Let’s face it, even though social media is taking a big place in creating an effective online strategy for your business, your own website is still a very important part of the equation. Email is still an effective way to maintain communication with your prospects, as you take them down the sales funnel as you move them from prospect to customer. The standard way of increasing your email list size is to get your prospects to sign up for your mailing list from your web site….. and to do that, the most long term effective way is to have them fill out a web form with their information.
Filling out web forms is one place where visitors drop off from your web site. So increasing the conversion rate of your web forms is not a trivial notion. Every person who fails to fill out your web for is one additional person who can’t be a potential client for your business. So what are some of the things that you can do to increase your web form submission rate?
Placement:
Where your web form is on your website makes a big difference in how many sign ups you get to your web site. You want the form to be above the fold and designed so that it grabs the visitors attention. Forms that blend into the site too much tend to get overlooked and will have fewer signups. Make the color of the form and the heading of the form stand out from the rest of the site without it being too tacky, as it will defeat the purpose of tweaking your form. You want your visitors to be able to see your form easily!
WIFM (What’s In It For Me?):
Why should they even bother to sign up to your website? You must give a reason and build enough trust to have a visitor leave you their name, email and whatever information you want them to leave you. Typically the more information you require from them, the lower your conversion rate will be (we’ll talk more about that later). So in the mean time, you should answer the following in your signup header:
- What is this (is it a newsletter, an email course, a membership, etc.)?
- Why should I sign up (What will I receive)?
- How do I sign up (tell them what to fill in and where the form is – event if it’s obvious to you!)?
- When (How often & How soon) will I get the emails?
Put the answers to these questions right in the form signup header. Whatever you tell them, you better stick to it! Remember, you need to build trust, and misguiding them right off the bat is not the way to build trust. So if you tell them you are going to email them weekly, then do so, and not monthly, or daily.
Don’t ask for too much information:
The less information you require from them the more signups you will have. If you are required to ask for more information than name and email, it will help to put an explanation as to why you require the extra information. You will also want to make sure you keep their information private, and don’t use it outside of the purpose you say you want that information for.
It will also help to make the form less intimidating, especially if you are requiring more information than just the basic information (name and email). Instead of using the word Required, on the necessary fields, studies have shown that there is a slightly higher conversion rate on forms that use the word Optional on the fields that aren’t required. Try this out yourself and see what that does to your signup rate.
Does the signup form work properly?
Nothing can screw up your signups more than a nonworking signup form. Test it to make sure it works. Sometimes changes you think won’t make a difference end up breaking the form, or confusing the person who signed up. Confused prospects don’t turn into customers…. so Test, TEST, TEST!!
What are some of the things that you have done to increase the response rate of your web signup forms? We’d love to hear them. Share them in the comment box below.
Also.
There is a free Web Conversion webinar coming up on Dec. 16th. You will want to catch this one if you can as we will be going over some things you can do to increase the web conversion on your website, and there is a surprise at the end of the webinar the you will want to take advantage of!
Sign up below,
