A signup form on your website is a perfect way to enable leads to take the first step to enter a sales process. Whether you want visitors to sign up for an ebook, schedule an appointment, or request a demo, contact forms will help make things possible. However, the way you set up your contact form on your site has a huge effect on whether people really want to “submit” it.
More specifically, the amount of data you ask for on the form has a massive impact on conversion rates. Forms can have a simple name and email field or they can request substantially more information. Suppose you have a landing page and plenty of traffic, but no one is submitting your lead generation form that has 5 to 8 fields, as a corrective action, most marketers will reduce the number of form fields.
However, is it reducing the form fields that will improve the conversion rate? How can you create a win-win situation for both you and your potential customers? This article shows how.
Should You Really Reduce Form Fields?
If you are like most marketers, your first reaction is to reduce the number of form fields to minimize friction while filling up the form. It sounds easy and obvious, doesn’t it? If you want more people to fill out your form, ask less of them.
So, does this approach really work? Does the reduction of form fields always increase the conversion rate of the form? Short answer: Yes. Here are a few reasons to keep your form as short as possible.
Asking for Too Much Information Can Drive People Away
The core purpose of a signup form is to let your prospects contact you for more information or a demo of your product or service. Asking for basic information such as name and email address is the best practice to follow. Even asking for a phone number is not necessarily a good move, depending on which stage your prospect is at in the buying cycle and whether you have earned his or her trust.
However, on most signup forms, marketers tend to ask additional questions to learn more about the potential lead. While these questions may be helpful to the marketing and sales team, they may be a turn-off to the person who is attempting to submit the form and move on. Be careful about the mandatory fields you use on your contact or signup form. Ask the necessary information and leave the other fields optional, or prospects will give up.
People Are Reluctant About Giving up Too Much Information
No matter their level of interest, prospects may be hesitant to give away too much personal information at the initial stages of the buying cycle. They might be fine with providing you their name and email address, but if you start pressing for their phone number, designation, company name, or other information, they get uncomfortable and press random keys. You might have reckoned with random (or invalid) data entered by your leads. For this reason, it is crucial to draw a clear line and distinguish the mandatory information you need at the initial stage or while making first contact.
Think About the Information You Really Will Use
Forbes found that 58% of companies are generating value from the data they are using; almost 60% of survey respondents agreed that data and analytics are “vital” to their organizations’ operations.
Marketers believe that if they collect a lot of information from users who request it, they will be able to interpret these data points and draw highly insightful conclusions about their potential clients. However, it is important to be rational about this. Will marketing staff really have time to review and evaluate all the data available before reaching a lead? In many cases, the answer is no. As a result, many businesses end up aggravating both their prospects and their employees. Instead, cut the form down to the most relevant detail and leave the remainder of it out.
In summary, keeping your form short is a smart thing to do. You also need to consider the fact that your lead wants you to get in touch with them to understand their requirements. Plus, they are also filling out forms at your competitors’ websites. By keeping your form short, you are making that first hurdle low so that they will follow through with the call to action on your website. Keep it simple: Name, email, and a message box.
But … is there a way to get additional data without increasing the form fields? Can you create a win-win situation for both you and your prospects? Yes, you can.
Data Enrichment Creates the Win-Win Situation
Data enrichment is a method for combining raw data from your own resources with data from other internal or external datasets. Enriched data is a valuable resource, as it transforms raw data into more meaningful insights for each organization. The majority of brands are enriching their raw data so that they can use it for informed decision-making.
1. Get Valuable Data Without Asking for It
You can’t deny the fact that additional data allows you to learn more about your leads and empowers you to hold better conversations with your prospects. However, as discussed earlier, asking too much can lead to either inaccurate information or driving the prospect away.
Data enrichment allows you to get that additional information about your leads without adding extra fields in your contact form.
2. Better Data Validation
The more fields you have, the more chances that a user will enter random (fake) information in the additional fields. When this happens, you will get bad data. khttps://salesintel.io/blog/how-bad-data-hurts-b2b-companies/
of the businesses face the direct impact of bad data on their bottom-line.
Because data enrichment is an automated process that fetches data from external resources, it allows you to only ask for the necessary information to contact your prospects. Using data enrichment, you get better data validation than by asking for more information.
3. Improved Lead Segmentation
Segmenting your audiences will generate a much higher return on your campaigns by letting you focus your efforts and tailor your content and outreach. Without proper segmentation, no marketing strategy can be effective. Fewer fields mean less information. Due to a lack of information, marketers find it challenging to segment leads. Data enrichment resolves this challenge by providing additional valuable data that businesses can use to segment leads.
4. Improved Lead Scoring
Your overall prospect-to-closed won conversion rate depends to a large degree on how you score leads. The aim is to build a good partnership between marketing and sales teams since they need to work together to attract new customers and keep them loyal.
However, manual processes can be very slow and time-consuming. For example, if all you know about a customer is a full name and personal email, your lead generation tool would allocate a low score to the user based on the details available.
But if you have a data enrichment method, you’ll be able to connect information that you need more data, including a professional email. This will not only boost the ranking but will also increase your chances of finding success.
5. Saves Time
Marketers and SDRs spend a lot of time logging and maintaining data. According to a HubSpot report, sales reps spend 17% of their day entering contacts, updating records, and logging activities into the system.
Data enrichment saves your reps time and effort through automation. As a result, your sales team becomes more productive. They can spend more time actually selling than collecting additional data and entering it into the CRM.
Availing the benefits of data completeness with a hassle-free signup experience for your potential customers will mean making an investment in a good data enrichment platform. However, it’s worth making the investment due to the money and time you will save in the long run.
SalesIntel – The Go-to B2B Data Enrichment Platform
SalesIntel helps you add various data points to existing B2B data and prospecting lists. If you are relying on inbound leads, just ask for your prospect’s email and we will help you fill in the missing data. SalesIntel has 10 years of historical match rate data as well as matching against a contact’s job history.
Yes, you read it right. You can enrich your existing data with as little as an email address, and SalesIntel will automatically incorporate the human-verified firmographic data, technographic data, and direct-dials you need to carry out the sales and marketing strategies. Bring lead enrichment to your tech stack and capitalize on every opportunity whenever a contact or signup form is filled.
