Its common sense, don’t make it hard for customers to do what you want them to do. Yet that’s what I see happening all too often with online forms. They are not always as helpful and friendly as they could be. After all, nobody likes filling in forms, nobody starts their day hoping for opportunities to fill in forms.
They are a necessary evil that people tolerate, if they are motivated enough. Make the form and conversion process too hard and they will abandon part way.
Take a recent experience I had. I wished to make a donation to a charity via their website. I entered all my details for a credit card payment and was greeted with this error when I tried to complete payment:
Sorry, but for your donation to be processed, you must correct the following:
-BH189NB is not a valid postcode – no space or space in wrong position
Reasonable you might think? However, if the website is smart enough to suggest I need a space; it could have just put it in for me. When postcodes are typed they are entered with a selection of upper case, lower case, with extra spaces before, in the middle or after the postcode. Given this can be expected, the form should be clever and work out what’s meant.
It’s not an issue confined to small mom & pop online businesses, my postcode experience was a major charity with payment facility provided by a major company. The footer proudly said ‘Powered by BT’.
I’ve experienced pedantic form processes many times and in most cases the form could have been made easier. These are my tips to help get your forms converted, whether it’s a lead enquiry, whitepaper download, subscription, user preferences, event registation or checkout.
- Keep forms short, don’t ask for data you don’t absolutely need. If asking for sensitive data, such as date of birth, explain why it’s in the customers’ interest to provide it.
- Pre-fill forms. If you know who is visiting fill in the form with the data you have already. This gives a significant boost to the number of people who will convert.
- Re-fill forms. Should it be necessary for someone to back step in your process, don’t make the customer re-fill or select options they have already completed once.
- Allow for information in mixed upper and lower case.
- Automatically remove extra spaces.
- Don’t rely on separation characters such as space or hyphen being entered perfectly. This could be a space in the postcode, or hyphens in customer ID or account number.
- Verify all information as far as possible.
- Provide clear and specific details of errors when necessary. Don’t just give a vague error message, when you could say, how many digits too many, or too few or which characters were typed which aren’t allowed.
- Use drop-down and tick boxes to make data entry quick and easy.
- When asking for details such as user or account IDs, remind the customer where they can find this information, such as where on an address label, invoice or bill statement it might appear.
- Don’t ask for registration unless that is your conversion objective. Within shopping carts making registration optional after the purchase increases conversion.
- Ensure your forms are tested with a variety of different data values. Including valid and invalid data.
Remember, forms are a tolerated evil. I’ve never come across a form that I actually enjoyed filling in, but if you have, I’d be delighted to know about it. Please leave details in a comment.
Tim Watson is Email Expert and Consultant at Zettasphere Ltd. View the full bio here.
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