How to Build Helpful Forms That Convert

Want a way to boost your form conversion rates? Building helpful forms that convert is the key to success!

When was the last time you visited a website that didn't have a form of some kind?

Forms may be a huge part of a website, vital to your sales process or ongoing market research. It's something your customers and potentials have come to expect. However, that doesn't mean they don't expect more.

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With so many websites offering forms out there, from the good to the bad, customers have come to expect a higher standard of user experience.

By this, we mean forms that go above and beyond simple contact forms. We mean forms that use automation and smart technology to deliver an experience that makes the forms valuable and effortless to fill in.

This is what will set your forms apart from the others. It's what will drive stagnant form conversion rates.

Whatever type of forms you want to build on your WordPress website, there's one thing they should all have in common.

You need to build helpful forms that convert.

Being helpful can refer to a number of different things, such as:

Making your forms easy to understand
Ensuring your fields/questions are relevant and not a waste of time
Ensuring your forms aren't longer than they need to be
Making your forms convenient to fill in
Providing something of value after a form submission

People filling in your forms could be doing 101 other things with their time. They need to know that filling in your form isn't going to be a hassle, take up too much time or even be a waste of time altogether.

We've already spoken about ways to improve conversion rates on WordPress forms. Today, we want to explore that further.

Form conversion rates aren't just about getting people onto your form. You also need to make their experience a good one while they're there.

Unfortunately, form abandonment is a real problem for website and form builders. Depending on the type of form, you can see abandonment rates of 30-40%!

Sound familiar?

We all abandon forms for one reason or another. If you have low conversion rates or high form abandonment, then it's time to rethink your forms.

So, let's take a look at some ways you can solve this problem and increase conversions.

Make your forms easy to understand

It's really frustrating when you arrive on a form and you're not entirely sure what the question is really asking. Perhaps it's too vague, too wordy or overly complicated.

The questions might be easy for you to understand if you wrote them. However, if a user is tired or ill, do they really want to come home to a confusing form? They probably won't bother filling it in.

You need to make sure your questions and instructions are easy to follow, even if the potential customer is distracted.

This will give you a much better chance at getting form submissions from everyone. It won't just be a select few who had time to work out what you meant in question 4.1.

Try to avoid long sentences, questions within questions or ones that require a long time to answer. It's good practice to check your content through the Flesch Reading Ease Score. This will show you the grade level of your copy. If it's at a grade higher than 8th, you might want to simplify it.

Ensure all your questions are relevant

The last thing you want is for users to ask "why do I need to answer this?"

If users are scrolling through tons of questions that don't apply to them, all this does is waste their time.

The best solution here is to make use of conditional logic. Conditional logic works by showing users a section only if it's relevant, based on their previous answers.

For example, if a questionnaire about diet asks if a user is a vegetarian, they don't need a follow up question about eating meat.

With conditional logic, if a user selects the option 'Yes' to the question 'Are you a vegetarian?", they will get a follow up question that's relevant to them. For example, "how long have you been a vegetarian?"

The form will hide any follow up questions that relate to eating meat, because they won't be relevant to that particular user.

This keeps the form short, highly relevant and easy to follow. Who wouldn't want that?

Make sure your forms aren't too long

How do you make someone take the time to answer all your questions?

You no doubt want to ask your customers lots of questions. However, your customers might not want to answer them.

When you build a form, go through and cut anything that doesn't need to be there. Are there any questions that are quite similar to each other? Could they be condensed into one form field without being confusing?

More often than not, you don't need as many fields as you might think to get the results you want.

When forms are too long, users quickly become tired of answering questions, until their answers become less accurate and more vague. You'll get better, fuller answers if you reduce the number of fields on your form.

Make it convenient to fill in your forms

If having long forms is unavoidable, then the next best thing is to try and make filling them out as convenient as possible.

Instead of expecting your users to fill in a 10-page survey in one go, let them save their progress and come back to it later.

This can boost your conversion rates because people are less likely to be put off from even starting your survey.

You'll find that your form abandonment reduces significantly when you use a feature that allows you to save and continue your form progress, like Formidable offers.

Another bonus benefit to this is that it'll only work with logged in users, which gives your users an incentive to sign up and hand you their email address or phone number.

Provide something of value after form submission

Often, users need a tangible incentive to fill in a form. You can offer a number of things, such as:

A membership
A free file download e.g. an ebook
Entry into a competition

In order to make this experience as seamless as possible, it helps to have these things built into your forms. For example, with the free download, you'll need to set up a form that offers file downloads after form submissions.

With something like a membership or competition entry, it might be beneficial to direct new users to a specific page after form submission. For example, once people have signed up to become members, you might want to direct them to your login page so they can get started using their new account.

You can do this with the use of conditional logic, which will set up the form submission as the trigger to redirect new users to a specific page.