We're excited to announce our new Formidable Conversational Forms: the best way to build a form conversation in WordPress. Reduce abandonment and drive conversions - one question at a time!
Form abandonment can be a major struggle when you're running a business website. There's nothing more frustrating than when users only partially fill out a lead form before leaving. And as the stats show: simplifying forms and reducing distractions increases conversions.
With that in mind, we're excited to announce our new Formidable Conversational Forms! Designed to work seamlessly with Form Landing Pages, you can use form conversations to engage users and drive conversions!
In this post, we'll discuss the benefits of using these interactive forms on your WordPress website. Then we'll show you how to build an automated form conversation easily in WordPress with Formidable Forms. Let's get started!
The benefits of using form conversations
Have you ever gone to fill out an application form, and it's so long that you don't even want to start? Imagine if a form could walk you through the application, one question at a time. Just like a real conversation.
Using form conversations on your WordPress site will give your visitors:
- A more personal, conversational experience
- Ease of use
- Increased contact form conversions
- Higher form completion rates
- Guided information gathering with conditional logic
- Sleek question-by-question conversational form design
And best of all, you don't need to write a single line of code! While developers and designers can still customize these forms to their heart's content, anyone can use the form builder templates to put a conversational web form on their WordPress site or landing pages.
What better way to increase casual conversions than through a conversational contact form? With these versatile and fluent forms, you can collect email addresses, gain subscribers, and make sales one question at a time!
So, let's get started!
How to create a form conversation in WordPress
Now that we understand more about why conversational forms can improve conversions, let's explore how to make them in WordPress. Note that for the following tutorial, you'll need Formidable Forms and the Formidable Landing Pages plugins installed and activated on your website.
Step 1: Add a new Formidable Form in WordPress
To get started, you'll first need to create a new form in WordPress. You can do this by going to Formidable → Forms → Add New:
You can choose from any of the form templates. Alternatively, you can start from scratch by selecting Blank Form:
After naming your form and writing an optional description, click on Create. On the next screen, you can add any form fields you need by dragging and dropping them:
Next, you can click on any of the fields followed by Field Options to modify them. For example, you might change their labels or positions.
Keep in mind that you can turn any form into an attractive, high-converting conversation with users at any time. Awesome, right?
When you finish building your form elements and entry fields, remember to save your changes!
Step 2: Customize the form settings
Once you're happy with how your form looks, the next step is to configure its settings. To get started, click on the Settings tab at the top of the form editor:
Here, you will find a variety of setting categories, starting with General. Here, you can change the form title and description, locate the embed shortcode, and more.
Other settings include:
- Actions & Email Notifications
- Form Permissions
- Form Scheduling
- Styling & Buttons
- Form Landing Page
We won't go through each of these setting options, as they are pretty extensive. But we definitely recommend taking some time to explore all the super helpful features so you can get the most from your forms!
Step 3: Enable and configure your form conversation settings
When you're done with your settings, you're ready to enable a form conversation. To do this, click on Conversational Forms (located under Settings), then toggle the switch to turn on conversational form mode:
After you enable the feature, more options appear:
For example, you can include an arrow button in the navigation. You can also display a progress bar as a standalone element, text, or a progress bar with text. If you don't want to use this feature at all, leave the default setting on None.
Then you can also change the Continue Button Text and Start Button Text. When you're done making these changes, be sure to select the Update button. Here's an example of where the start button will be used:
Step 4: Add the form conversation to your website
Once you finish building your form and applying your form conversation template settings, the last step is to add it to your WordPress website. Before doing that, you can see how it will look on the front end of your site by clicking on Preview in the top-right corner:
You can view it on a blank page, within your current theme, or on a landing page. For the best results, we recommend using a landing page, to get a beautiful, distraction-free form:
If you'd like to embed the form on a page, you can also use the Formidable Form block in your WordPress editor. Simply click within the paragraph block, select the Add Block button, then search for 'Formidable':
Then you can then choose your new form from the dropdown menu. That's it! Here's an example of an embedded conversational form with a progress bar and arrows:
Conclusion
If you want to boost form completion rates and drive conversions, providing an engaging, interactive experience is key! Form conversations can help you do that with any Formidable Form you create.
Now, you know how to create automated form conversations in WordPress in four simple steps:
- Add a new Formidable Form in WordPress.
- Customize your form settings.
- Enable the form conversation settings.
- Add the form conversation to your website.
So get started!
Formidable Forms is the best form plugin for WordPress. It makes creating interactive form conversations quick and easy. Check out this great new feature to provide a better customer experience, one question at a time!
Looks like a multipage form and the only difference I see is there's a continue button aside from the forward and backward button.
Are there any other differences between multipaged forms and conversational forms?
There are many differences and advantages to the new conversational forms. One major difference is the auto-advance feature when using fields like drop-downs, radios, etc. When a user makes a selection, the form auto advances to the next question.
Additionally, keyboard commands can be used to navigate to next/previous questions.
One of the major advantages is the ease of building this type of form over creating a form with multiple pages. Prior to conversational forms, if you were building a 10 question form, you would need 10 question fields, and 9 page breaks. Now you simply add your fields to your form, and we take care of the rest. Easy Peasy.
If it drive conversions, why not making it easier to really track conversions with Google Ads or Facebook Pixel? Still looking for an easy integration into Formidable Forms...
Why not make the questions in a 'bubble' format? Like a text message.
Hey, don't steal our thunder...we are actually working on this feature, but it's going to be epic so keep your lips sealed until it launches. 🙂
This is a great update! While this type of funtionality was built into Formidable a while back (I've used it for "multi-step" forms), this makes it so much easier to implement!
Yep, should make building this type of conversational form so much easier. We also have some enhancements planned to take these even farther. Stay tuned!
I like the new conversation form. Mabye someday we can quite using Typeform. However there are still a few things I'm missing.
1. Lay-out / flexibility: at the moment title and description are used, I much rather would be able to start the page with a html block within the form.
2. This goes for all the forms, but I wish data would be "hold" when you accidentally refresh the page.
3. Transactional forms don't place nice with a few Formidable functions. For example the 'unique' feature doesn't work that great. It would be better that somehow the field would be checked at the moment you fill it in instead of submission. Normally this isn't a issue but now the form "resets" and the error isn't clear untill you've pressed start and reach the field that has the unique error.
Another field that doesn't work that great is the e-mail confirmation field.
4. Additional styling for the transactional form would be nice.
5. I would rather see this as a basic functionallity in Pro instead of another add-on 🙂
Is there a way to skip the button? I want it to open in a sidebar and want it to start on page 1 of the form without having to click another button. Can this be done?
Hi Adam, there isn't a way to do this currently. This is a brand new feature for Formidable Forms and while it does currently have limitations, we wanted to get it out there and start collecting feedback and feature requests so we can focus on what you guys really want for phase two. I have added this suggestion(and I think it's great by the way), to the list so we can get this added.
This feature request is in your list since months! A real conversational form wouldn't have a submit button if it is not needed (e.g. if there's only an option field).
There are some additional shortcomings:
- Hard-coded enter icon on the button (bad!)
- No way to disable button on pages where it is not needed
- No way to define other objects on the "page" (e.g. HTML for explanations or hidden fields for tracking or JS). The "old" paging does a good job when it comes to show more than one field on a "page"
It would have been enough to make single-selection-fieldtypes interactiv. Try class frm_submit on an option field, and you can see the behavior. Only caching values and "frm_final_submit" should be fixed.
Looking forward to release 2.0 ...
Thanks for the feedback, We'll log it and get to work. We are all looking forward to version 2.0!