When you think about a landing page, you think of many different aspects combining to make one page. There is your product, your message, the images and the promotion or incentive you’re offering. The centerpiece of this page is your form. Ultimately, your goal of driving people to the landing page is so they will fill out a form. That is your chance to turn someone from a suspect to a prospect, so it is important to make your form enticing to those who come across it.
Things to keep in mind when creating a form are:
- Keep it simple - Just require the basic information. You want enough to be able to contact them, but you don’t want them to get frustrated with the length of your form or number of questions and have them skip over it. It is OK to ask some questions that will give you more information about them, but don’t require it. This way, when someone is willing they will take the extra time to fill out the extra questions, and if not they will simply fill out what is required, its a win-win situation.
- Make it easy to fill out – Nobody is going to spend 30 minutes filling out a form on your landing page, you are lucky if they even take 5. You need to make it clear and straightforward, no high tech special effects are needed. Impress people in other areas of your website, this is not the place, if they can’t just type there information up quickly there is a big chance they won’t do it at all.
- Balance friction and incentive – Friction is the consumer’s resistance to a given element in the sales process. It can be caused by many things, including filling out a form. The friction the consumer feels needs to be outweighed by the incentive they will receive after completing the desired action. Put simply, if you want a prospect to fill out a form, you’d better make it worth their while. It is not possible to have zero friction, that would lead to no information on the sales side, and no incentive would create no leads or extremely poor leads, so it is imperative that a balance is achieved that will generate interest and happy prospects.
