How Forms and First Impressions Affect Conversion Rates on Your Website

The May 6 HubSpot Webinar, The Science of Lead Generation, featured Dan Zarrella. The part of the presentation that focused on Form Fields and Conversion rates produced the following info of interest to marketers.

• Ask for information that makes sense. For example, if you ask for a home address when registering for a webinar, people wonder “why?” Zarrella says the reluctance is less about privacy invasion than it is about a fear that sales people will hassle you later. Zarrella looked at conversation rates as related to the number of form fields required. “Yes, there is a very slight decline when the number of fields go up, generally, so I looked at how the number of text fields affected conversion. As the number of text fields goes up, you don’t see significant decline until you reach 15 text fields and up. But when I looked at the number of “select boxes,” as the number of those increased, conversation rate did show a sharp decline.”

Other findings included:
• “When you’re trying to decide about removing form fields, you need to be worried about the more complicated fields.”

• Asking for people’s age is a big no-no.

• When you ask for an address, conversion rate is lower, but ZIP information doesn’t significantly hurt conversion.

• Aversion to giving address, phone, and other information is less about privacy than it is about an aversion to being hassled by random cold calls.

• When you use the word “submit” as a button text, you get a much lower conversion rate than with alternate text choices. “The word ‘submit’ has a negative association for most B2B consumers. When I tested five other kinds of text on buttons instead, the most popular button text choices, in descending order of conversion, were ‘click here,’ ‘go,’ ‘submit,’ ‘download,’ and ‘register.’”

Also of interest were Dan’s general pointers on how visitors tend to evaluate a website.

• Design skill and professionalism are super important to the impression your website leaves with visitors, so give it your best.

• People who are interested in you after a website viewing, will also research you. They won’t just Google you, either. They will search third-party results for complaints or bad comments about you. Research yourself to see what might pop up.

• One of the ways people decide if your website is genuine is by looking for specificity. The more specific you can be about your business, the more people will trust you.

Hats off to Dan Zarrella and HubSpot for its great series of free Webinars.

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