Your Form Fields Matter. Here’s How.

Hello and welcome to Factors Labs — a segment that reviews actionable insights from our data science team on all things marketing analytics and attribution. We report on patterns that emerge from real data collected across markets, companies, campaigns, events, funnels, and more.a 

This week, we continue our three part series on demo form optimization. The first part discusses how various marketing channels perform at driving successful submissions. Part two explores the impact of number of form fields on form submission rates. Now, we finally arrive at the actual contents of a demo form. What types of fields positively influence submissions? What fields are hurting your conversions? What sorts of questions should you be asking? The following post answers these questions and more with robust, data-driven insights.

Your Form Fields Matter. Here’s How...

Demo form fields capture a lot of vital information about high-intent leads. Names, emails, companies, geographies, and more — straight from the source. It’s valuable data. On one hand, you want to collect as much of it as possible. More data can be used to better analyze your prospects, better personalize marketing efforts, and convert more leads. On the other hand, however, an invasive, irrelevant, or excessive form may turn away potential customers from submitting it in the first place. We’ve compiled the performance of a few common form fields to derive an understanding of what’s helping, and what’s hurting your form submission rate. Here’s what the numbers have to say:

Job Title - what do you do?

The result is unintuitive. Turns out that asking for a visitor’s job title actually improves their chance of successfully submitting a demo form by close to 15%. What might explain this? One reason is that providing job title details helps tailor the demo appropriately. A CXO may care about high level impact on revenue, an operations head may care about convenience and efficiency, and so on. Hence, a potential lead may favour providing this information. Of course, one’s job title isn’t particularly invasive either — unlike asking for phone numbers or addresses. 

Website vs Company - where do you work?

Let’s face it — your website IS your company. Digital transformation, especially in the B2B SaaS space, has rendered your domain the face of your business. So it’s hardly surprising that leads prefer sharing their website details (52.16% success rate) over their company name (43.22% success rate). Since both pieces of information are virtually identical and one outperforms the other significantly (1.2X), it makes sense for your form to request for website domain alone. 

Country - where is business conducted?

“Country” is a high performing field (55.12% success rate) as compared to “No country” which results in a far lower success rate of 40.53%. Asking for a lead’s country is often just another way to identify their company’s place of business. With remote work and international SaaS transactions becoming increasingly common, however, this data may be inaccurately interpreted. Hence, a more appropriate question may be to ask for the lead’s company’s active geographies. Subtle difference, big implications. 

Remember that saying “It doesn't hurt to ask”? Well turns out that sometimes, it does. 

It’s not uncommon for SaaS firms to ask a few too many questions. This ultimately hurts their cause by driving away leads either because of excessive length or invasive, unnecessary fields. On average, implementing these “extra fields'' will reduce your form’s success rate by approximately 3%. Here are a couple of questions that are BIG turn offs:

“What tools are you currently using?”

“How soon are you planning to buy?”

And there you have it. Your forms and form fields matter. And making even minor tweaks around the number of form fields and the content of said fields can have a major impact on the number of successful submissions.