Here’s some food for your thoughts: Is it possible to lose customers that were never there in the first place?
You might think this is an absurd idea but imagine a potential customer visits your website, likes your product/service (maybe bookmarks your page for later), but never follows through. Alternatively, imagine they are about to sign up for your newsletter but their cat jumps on them and closes the browser. Or, they get distracted by an SMS and leave their computer — the possibilities are endless.
Now, the question is, are these simply hypotheticals, or do they have a foundation in reality? Unfortunately, form abandonment is very real. So real that (according to a study done by Formisimo on 1.5 million site visitors), only 49% of your website visitors actually added details to an online form after viewing it. According to another study, more than 67% of site visitors will abandon your form forever if they encounter any complications; only 20% will follow up with the company in some way.
The good news is that form abandonment can be reduced by using some simple best practices, so you can generate a better return on your marketing investment. Let’s discuss some of those methods.
Analyze existing lead generation strategies
Before you can improve from abandonment and start capturing potential leads, you need to make sure you got the basics right. This includes website performance such as load speed, size, caching, responsiveness, structure and server speed. Tools such as GTmetrix, WebPageTest, and Website Grader can help you with this — Bulk Page Speed Test is great for testing several pages at once.
After you have got your basics straight, you can dig deep into analytics. Web analytics services such as Google Analytics provide statistics and basic analytical tools, but these are seldom enough on their own. While Google Analytics is an outstanding tool for site-level analytics, it lacks visibility when it comes to in-page analytics: how users interact within each individual webpage. You can complement Google Analytics with Insiteful & Ahrefs.
With Insiteful you can easily track & optimize your existing web forms. Capture unfinished form responses and partial leads using this industry-leading solution.
With Ahrefs, you’ll gain a better understanding of the tactics your competition uses to capture more data-driven leads.
The best way to utilize data and analytics is to deploy A/B testing. You can read all the guides in the world but what works for someone else might not work for you. The best way to find what works for you is through A/B testing: to determine which form design produces more results, try several versions of the same form. When you test effectively, you’ll identify the “invisible” leads you could have captured with a better lead form, but never knew about until testing alternative page designs.
Optimize to a single conversion goal
When evaluating your current lead generation strategy, you should seek to understand what is causing missed opportunities so you can work towards a single, unified conversion goal:
Test niche landing pages
Testing niche landing pages can be a good place to start. Any web page that a visitor can land on is considered a landing page. In the realm of marketing and advertising, landing pages are more commonly referred to as standalone web pages that have been designed to target a specific goal, in our case, generating leads.
Consider adding Save & Continue Later
As discussed earlier, it’s very easy for people to get distracted and lose interest in completing a form on your website. To create a seamless experience, enabling the Save & continue later (available in Insiteful) can help. Visitors can save their progress if they get distracted and Insiteful can remind them later with email follow-up.
Give incentives
Most people don’t go out of their way to fill a form on any website. They must be interested in your product or service. However, what about the visitors that aren’t interested yet and just surfing your website? You can still capture that audience with some incentive such as downloadables, special discounts or lead magnets.
Add a personal touch
Consumers have access to content through multiple channels today, making personalization more important than ever. Often, consumers receive an excessive amount of information, and will not pay attention to it fully, but seeing their own name can grab their attention. Consumers like personalized content because it talks directly to them. Personalization is a hallmark of Typeform’s conversational form UI and proven to increase conversions:
How to recover visitors that never converted into leads
Despite all your efforts, some people will fall through the cracks and will never convert. You will have to enter into recovery mode to capture those leads.
Remarketing ads
Remarketing is a great way to stay in front of your potential customer when they visit other websites. Insiteful can automatically add partial entries to remarketing campaigns to help you with lead recovery.
Automatic email follow-up
According to Ziff Davis, leads are 9x more likely to convert when businesses follow-up within 5 minutes. It is paramount that you follow up with leads as soon as they leave the site, which is only possible if you have partial lead tracking in place.
Saved progress (for returning users)
It’s highly likely your users will convert if they come back through remarketing or email follow up and find that their progress is saved. Insiteful can streamline the user’s journey by saving the progress and repopulating form fields through Repopulate feature.
Make the most of your existing marketing efforts
Form abandonment is hard on your marketing budget because it increases the customer acquisition cost. Marketing ROI, Traffic-to-lead ratio, and Landing page conversion rates are negatively affected too. You can improve all these marketing KPIs by reducing form abandonment. Insiteful can help you set up end-to-end automation with the most advanced conversion optimization solution for all sizes of businesses.
With an easy-to-use interface and the industry’s most powerful form tracking engine, Insiteful’s conversion rate optimization platform can help any business get more leads and sales from their website and forms.
From smart insights & form funnel analytics to partial entry tracking, auto email follow-up & saved progress, Insiteful has everything you need to capture & convert more leads from your existing efforts. Try it today — it takes just a few clicks!
