dangletech

I read a great article from Marketo recently, that dealt with the question of landing page form length. They asked the question, “Do short form convert better?” and carried out an experiment to find out. The results were quite compelling:

They used a landing page that had already been performing relatively well for them. To test their hypothesis, the only thing they changed was the form length. The three different forms they used comprised:

Form #1 - five fields
First Name
Last Name
Job Title
Company
Work Email

Form #2 - seven fields
As above, plus:
Employees
Salesforce.com User?

Form #3 - nine fields
As above, plus:
Phone
Industry

Results- Shorter Forms Reduced Cost Per Conversion by up to 25%

Short Form: Conversion rate 13.4%, cost per conversion $31.24.
Medium Form: Conversion rate 12.0%, cost per conversion $34.94.
Long Form: Conversion rate 10.0%, cost per conversion $41.90.

The difference in the cost per conversion between the short and long forms is $10.67, or over 25%. This means that each additional piece of information costs $1.85. Asking for a phone number (the most invasive of all the fields) costs more than $5.00.The conclusion was obvious: keep only the landing page with the short form and turn off the other versions.

Shorter is Better
I have always been a proponent of the short form, so I was pleased to see the results that Marketo observed. It’s just common sense really. If you ask someone to fill out 8, 10 or even 12 mandatory form fields (yes I’ve seen that many and more!) to access a simple piece of value added content, they are less likely to convert than if you ask them for just three or four bits of information.

Once you have a persons name, work email, job title and company name you can pretty much guarantee getting hold of their address, phone number, web site, etc. All it takes is a little sleuthing on the web, or even easier, deploying the services of a data cleansing and augmentation vendor to append the missing information, which could cost as little as $1.00 per record.

So, I would like to make a suggestion to all those form junkies out there. Ask for less and you will be rewarded with better conversions. It will take a little more work on the back end, but if you are able to bring in 25% or more additional conversions for the same marketing spend, the extra effort should pay for itself many times over.

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Sean O’Donovan is the owner of FunnelBuilders, an internet marketing consultancy that helps technology organizations develop and implement post-click marketing strategies that generate actionable in-bound sales leads - http://www.funnelbuilders.com