Less is More – Form Conversions

In this post-pandemic era, we have seen companies focus heavily on digital marketing channels  such as webinars, virtual conferences, podcasts, etc. 

The endgame for all these marketing efforts is a form fill. Marketers try to get the attention of their audience to sign up for their events over the plethora of other events out there. 

Building the Perfect Form

Getting people to come to your landing page or view your ad is easy but getting them to sign up is where it gets tricky. People hesitate signing up these days primarily due to privacy concerns. Lately media coverage on how big companies track our every move, has worried people about their privacy and they are not willing to fill out their actual details in forms, let alone form with multiple fields. 

A marketer needs to identify which fields do we REALLY need, and once they think about that, they’d come to a shocking realization that  they don’t need to have 10-12 fields in a simple form.

These days marketing automation platforms (MAP) like HubSpot are intelligent enough to populate upper-level information on contacts with their immeasurable databases. Commonly asked for information, like Company Name, Industry, Annual Revenue, State, Country, etc, can be populated by the platform itself. Let’s put on our technical hats and understand the how part.

When someone puts their official email address that includes the company domain such as (niceguy@blabla.com), MAPs run that email id through their database to derive the Company Name from that domain. It provides us the information that “BlaBla” is the company name, www.blabla.com is the website domain name, and it also gets the Industry and the annual revenue of the company from public sources where the company would have published that information.

Moving on to fields like City, State, Country, – information for these fields is simple to gather. MAPs work with our ISPs to get this information and refer to them as inferred fields.

An Extra Kick to Boost Form Conversion Rate

What if your form is smaller now but the conversion rate is still low? Here’s a best practice to increase that – Two-Step Form Fill Process.

In this workflow, you start by showing only 3 fields on the form in phase 1 – First Name, Last Name, and Email Address (You can change first and last name to anything else but Email Address is a mandatory field in many platforms). When someone fills these 3 fields and clicks on “Continue” we’ll show 3 more fields that are necessary to our business logic. Many psychological studies confirm that if/when a person has already invested some time, money, or information they will provide some more of that to get the process finished. 

By using this approach we ourselves have seen much better results than we were getting when we were creating our forms with 6+ fields.

Creating the Two-Step Form Fill Process

In HubSpot if we don’t have an in-built CMS system, we can’t create the 2-step or multi-step form system. So as an alternative we need to create 2 separate forms and tie them together with some simple JavaScript where Email Address will work as a binding glue. You can use the code below to do that.

<script>
  var data = []

  hbspt.forms.create({
  portalId: "Add HubSpot Portal ID HERE",
  formId: "Add 1st Form ID",
  target: "#multiStepForm",
  onFormSubmit: function(form) {
    var incoming = $(form).serializeArray();
    data.push(incoming);
  },
  onFormSubmitted: function(form) {
    $('#multiStepForm').empty();
    hbspt.forms.create({
      portalId: "Add HubSpot Portal ID HERE",
      formId: "Add 2nd Form ID",
      target: "#multiStepForm",
      onFormReady: function(form) {
        form.find('input[name="email"]').val(data[0].value).change();
      }    
    })
  }
});