Why You Should Use Multi Step Forms and Why it Will Increase Your Conversion Rate
Identifying the problem
Friction and Limitations
Why do we shop at amazon? Is it because they have the best product selection? maybe it’s their user experience?
I’m just gonna say it. Shopping on amazon sucks. The user experience is horrible, the UI looks ugly and 99% of the products are just low quality junk from China.
What does this have to do with forms? I’ll get to that.
The reason we shop on amazon is because it’s convenient, they have our address and name. The purchasing process is frictionless.
Amazon has mastered the process of convenience and there are a few things we can learn from this as marketers or even just small business owners trying to get more leads.
The problem with basic forms is what we call friction. When potential customers are faced with too many inputs it becomes too much of a psychological commitment to fill out the form. This leads to a lower conversion rate and in turn fewer customers.
This is a very bad form.. please don't do this.
To combat this we can make our form have less inputs, but then the issue becomes choosing what information we should collect. There is a reason we’re asking our potential customers all these questions after all.
If you had to choose between A: Losing customers due to long forms or B: Losing customers due to poor/irrelevant follow up. Which one do you choose?
The answer is option C.. Multi step forms!
How Does Multi Step Forms Solve This?
Reduce the Friction
Multi step takes less commitment, starting with simple questions makes it easy to get your customers involved.overwhelming our customers with questions causes friction by reducing questions to one at a time we are able to get more information whilst keeping our customers engaged.
Because a multi step form typically only shows one or two questions at a time, the commitment required to answer them is a lot lower. This solves both our problems of either having too many questions or gathering too little info about our customers.
By beginning our forms with a super low commitment question, perhaps just a button asking what field of profession they’re in we’re going to be able to capture more leads.
You might think that we’ll face another issue of having too many different pages in our multi step forms, just like we had too many inputs in the regular forms and that this will cause customers to simply not complete them.
However the data proves the complete opposite!
Boost Engagement
There are several studies showing that interactivity increases engagement and that for every question your customers are answering the more “skin in the game” they will have. In other words, for every answer your customers become more likely to finish the form.
This is great news, for all marketers!
Finally we’ll be able to boost our conversion rate(in some cases by as much as 2-3X) with multi step forms without having to limit the info we collect on our potential customers.
But that leaves the question, how do you actually go about creating multi step forms?
Building Multi Step Forms
Well, there are three options. If you’re a developer you can probably code it yourself although it might be time consuming. Another option is to hire a developer, this however tends to be both time consuming and expensive..
Your best bet is to use a simple and secure option like Fireforms, With our drag and drop builder you can create forms in minutes. Best of all is that making changes to your forms takes no time and shows up on your website instantly!
Alright.. enough self promotion. Either way, having a multi step form on your website might make sense and whatever service you use it should definitely be something to keep in mind if you’re looking for more leads.
You can read more about multi step forms and how to effectively use them in your marketing strategy on our blog.