How To Design A Signup Form That Will Boost Subscriptions
Convert More Visitors Into Leads with Signup Forms that Grab Their Attention and Encourage Subscriptions
Even if you’re a genius in directing traffic to your site, traffic alone won’t make you any money. If your visitors leave without making a purchase, your traffic is as useful as a fork is to eat ice cream.
And unfortunately, only a very low percentage of online visitors buy something on their first visit. That’s why you will have to make sure to draw them back to your site, establish a trusting relationship and remind them of the great products you’re selling. How would you do all this?
Use The Power Of The Signup form.
The signup form is one of the most critical elements of your website because it gives you the tools to turn a visitor into a prospect. The moment visitors complete a signup form, they give you the permission and the ability to start a dialogue – a long-term relationship that will hopefully translate into sales down the road.
That’s why it’s so important to design a signup form that attracts your visitors enough so that give you their name and email address. It needs to offer value and create trust.
Designing a signup form might not be as exciting as creating animated Flash movies or experimenting with different website designs, but it is lot more critical to get right. Signup forms are a very important online marketing tool and usually form the gateway through which revenue is generated.
We’ve seen signup rates go up by 8% just with simple tweaks to the design of our signup forms. We’ll share these tweaks with you in this tactic and show you how to design a killer form.
Designing Forms that Convert Well
1. Keep Your Forms Short and To the Point
Shorter forms generally get higher completion rates. So strip your forms down and ask for the absolute minimum amount of information you need from your visitors. For subscription forms this is often just a first name and email address.
Sometimes you might want to ask additional questions to gauge customer views or collect marketing data. In this case you need to be very careful. Is the additional information worth the drop in sales you might create from expanding the length of your form?
Case Study
Here’s the result of an experiment we did.
The form below was designed to get people to sign up for a seminar. To gauge our audience interest we asked them to pick what aspect of the seminar interested them most.
We later removed the radio button options to shorten the form. The result looked like this:
We found that removing the options caused signups to increase by 3.3%. This may not seem like a lot, but look at it this way. If your signups directly correspond to your sales (ours did) then a 3.3% increase in signups represents a sales boost of $33,000 for a business doing 1 million dollars a year.
Was the data we were getting from the options worth that $33,000?
It was not. We left the options on for one month and then removed them. One month was all it took to get sufficiently accurate data about our audience.
Look at your forms and see if there is anything you can strip out. We’ve seen many subscription forms that ask for a title like Mr. or Mrs. and a last name. These are almost always useless so avoid asking for them.
2. Mention Your Privacy Policy
People are often reluctant to give out their email on the internet. Stating a privacy policy in simple terms can often boost form completion rates.
Example
The example below shows two privacy statements. We recommend going with the shorter one. Longer statements look too much like legalese and can turn off subscribers.
Long Privacy Statement
Short Privacy Statement
3. Watch Your Submit Buttons
Be careful not to create any obstacles to the completion of a subscription.
Do you see the flaw in the form below? Right next to the submit button is a button that says “Clear.”
This is an unwise thing to do. How often would one need to actually clear a form this simple and start over? The problem with the clear button is that a significant percentage of users who are in a hurry will click on that button, see their data get lost, and then give up in frustration.
Remove all CLEAR or RESET buttons. They don’t help and can create problems when clicked on by accident.
To improve the form above we would also suggest renaming the SUBMIT button to something more meaningful. Never stick with the default text “Submit.” Change it to something like:
- “Subscribe Now for Free Training”
- “Get Your Free Report”
- “Claim Your Free Audio”
4. Make Your Form STAND OUT
Often, your form constitutes the core of your most wanted response on a page. In this case the entire goal of the page is to get a visitor to sign up.
For pages like this the form should stand out like a zebra on a subway train. It must draw the user’s attention.
Case Study
Take a look at the form below. It uses 4 different techniques to stand out.
First, the form uses a bright color to make it stand out from the rest of the site (which was white). This draws the user’s attention.
Second, the form starts with a headline. The word “FREE” in the headline is further highlighted to command attention.
Third, the form makes the SUBMIT button bright, bold and replaces the usual SUBMIT text with benefit-laden text “Get Free Training.”
Fourth, the form adopts a technique pioneered by marketing expert Alex Mandossian. Mandossian calls this the “Sesame Street Effect.” Producers of the hit children’s show Sesame Street found that children paid most attention to what was happening on the show when they included both human actors and puppets in a scene. Scenes with just humans or just puppets attracted less attention. The understanding here is that the mind is drawn to things that combine real-world images with virtual images (such as puppets).
Mandossian uses this principle to increase signups by having a human figure (real world) interact directly with the signup form (virtual element).
Doing this requires some fancier design but is not too difficult and most web designers can design a form of this sort in a few hours.
4. Use Multiple Pages to Boost Signups on Longer Forms
Often, you may need to collect more data than just a visitor’s first name and email address. Yet, adding more fields to a form usually causes a drop in signup rates.
The way to do both is to have a 2-step signup. In the first step, you request only a first name and email address. In the second step, you can ask for any additional data.
Example
The two images below show an example of a 2-step form we use. In the first step we only request the most basic information.
Step 1 of the Form
Now in the second step, we request additional information we might need for further marketing purposes.
Step 2 of the Form
Now here’s the trick that makes this work. We found that 4.3% of people would skip out on Step 2 and we would lose all their data, including the info they provided in Step 1. This meant we were losing close to 50 out of every 1,000 signups, a fairly significant loss.
So we set up our autoresponder system to subscribe the user after Step 1. Any information submitted in Step 2 is stored as additional info. So the great advantage of a two-step signup form like this is that if the user does not complete Step 2, we do not lose them as subscriber.
If you must use a 2-step form, make sure you’re recording data from Step 1. You could be losing a huge chunk of subscribers by only recording data from Step 2.
User Friendliness and Form Validation
Excessive validation often gets in the way of signups. This happens when you force the users to use the form in a specific way. Here are some examples of how to avoid validation problems and keep your forms user friendly.
Highlight Required Fields
For longer forms with optional and required fields, if you make a field required, let the customer know. The web standard is to mark the field with an asterisk (*).
In the same sense, if a field is not required let the customer know by adding the words (optional) next to the field.
Don’t Be Picky
We’ve seen sites that demand that customers give them credit card numbers in a certain format. The format xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx works but typing all the digits together as in xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx produces an error. If a customer is trying to give you a credit card number, consider yourself lucky and don’t get picky. Let them type in their number in any format they’re used to.
Tiny frustrations like this can turn off customers at the point of sale.
Another common annoyance is when forms demand that phone numbers or dates follow a certain format. Why should you care if a phone number is typed in as xxx.xxx.xxxx rather than (xxx) xxx-xxxx?
If you must receive a phone number in a specific format use a segmented form field as in the example below where area code and phone number are separated into two boxes.
If You Must Be Picky – Offer Guidelines
If you insist on getting entries in specific formats let the customer know what you expect. For example, next to the date field specify that the date should be added as “mm-dd-yyyy” or “dd-mm-yy” or whichever format you prefer. Alternatively, you could supply drop down menus so that all submissions are uniform.
Validate Emails
Serious losses can occur if a customer orders something and types in the wrong email address. They won’t get their order confirmation and could freak out. So validate emails. Free scripts are available online that will validate an email address to make sure the address contains the @ symbol and ends in a .com, .net or any other valid internet extension.
Tools
You can download an excellent PHP based email validation script here. (Unless you’re fluent in PHP, you will need to have a web designer implement this.)
Making Sense of Long Drop Down Menus
We’ve seen drop-down menus asking a visitor to specify their country and then listing 250+ countries in alphabetical order. The problem is that when you list countries in alphabetical order you end up with Afghanistan as the first option and the United States or United Kingdom way down at the bottom of the list.
If your audience is primarily US based, place the option for US twice in the drop-down menu – once at the bottom where it should be by order of letters and once at the top, above Afghanistan and in easy view for your visitors.
These basic design principles will go a long way towards making your forms more user friendly and boosting signups.
Note: If you’d like to read a fun critique of forms on major websites, take a look at this article.
Where to Place Your Signup Form
The placement of your signup form is critical to maximizing its conversion rate. Here are 2 critical rules to follow:
Rule 1: Always Place Your Form Above the Fold
The form should always be on the top fold of your web page. This is the portion of the screen that appears in the average visitor’s browser window without having to scroll down.
Make sure the entire form is visible above the fold and that the submit button does not fall below the fold on lower resolution monitors.
Rule 2: Embed the Form in Multiple Sections of Your Copy
In addition to placing the form above the fold, be sure to also place the form at the bottom of the page. It’s a good idea to place the form within several sections of the page copy. It’s perfectly fine to place the form 3 – 5 times on a long copy page (as long as only one form is visible at a time).
You can see an example of this technique on the main copy page of our website: www.MindValleyLabs.com.
Summary
Signup forms are important determinants of your revenue. They enable you to turn a one-time visitor into a viable prospect.
The basic rule in designing signup forms is to make them as attractive and simple as possible. In this tactic we have provided you with the tools to do just that.
Keep your forms short and to the point, make them stand out by combining real-world and virtual elements, cleverly use multiple page forms if you need additional information, and make sure your signup form is always clearly visible.
Remember that signups are almost always directly proportional to sales and revenue.
Sincerely,
Vishen M Lakhiani and Mike Reining
Founders, MindValley Labs
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