Planning Web Forms, part II

In the first post on planning web forms, we thought about your visitors' initial response to your web form, and your initial goal: information seeking.

Let's take it a bit beyond that. The way you set up your contact form can influence the choices your visitors make.

I want to emphasize that we're not talking here about manipulation. We're talking about creating harmony between your company and your visitors.

I'm thinking right now about a web form for a new website I'm building with Shan Pesaru for an upscale chocolatier who does custom, private label chocolates for nonprofits and corporate promotion.

When we think about the user journey for this company's customers, we know that their search for information is likely to begin far in advance of their need to order. The retail consumer of fine chocolates is likely to pick up a jar of the company's chocolate seashells spontaneously for a gift, a souvenir, or even a bit of self indulgence. The symphony orchestra currently considering using their private label chocolates as fundraising items at their concerts isn't likely to make that decision so lightly.

They need figures to take before the board, they'll be holding committee meetings and discussing it with their community partners, they'll be looking at competitors, and they'll be using their annual planning calendar to choose the best launch date for the private label chocolates.

A corporation intending to choose private label chocolates for tradeshow giveaways or corporate holiday gifts will have an equally lengthy procedure.

At what point in this journey does the company want to engage the organization?

The decision isn't like the conductor's decisions for a symphony. It's like the decisions of the players in a bluegrass band. When to move to the second part of the tune, when a player will take a solo interlude, when to make a key change or a shift in tempo -- each of these decisions will influence the next move of other band members and change the direction of the music as a whole.

Just so, your web form can influence your relationship with your customer. If we limit the number of information fields to the essentials, as we did with the software company, then we encourage the greatest posssible response and increase the number of leads.

However, if we ask for more information and offer more interaction, we limit the number of leads but ensure that those leads are hotter.

Here are some examples of web form elements that limit responses:

• additional information about the visitor's company or organization, especially questions designed to elecit the size of the organization, such as "How many employees in your company?" or "How many locations?"
• additional information about the visitor's plans, such as "How soon do you expect to make this decision?" or "What is your anticipated budget for this project?"
• expressed contact intentions, such as "Submit this form and a sales representative will call you."

These items in a web form will discourage those who are merely toying with the idea, and tend to solidify the resolve of those who are serious in their interest. Answering these questions requires more thought and more certainty about the resources involved, and will cause the visitor to envision using your goods or services in a clearer and more concrete way.

You'll have fewer responses, but those you receive will be nearer a decision.

How can you decide which way you ought to go in your contact form? Here are some questions to consider:

• How much staff time is involved in responses? The software company offers an automatic free download with no human effort on their part and no real cost to the company. They want high volume. A company that needs to craft an individual proposal or quote for each prospect may want to pre-qualify those leads as much as possible.
• Can you provide samples? The software company's download is a sample. Someone who is thinking only casually about their product is likely to be swayed by trying it. This is true for the chocolatiers as well, but the cost and logistics of providing samples is completely different.
• How important is it to build relationships? Some products and services are likely to be one-time purchases with quick decision-making. Others require nurturing of relationships that last over a period of years and may lead to many future business relationships with others. Where your company's offerings fall along that continuum affects how important it is to you to build your house contact list for the future.

For the chocolatier, the best decision may be to create two web forms: one on the Contact form which encourages a high volume of additions to the email list, and one on the Private Label form which narrows the field to people who are ready to talk with a sales rep.

Good planning will let you use your web form to make beautiful music with your visitors.

Planning Your Web Forms, part I

Web forms have been on my mind lately. For one thing, I've been helping Fargo web design firm Onsharp get the word out about their opening for a Web Project Manager (click on that link and apply if you're qualified and live near Fargo -- they're a great team), and this is a task that involves filling out lots of web forms.

For another, I've been assisting backup software makers FileReplicationPro to plan a new web form, and that discussion included many more viewpoints than such discussions generally do. This is because we were hanging out at Basecamp talking about it, an approach which tends to get more input than the usual IM exchange.

There are two big questions when you plan your web form. The first is what information to include or request.

As a general rule, people get antsy if you ask too many questions on your web form. They get tired of typing and give up, or they begin to wonder why you want to know all these things and decide not to tell you.

So your first goal should be not to ask for any more than you have to. And that means that you need to ask for the things you really want to know.

For FileReplicationPro, it seemed to me that we didn't need people's physical locations, but we did need to know their position in the company.

"They're CTOs," FileReplicationPro assured me, "or IT team leaders."

But what if they're not? What if they're office workers whom someone has instructed to find some data security software? Or small business owners with limited technical knowledge but an awareness that they need to back up their data? In that case, we need to be using completely different language when we write to them.

We never really need to know where in physical space they are. So, while there may be a natural inclination to start a form with name, address, and phone number, by giving up some of that we get to ask the visitors' position in the decision-making process. This information will let us target our content instead of just guessing.

When it comes to the questions you ask, your web from should be, as Einstein said of something else entirely, as simple as possible, but no simpler.

The next issue is how the form looks. Look at these two different approaches to the same hypothetical form from Angela Peace's web design class:




The first design, by Brandi Samuels, lays out the options very clearly, while the second relies on drop-down menus and bunches the choices together in a less readable way. The second approach creates a smaller form, but it may still be daunting to the visitor.

Your designer will have quite a few options for getting the information you want, once you decide what that is. You can make your visitors use a drop-down menu to choose their state, for example, or you can let them type in their two-letter abbreviation. I live in Arkansas, so I don't mind the drop-downs much usually -- but having to scroll down to North Dakota for Onsharp over and over was something else. People visiting your site during a coffee break may resent those extra seconds. Do you have the kind of volume that makes it worth inconveniencing your visitors in order to have some automatic sorting of the response data?

You can give them, as in the examples above, default options -- which of those designs do you think will lead more customers to choose a service plan, the one that starts with three years or the one that starts with "none"?

Consider testing a couple of different approaches to see how visitors respond.

Does your web site have no response form at all? The preschool website Jeff Wain and I are building currently doesn't have a form. The preschool owner hasn't had a website before, and she's used to getting contacts entirely by phone.

But a web form, however simple, will allow her to track conversions a bit better, build up her email list, and perhaps reach the busy working parents who search for a preschool in the wee hours of the morning and don't remember to call her later.

So I'm thinking that we need to add a contact form. Name, phone number, and email address should be plenty, and I can rely on Jeff to make it look great.

Looking for a Hero

When writing ads, or things that are expected to function like ads such as a landing page for your adwords campaign or a direct mail piece or a call to action, you should think like your readers.

You shouldn't always think like your readers. If nothing else, your readers sometimes want to read something different from what they're already thinking about.

Not with ads.

If I'm ready to buy, or at least to make a decision about what I want to buy, then I'm not thinking about my subject in an abstract way. I'm not contemplating the topic philosophically, or seeking greater knowledge.

On some other occasion, sure, your visitors might just be thinking about the thing you're writing about. Dragons, for example.

On some occasions, your visitors might care to examine the various intriguing suggestions writers have proposed for how dragons might in fact be able to fly. They might want to speculate on the origins of the markedly cross-cultural dragon stories. They might be looking for cool pictures of dragons.

If they are, at that moment, about to be eaten by a dragon, then they don't give a flip about any of that stuff. They want a dragonslayer.

If you are indeed a dragonslayer, then they don't care about your mission statement, your educational background, or your features. They want to know right off that you are a dragonslayer and prepared to come right over and slay their dragon.

Let's move away from dragons. I'm feeling sorry for the dragon in the picture right now, even though it's strictly metaphorical.

Put very simply, people reading your ads or ad-like content are thinking about themselves, not about you or your product. Speak to them about their current needs and wants.

A client of mine sells software. They want a great headline for a page people will visit when they search for the term "mirror server." If someone is searching for "mirror server" and clicks on a software company's website, then they want secure data management. That's what we need to offer them. We have a lot more to say, and we can say it somewhere else. On that page, we want to give the purchase-ready visitors what they want. The others can look around, and come back to that page when they're ready.

The damsel in the picture, once she's feeling less distressed, may be in the mood to hear all kinds of fascinating tidbits about dragons or about the knight's experiences. Right now, she's just looking for a hero.

The Call to Action

Recently I received a document from a client listing the pages she wanted on her website. One of them was "the call to action."

The problem here is the common one of imagining our visitors coming to our website and experiencing it just as we planned it. They'll start at our homepage, we figure, then read all the information about our company and all the details about our products, and then, having seen everything we have for them, they'll make a considered decision about the best button to click on. They'll go over to our Call to Action page, of course, be called, and take that action.

This isn't actually how it works.

Consider this web page. You are seeing the entire call to action for the page: "close."



If you click on that button (and, yes, it is a clickable button, the only one, down at the bottom of the page where people must scroll down to find it -- that's another problem entirely), the page simply closes.

There is a page at this website that explains how to order. You are supposed to call the company, having perused the list of goodies on offer, and tell them what you want. You were supposed to have gotten to this list by clicking a button and having this page pop up. That way, when you click on "close," you'll return to the "how to order" page.

Google Analytics tells us that a quarter of the people who make it to this page got there first. It was their landing page. They were searching, perhaps, for some nice pig spleens, they found this page, they thought five spleens for $65 was a good price, and they were set to order -- but there is no contact information on this page, no navigation, and no way to buy that pig spleen.

Compare with this page:




These handy buttons are on each page, in the same place every time. Wherever I land in this website, I am invited to contact the company and to invite my friends to check out the website.

I am much more likely to get a fishing trip than a pig spleen.

Here's one more example.



This website offers different calls to action on different pages. The page shown, which is for individuals, should get a different group of visitors from the page for corporate visitors. There is, therefore, a different call to action.

If we look at the first, highly unsuccessful page and compare it with the other two, we can find a simple rule for the call to action on a website: there should be one. On every page. Where people can find it.

The client who wants a "call to action" page won't get one. She'll get something much more effective.

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