Guest Post: Anatomy of a Web Form

Here’s a Guest Post from our friends at Demandbase!

Today’s post is written by guest blogger Shari Johnston, Demandbase

You have the perfect lead bait, you have carefully crafted your compelling marketing copy, and laid out your webpage, now onto the form design…

The guide below is your at-a-glance infographic for pulling together your form design for optimal performance in no time!

Simple changes outlined in our best practices can make some significant difference to your conversion rate and data integrity. By using these simple design elements you can improve your users experience, data quality and…. get more leads.

JOB TITLE:  Best practices state to label this field job title to avoid getting “Mr. and Mrs.” values. Avoid this data issue from the start by labeling the field clearly.

BUSINESS EMAIL: Encourage your prospects to include their business address and avoid your email campaigns getting sent to unattended web mail accounts.

CAPTURE KEY PROFILE DATA: This being the most involved and time consuming portion of form design, which fields should I ask for? Well we all know we will get more leads by using as few fields as possible, but internally we need that critical data sales is screaming for. Keep everyone happy and offer a shorter form and capture the data behind the scenes. Best of both worlds!

5 RECOMMENDED FORM FIELDS: By capturing the critical data behind the scenes, we recommend you stick with these 5 form fields (First Name, Last Name, Job Title, Business Email, and Company) that are key personal data attributes that are needed.

COMPANY AUTOCOMPLETE: Using a company autocomplete widget allows for data accuracy by avoiding misspellings and normalizes company name treatments making account management in your MAS and CRM clean and easy. And it makes it easier on your prospect to boot!

CALL TO ACTION BUTTON: Match the action of your CTA button to the user experience. This helps engage your user and improve conversion. Try “Register” or “Download”  or “RSVP” depending on the context of your form.

Keep this infographic handy for the next time your field marketing team needs you to build that critical form yesterday; you will be prepared!