Once you “convinced” the web visitors to click through your website, you want them to land on – you guessed it -”your landing page”. There you should have a short and sweet form that will ask them a minimum number of questions so they can move forward as fast as possible and download the piece of information or whatever else you previously promised them.

Functional Web Forms

Do not make the mistake of displaying an email address. It shows 3 things:

• You don’t care about your prospects
• You are not professional and
• You really don’t know the first thing about creating client lists and their usefulness in the age of the web.

Instead use performing software like Aweber

The basic elements of a functional form are:

Forms should be Short

I know you are tempted to ask the visitor a bunch of questions varying from their social security to their granny’s eye color but put yourself in their shoes. Would you like to stumble upon a form that goes on forever with no end in sight? Would you even have the time or patience to fill out all those fields? That’s exactly how your web visitors feel too. So keep it short.

At this point you are trying to lure people in and not give them the smallest reason to leave your site. A Name and an email address would be sufficient. Why email? You’ll see later in this article why this is extremely important for your business.

Location of the Form

Always above the fold. If you have a slightly longer form (although I warned you above why this is a bad idea) you have to keep it above the fold. If you make people scroll down you can kiss them goodbye.

Don’t Get Personal

Email address and even physical address (only if you are shipping them something) it’s ok. Social security numbers are not.

Ask Simple Questions

I am registered with a bunch of social networks and have about 4 email accounts. I keep a lot of personal data on these accounts and I find it very easy to log in, check stuff out and logout. One thing it has always baffled me how come, whenever I log into my account, the cable company is always asking me for the 16 digit number of my account. Wouldn’t an email account and a password be sufficient?

I am always annoyed by this and for that reason I never go to my cable company account. Why bother? I still don’t know and could care less about my 16 digit account number.

Don’t Let Them Cancel out

Always provide only ONE button after they filled out that form – “Submit”, or “Create Account” or “Send”. Do not attempt to leave them an option out, like “Cancel” or “Clear Form”. The web visitors will get confused and become annoyed if they hit the button by mistake and canceled out the form they just filed in. Under 1% will be willing to start over, so why take the chance?

They got on that form because they wanted to. If they don’t want to communicate via the form with you they will just hit the “back” button but why make it easy when you haven’t forced them to do anything anyway?

Make Them Trust You

When web visitors agree to fill out a form on your website, they already trust you somewhat. Thicken that trust with more statements like “We will never sell your email to a third party. We don’t like span and we are sure you don’t either.” Or something to that effect.

Present a privacy policy if necessary. Whatever you can do so the web surfer trusts you and hopefully you are one of the good guys not some guy in Nigeria who has constant rich dead relatives and don’t know where to send the millions stuck in the bank.

Get an Autoresponder

This show you care, even the customer knows this is an automated response. Don’t you feel good every time you get an email that says: “Thank you [ insert your first name here], for being a loyal customer…”.

Run tests on the autoresponder. One of these best out there is AWeber.

Go back and look at your forms again. See if they follow the elements above and modify accordingly. You should be able to convert many more prospects than before.

 Claudiu Geanta is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Design by Satori Inc. & Satori CG Inc.. He helps businesses promote their presence on and off line. He is also an accomplished web designer, book writer and photographer. You can follow him on Twitter.
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