What is Form Abandonment?
Form abandonment happens when someone starts filling out a forum on your website but doesn’t finish and abandons it. Why does it matter you might ask? According to HubSpot, 50% of marketers say inbound marketing strategies, such as onsite forms, are their primary source of leads.
It varies from sector to sector but the majority of people (81%) have abandoned an online form after beginning to fill it out. The travel industry has the highest form abandonment rate at 81%, followed by nonprofits (77.9%), finance (75.7%), and retail (75.8%).
These statistics suggest that you should treat the issue of form abandonment as a high priority, as it can have a major financial impact on your business. Losing thousands of dollars every month due to form abandonment puts you in a unique place: simply reduce form abandonment and increase your revenue by several fold!
Ultimately, you should treat form abandonment as an opportunity to improve the user experience and boost your revenue.
The #1 reason leads abandon forms
Before we try to eliminate form abandonment from our website, we have to understand why leads are abandoning the forms in the first place. Various studies frequently suggest that poor form experience and distractions are the biggest reasons behind form abandonment.
Poor form experience can come in many forms: are you asking for information people feel uncomfortable answering? 37% of people will abandon a form asking for their phone number, unless the field is optional, which nearly doubles completions. Is your form too complicated and keep on going?
Similarly, distractions — such as unnecessary upsells or display ads that are poorly positioned — can cause a lead to abandon the form. It is also possible a user is looking for the same product or service on other websites and gets distracted because of them. According to a study done in the early 2000s, the average attention span of humans decreased from 12 seconds to eight seconds. Now it’s shorter than a goldfish. Poor form experience coupled with distractions can cause your user to abandon the form without completing it.
4 ways to bring leads back
When someone starts filling out a form on your website, it’s a sign they are greatly interested in your product or service. It’s worth all the efforts to try to bring them back. In addition, when your conversion rate increases, you will see a boost in each of your marketing metrics: acquisition costs will go down, return on ad spend will go up and overall ROI will improve.
So you might be wondering how you can bring back the leads that have abandoned your forms. Fortunately, using the right conversion optimization tools available in the market can help you solve form abandonment effortlessly. Let’s discuss 3 ways you can use CRO tools to win the leads back.
1. Partial Entry Tracking + Missed Opportunity Alerts
The first step to sealing the leaks in your funnel is detecting form abandonment. Traditional analytics such as Google Analytics are completely blind to form abandonment: you have no way of knowing when a potential lead abandons your forms if you’re just using standard in-page analytics.
Form tracking solutions such as Insiteful allow you to capture 100% of users who fill out your forms by tracking partial entries & incomplete submissions. Get real-time alerts via email or Slack/Microsoft Teams for missed opportunities so you can re-engage these leads right away. Recover lost leads from your forms by using contact data from partial submissions and stop losing prospects to form abandonment.
2. Auto Follow-up Email
Sometimes the solution to form abandonment can be as simple as reminding the users about the forms they were filling. Auto follow-up emails are a great way to re-engage the leads. 19% of people will return to complete a form if the company reaches out to them through email or business phone to re-engage them.
Insiteful’s Auto Follow-up feature is an easy and simple way to do just that. Once you’ve added our one-line tracking code to capture anyone who has abandoned your forms, you can use our platform or no-code integrations to automate reaching out to them without any manual effort. Another advantage of email follow-up is that people are most receptive to being contacted via this channel: 77% of people prefer email over social media or other channels for receiving promotional material from businesses they’re interested in.
3. Remarketing Ads
After someone interacts with your website or mobile app, remarketing lets you track that person and serve ads to them as they browse other websites. This can remind them of your product or service and help you build brand awareness. If they have abandoned a form on your website, this can be a great way to follow up.
Remarketing can be a powerful tool as it allows you to follow up with people according to their journey in your sales funnel. You can create a separate audience for each stage of the funnel by including users who exited the funnel at that stage and excluding users who exited the funnel at later stages. Using CRO and form tracking tools such as Insiteful allows you to automatically add leads from abandoned forms to your remarketing ad campaigns.
Norwegian cruise line Hurtigruten tried out manual email remarketing campaigns by reaching out to clients who had booked but hadn’t paid for their trip. The booking process at Hurtigruten allowed visitors to save a reservation for 48 hours with no payment required. If no payment was received within 48 hours, the booking would be canceled. Out of 25 emails sent, 16 orders were saved which led to $57,000 in revenue.
4. Welcome Back & Saved Progress
In a world full of choice, personalization is what drives sales. Customization is the act of leveraging data to deliver individualized messages to prospects and current customers. When a customer who had previously left without converting returns, a personalized “welcome back” message can make all the difference.
Insiteful has all the tools you need to regain control of your form abandonment problems. With turnkey features such as the “Save & Continue Later” and “Welcome Back” functionality, Insiteful can uncover more leads from virtually any existing form — compatible with most all form builders and web platforms. Insiteful’s form tracking and optimization software helps you find leads that are lost due to incomplete entries, abandoned forms, or poor conversion rates. Learn more about how you could be getting more leads from your existing forms & marketing efforts today!
