We might be a little biased here, but we think forms are the absolute best way to engage with your current and future customers. Of course, a form isn’t very useful if it’s not converting because nobody is filling it out. Increasing your form’s conversion rates is a simple way to better engage your customers which ultimately results in more money.

Look at all of the websites you access each day. If you look hard enough, you’ll notice that there is at least one form on every page. You may even submit several forms without even noticing them (and there’s a good chance that they’re powered by Gravity Forms too).

Regardless of what the purpose of your form is, your end-goal is always a completed submission. Whether it’s a new mailing list subscription, a purchase order, or a general inquiry, you’re losing money for every failed conversion.

There’s no magic method to automatically increase your form conversion rates with a click of a button, but here are a few ways you can help push your conversion rate closer to 100%.

Gather Data

If you’re not gathering data on your conversions, how do you know what your conversion rate even is? By gathering data related to your form views and entries, finding potential issues and opportunities is a breeze.

Google Analytics Events

Understanding your potential, failed, and successful form submissions is key. Chances are, you’re already using Google Analytics to assess your traffic, so utilizing conversion tracking for your forms is just a small extra step that will amount in huge benefits.

Does your form fail for visitors in a certain country? Mobile visitors? Other demographics?

Utilizing a plugin like Gravity Forms Google Analytics Event Tracking will help you better understand who is submitting your form and who is ignoring it.

Capture Partial Form Entries

When we released the Partial Entries add-on, marketers everywhere rejoiced. By capturing partial entries, every failed conversion can become a beneficial opportunity.

Identifying Failure Points

One example could be a multi-page form. By capturing partial entries, you may be able to determine that most failed submissions occur on a particular page of the form. If you’re asking for generic information such as a name and email address on the first page, but then see failures on the second page where you’re asking for an address, it could be that your visitors are unwilling to provide you with more personal information.

At times, even a single field can cause the form to be abandoned. One common field that can often cause abandonment is the Phone field. If you’re often seeing your partial entries stop at a particular field, you might need to re-evaluate your need for that field.

Converting Partial Entries

Often times, a partial entry can still be converted into a sale. Have you ever gotten halfway through a checkout process and decided against it, only to later receive a coupon in your inbox for that very product?

It’s a common practice to utilize partial entries on e-commerce sites to help convert an abandoned cart, and the same can apply to your forms.

Capturing an email address within a partial entry will allow you to reach out to the visitor and give them a bit of a personal touch. Maybe they just had to get up from their desk and forgot about your form. In that case, a simple reminder can make a world of difference.

Make It Your Forms Pretty

There’s nothing worse than filling out a form that looks all jumbled up or doesn’t match the rest of the site. While we do our best to ensure your theme utilizes Gravity Forms the best it can, things can sometimes cause conflicts.

When embedding your form, be sure to check it over for styling issues and adjust the styling as needed. If the form doesn’t match the rest of your site, it’s likely that your conversion rates are suffering.

Minimize Required Form Data

Simply put, if the field isn’t absolutely required, don’t require it.

As mentioned previously in this article, phone number fields are often a culprit when investigating failed form conversions. If you already have the user’s email address and don’t absolutely need their phone number immediately, don’t make the field a requirement.

If the field isn’t required, it doesn’t mean the user won’t fill it out. Removing the field requirement will still cause most to fill it out, but will also allow those who prefer not to disclose the information to skip it.

Make Your Forms Noticeable

What’s worse than a partially filled form? One that isn’t even noticed. Just because your form is on the page doesn’t mean that it will even be seen. This is often true of pages that have other primary content on them.

For example, say you’re trying to capture email addresses for a mailing list. Depending on the placement of your form, the article may have been skimmed over and your form may be either not seen or forgotten about.

If your primary objective on the page is to get completed submissions, you’ll want to identify the best possible location for the form. In most cases, placing the form “above the fold” will cause higher conversions than other locations.

If you are trying to get feedback on a particular article, a form at the top of the page would likely be forgotten about by the time the article is fully read. By placing the form below the content, it will be immediately on your visitor’s mind at the time it would be relevant to them.

Experiment

In any type of conversion tracking, it’s important to experiment with what works and what doesn’t. Usually, the best course of action when trying something new is split testing your forms. If one form proves more successful than another, then you know which direction to continue in. From there, you can continue running tests with different variations to see what works best.