Articles in The 'required-fields' Tag

Are You Asking For Too Much from Your Visitors?

by Marni Weinberg

I speak with many clients on a daily basis with lead generation sites. Clearly, the most integral component of a lead generation site is obtaining leads. This typically occurs through an online form, which should qualify the visitor as well as possible. For example: Which specific service is your visitor interested in learning more about?

One of the biggest mistakes I see (unfortunately way too often) is an online form that has an excessive number of fields, which can be downright overwhelming. This is bad enough; however, some forms take it a step further and require that all of the fields be filled out before visitors can click to submit the form. This is a huge no no. You want your form to be brief, user friendly and with as few required fields as possible. If you require too many fields, you may lose potential leads. Reason being, the average person will not take a liking to being forced to tell you their entire life story (I am exaggerating a bit here) in order to obtain the requested information.

So what should the required fields be? Well, every company is different and it depends on the specific action item you are asking your visitor to take. I can give you my 2 cents….With a Newsletter signup, the only requirement I would have is a valid email address. You can then reach out to thank the visitor for their interest and see if they would like to speak with someone from your organization in more detail. For a Whitepaper download, you will want to know which particular whitepaper they are interested in; a drop down menu usually achieves this task. On our Website, one of the action items is to request a Free Search Engine Visibility Report. In order for our team to complete the requested report, we must have a website. Therefore, that is field is a requirement.

I encourage you to take a look at your online forms. Are they clean and professional looking with as little required fields as possible? If the answer is no, now is the time to make some modifications to improve your overall intake of leads.