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Simplify your form fields

Apr 22, 2021

Once the prospect reaches the form, you’ve already caught their interest and they’re at least partially invested. You want to make the form experience as painless as possible to limit the chances that they’ll back out. Reduce the time it takes to fill out your forms by leveraging info that you already know about your prospects and only asking them to provide what you think is needed.

Reduce the number of required fields

Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. Would you be more inclined to fill out a short form with just the essentials or a longer form with what may seem like less relevant questions? In general, prospects are more likely to submit a form that is simple with fewer questions.

Consider reducing the number of fields that you ask for on your forms.

  • Decide what you absolutely need to ask and make those fields required.
  • Anything that doesn’t make the cut is “optional” at that point.
  • Either remove optional fields entirely or allow the prospect to leave them blank.
Illustrative example: Snowflake

The example on the left is a form on Snowflake’s website. It’s not super long to begin with, but when you compare it to the simplified mock-up on the right, you can get a sense of how much easier it would be for a prospect to fill out and submit.

Prepopulate fields based on what you know

Have you ever called customer service and ended up providing the same info to several different people before you even get to the point of your call? It can be annoying and probably makes you wonder why they ask for that info in the first place if they’re not passing it along the chain.

Forms are a big opportunity for you to leverage the info you already know or can learn about a prospect to make their experience as smooth as possible.

  • Prospects will appreciate not needing to reenter info they’ve previously provided.
  • You reduce the time it takes to submit the form, increasing the likelihood of submissions.

Consider prepopulating fields with the info you already know. You can leave the fields editable to let the prospect correct incorrect info as needed. Prospects often prefer updating parts of the info over filling it out from scratch.

The info you have to leverage will vary, but examples include:

  • Industry and role
  • Country and state (zip codes often are inaccurate with reverse IP lookup)
Illustrative example: RMS Cloud

In this example, we’ve prepopulated the country and industry field.

They should be able to identify that we’re US-based and could tell that we’re in the hotel industry based on either:

  • How we interacted with their site
  • Because we arrived on the site from an email campaign / paid ad that was catered to our industry
  • They’ve associated us with data via other means (e.g. CRM data or a lead-generating service like Marketo).

Each field that’s prepopulated makes it one step closer to us clicking Submit.

Hide fields based on what you know

This is similar to prepopulating fields, but with a twist. When you’re confident that the info you have is correct, you might consider simply hiding the form field entirely.

This will save the prospect from needing to even review the info, further reducing the overall time it takes to submit.

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