How To Increase Your Lead Form Conversion Rate

For a lead generation business, a lot of pressure rests on the humble online contact form. It’s responsible for collecting the information the sales team needs to follow up with qualified leads, and if it can’t convince site visitors to submit their information, the flow of leads can quickly dry up.

Fortunately, an underperforming lead gen form isn’t a lost cause. The beauty of online forms is that you can regularly tweak them and track their performance to see what contact form version gets the highest conversion rate.

So where do you start when you want to improve your contact form conversion rate? If you’re relatively new to form creation and inbound marketing, we recommend checking out our blog post on lead form best practices. If you’re already using simple forms on your website but want to get more out of them, check out our tips below (think of this as Lead Form Best Practices 201).

Make Sure You’re Tracking Lead Form Conversions Accurately

Before you start tinkering with your lead gen form, make sure you’re tracking your lead form conversion in Google Analytics. The easiest way to track your conversions is to set up a Custom Goal that registers as completed after a visitor fills out your form and lands on a Thank You page. To do this:

1. Create a Thank You page for people who complete your form. (Make sure it’s a unique thank you page, not one you’ve used for other forms or purchases.)
2. Go to Admin in Google Analytics.
3. Go to Goals and click +New Goal
4. Give your Goal a name and select Destination as the type.
5. Set the destination as equal to the URL of your confirmation page.

With your new Goal set, you’ll be able to view the contact form conversion rate by going to Conversions–>Goals–>Goal URLs in your Google Analytics Reports.

When setting up your Goal, you can also turn on Funnels. You’ll be prompted to enter the URLs for the funnel steps, i.e. the path through your site you expect users to take to get to your lead gen form. You can then start using the Funnel Visualization report, which makes it easy to see if users are dropping off at certain points of the funnel.

Example of Funnel Visualization report in Google Analytics

Try a New Location for Your Form

If your lead form has a lower conversion rate than expected, it could be because it’s not getting a lot of visibility in its current location (you can use Google Analytics to check traffic to the page with the contact form). Test out your contact form in a new location to see if traffic and form fills increase. You could also try creating a pop-up form using a tool like OptinMonster. You can set up the pop-up form so that it’s triggered by a specific user action (such as scrolling 50% of the way down the page or staying on a page for a certain amount of time). That way, you’re presenting your form to users after they’ve had some time to engage with your site and familiarize themselves with your products or services.

Pop-up lead gen form on OptinMonster’s site

Earn Trust with Social Proof

Site visitors may be wary about sharing their information unless they know they’re getting something of value in exchange, and one way to prove the value of your offer is to use social evidence. If you’re trying to get visitors to fill out a contact form to receive a downloadable asset, tell them how many people have already downloaded it. Consider having your web developer add a counter above the form so that visitors can see the number of downloads updating in real time.

When asking site visitors to fill out a form to receive any offer or service, you can build trust by displaying short testimonials from happy customers. If your customers give you permission, consider displaying small photos with each testimonial so that site visitors can see that the testimonials are coming from real people.

mHelpDesk uses customer videos as social proof.

Incorporate Autocomplete for Location Fields

According to Google, adding autofill attributes to forms allows users to complete those forms up to 30% faster. When forms take less time to fill out, users experience less friction and contact form conversion rates go up.

Autocomplete is most useful for location fields (such as Country or Street), where users might otherwise have to choose an option from an extensive drop-down menu or type out their full address. When you add autocomplete, the user should only have to type in a few letters before seeing a drop-down with the most likely options. You can add autocomplete for locations with the code for the Google Places API, which you’ll find here. If your site is built on WordPress, you can simply install a plugin that doesn’t require any coding.

Keep Your Design Minimal

If a lot of site visitors are making it to the page your contact form lives on but failing to get any further, you may need to take a look at your page and form design. If there are too many buttons and graphic elements on the page, visitors could be getting distracted and drawn away from the lead gen form. You can remedy this problem by redesigning the page so that there’s more white space. This will cause visitors’ eyes to go to the contact form immediately and will make it easier for them to scan the form fields.

Zendesk uses a simple, professional design to keep eyes on their lead gen form.

You’ll probably still want to include some visuals—such as branded graphics or product photos—on your contact form page. Just make sure any visuals you include fit seamlessly with the rest of the page and draw the viewers’ eyes toward the form, not away from it.

Want to know more about website improvements that can increase your conversion rates? Set up a call with the Leverage Marketing team—we’d love to talk to you about how our digital marketing services can help you meet your lead gen goals.

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