

A while back ago we used the loss aversion trigger on the banners we designed for one of our clients. As you can see below there was a counter working it’s way backwards warning users of the amount of time left for the one time sale.

• The world of unknown: Rather than talking about what people may gain from your services or product, researches have shown that talking about missing out on a special offer will increase your revenue much more than talking about gaining from it. Interesting strategy for PPC campaigns.

 

• Wheel them back again: A good example of bringing back the customers is the punch cards people collect at coffee shops. As apposed to a 10% immediate discount on their daily coffee, most people will prefer a punch card that grantees the 10^th coffee for free. People will keep going back every day to get that coffee and not miss out on it.

The key to conversion optimization is recognizing your audience’s emotional triggers and using your messaging and design to express them.

People don’t like losing things they already have, or are very close to having. So much so they will often make irrational decisions to avoid the loss, and as we already know 90% of all our decisions in life are irrational so why not use it to your advantage and increase your conversion?

Choosing the right place to start your optimization process is a super important decision. With so many conversion strategies and methods out there it’s hard to know where to start and how.

Where to start: It is customary to divide the user flow into Upper funnel (i.e banners, landing pages, lead generation) and lower funnel (registration forms and pricing pages etc.).  When choosing the starting point of your test you need to take into account that the “lower” the point is in the funnel the less traffic you’ll have for the test.

To help you get started and locate where you need to start optimizing, we’ve listed 3 basic metrics you should be following as soon as possible. These metrics will help you decide where to start optimizing and how.

 

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate metric measures the amount of users who visit your site’s first page, and stop there. For example: if you have 10,000 visits a month to your site and 5000 users leave before doing anything else on your site, your bounce rate is 50%. If your visitors are leaving without taking any actions you may need to work on:

1. Call to action buttons – One of the most important parts of conversion is creating the right call to action buttons. You can find 3 tips to improve your call to action buttons here.
2. Messaging – Check your messaging. Using emotional conversion optimization can vastly improve your conversion optimization and get visitors to take the next step in your site. Check out these 3 emotional triggers to optimize your messaging.

From the screen capture below you can see our clients bounce rate throughout the course of a month. Once standing on over 60% bounce rate, has now changed to less than 10% by simply locating the leaks and addressing them.

One important thing to remember is that bounce rate is a natural part of a website and some people just don’t find what they’re looking for or have found what they were looking for and don’t need to continue on, so you won’t be able to minimize it to 0% but you can reduce it a lot and learn from it.  In many online campaigns even 95% bounce rate is good for certain media channels so it’s always good to compare this data versus any other traffic sources performance for a base line.

• Note that there is a difference between exit rate and bounce rate as Google explains here.

 

Funnel Visualization

Google analytics offers an option to follow your funnel and find the “leak”. Once you’ve set your goals on Google analytics the “Funnel visualization” option will be available. Following it will give you a lot of insight on the amount of visitors who have entered each part of the funnel, the amount of visitors who converted and their flow.

This is a wonderful tool to illustrate where is the most significant “leak” in your funnel, assisting you to take the right action in order to optimize it ( learn to avoid shopping cart abandonment).

For example, as you can see below, 50,516 visitors entered our client’s homepage, 52.56% clicked on the button to proceed. On the side you can see where users went to if they didn’t convert, like the pricing for example. This flow will help you understand where you need to optimize or where you can add conversion metrics.

Below we can see that many visitors end up on the pricing page instead of signing up, so we could add a call to action on the pricing page and increase conversion from there.

 

Technology

One metric you do not want to miss out on is the technology your visitors are using. On Google Analytics you will find (in the Audience category) the option to see which browsers your visitors are using, their version and whether they’re using mobile, desktop or tablets. Once you have this information you can:

• QA – Does your site work on all Chrome versions? Are you compatible to Safari? Run a string of tests on all browsers and make the corrections, do not lose customers because of bugs.

• True Story: In one of our recent tests we discovered that our client’s landing pages weren’t compatible with older versions of IE, which resulted in almost 0% conversion rate. This simple fix boosted their conversion rate by over 50%. Below you can see the difference from before we started optimizing and after, with over 250,000 visits via IE this was a massive optimization:

 

• Optimize: A new study shows that you could lose 40% of your visitors if your site isn’t mobile compatible. Is your site/product mobile responsive? Prepare yourself for your mobile traffic and do not lose it. A simple redirect to a mobile friendly page could save your conversion rate. Know your limitations and address them.
  • Tip: To know which pages you need to optimize for mobile add a secondary dimension in Google Analytics (while in mobile overview) – “landing page”, and see where those mobile visitors are going, that way you won’t need to optimise your entire site to mobile immediately but fix it on the go.

Conversion optimization is an ongoing process that requires many conclusive tests and iterations. Testing too many variables at a time can cause a mess and testing the wrong variable can waste our time. Be sure to work out a test plan before starting out and use Google analytics to tackle the right areas.

What are the metrics you watch to help you decide where to optimize?

 

P.S. We would really appreciate it if you share this post and let us know what you think!

Statistics on registration forms are pretty grim: 86% (!) of users leave a page instantly when they’re required to fill out a form.
Thanks to hundreds of lead generation/signups tests we’ve done in the past 4 years, we’ve come up with various tips and tricks that can help reduce abandonment rate significantly and improve the quality of leads dramatically.

How to create converting registration forms:

1. Auto fill –  Don’t waste your user’s time and energy. Use auto complete to detect the their full name, address and email address. The less you ask of a user the more inclined they will be to fill in the form.
2. Minimize your requests – Remove all the unnecessary fields, they can complete them later on. Ask only for the most basic information and create a quicker process for the user. Give the user the feeling that your form is a 30 second fill out and no more.
   Facebook’s signup process: To make things simpler, facebook could create one field for first & last name and make it look shorter. They could also have just one field for the email address and only after the user clicks “Sign up” show a message that says: “we’re sending you an email, make sure your the address is correct.”Groupon does it in an great way, asking one short question at a time and slowly navigating the user towards the end.

   

3. Help the user – Add small question marks next to your fields including explanations of each field. You’d be surprised to learn the kind of questions that prevent users from filling out a form, things that might seems obvious to you, but aren’t clear to others.
4. Messaging – Be specific, use a title that explains exactly why the user needs to sign up, for example: Signup to get a free e-book!
5. Call to action – Don’t forget to end your form with a clear call to action that indicates the end of the form and the continuation of the next steps.
6. “Show password” – Instead of asking your user to fill in their new password twice for validation, give them the option to “show password” and go over it by themselves. This will reduce the amount of fields and will give a sense of an easy and quick form.By giving users the option to “show” the password, mailchimp reduces the sign up fields to the minimum required and still allows users to verify their email.

7. Social sign up – Make it quick and easy, allow users to sign up or log in via their Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin account.
8. Mobile forms: One of the most important parts of filling out a form on mobile is to be able to see what you are actually doing, Don’t forget to zoom in on each field the user is updating. Another tip is to enable only the relevant keyboards in each field – i.e in the phone field to create the numbers as the default keyboard.
9. Mobility- some users like to use their mobile horizontally and some vertically, don’t forget to make your mobile forms accessible on both screen options and allow for easy usage.
10. Shipping and billing – Allow users to simply auto-fill their payment address from the shipping address instead of filling in their details twice.                 
11. Make required/optional fields clear to the user – If some info isn’t required, we advise you remove it completely. If you still want to keep it in the form make sure it is clear to users what’s mandatory and what’s not.
12. Clear errors – Errors a very important aspect of filling out forms. Locating the errors on the bottom or hidden will make it difficult for a user to understand why they can’t submit the form.

Filling out a form should be a simple step along the funnel. Make sure to test your registration forms as much as possible and of course, learn from your insights. If you want to get some more information, contact us here.