One of the most important objectives of many websites is to get more leads or subscribers. To do this, you probably have one or more pages where you show a form for your visitors to contact you requesting more information about your products or subscribing to your newsletter.
From a conversion point of view, the design and content of pages with forms can be critical and, for this reason, today I would like to share with you some examples of types of A/B tests that you can try on them to optimize conversion (visitors contacting or subscribing). In the next examples you will see that the forms on the pages are created with Nelio Forms, our form creation plugin that is fully integrated with WordPress.
Location of the Form within the Page
When we talk about improving conversion on a page, one of the most frequently discussed points is the location of the call to action. If our goal is to get page visitors to fill out a form, try to place your form in different locations and analyze which one works best for you. Let’s see a simple example of how we would create a test like this with the Nelio A/B Testing plugin in WordPress.
Let’s suppose we want to create a test of the Nelio Unlocker page (our plugin that converts any web page to the WordPress or Elementor block editor) and thus check if more visitors contact us by placing the form higher on the page.
In the alternative to test, as you can see in the previous image, I have not only moved up the form, but also, to make it look better aesthetically, I have placed the section with examples further down in the page.
How do we perform this test with the Nelio A/B Testing plugin? First select that you want to create a new test page:
After naming test a name and selecting the page you want to test, by default, each variant you create is a copy of the original page, which you can edit to make the changes as you wish.
The great advantage of Nelio A/B Testing (being a plugin fully integrated in WordPress) is that making the variant changes is just as easy as editing any page in the block editor. In this case, you just select the block or blocks of the page you want to move and change their location.
After making the necessary modifications, all that remains is to save the page, return to the test that we were creating, and indicate the conversion goals and actions of the test. In this example, our goal is to get the contact form fill out. In the “Conversion Goals and Actions” section, specify the name of the goal and add the conversion action “Form Submission”.
As you can see in the previous image, you have a dropdown where you can select the form that must have been submitted in order to be saved as a conversion action for this test.
And that’s it! You can now hit the start button of the test so that half of the traffic to that page sees one alternative and the other half, the other. On the results page of the test you will be able to track the visits and conversions of each variant and thus analyze which option works best.
Number and Type of Fields to Fill In
In a study conducted by Hubspot analyzing over 40,000 pages, they observed that the number of fields to fill in and the type of each field have an impact on the conversion they get.
You can see from the graphs above that, as you probably already guessed, the fewer fields to fill in, the easier it will be for visitors to contact you. Still, you must also weigh the quality of the information you get from the form: are you sure you want anyone who passes by to contact you, or do you prefer only those who are really interested and willing to give you a little more information about themselves?
Try to perform different A/B tests modifying the number and type of form fields and analyze what works best for you as you can see in the following example:
To create such a test, if you use a plugin like Nelio Forms, it’s as easy as creating an additional form. You’ll see that the form editor is pretty much the same as the block editor you’re already familiar with:
And when editing the alternative page of the test (remember that it’s a copy of the original page) you only have to replace the form you had with the new one created, selecting it from the dropdown with the list of available forms.
In this case, note that, when specifying the conversion goals and actions of the test, you must have added the submission of the two forms as conversion actions. In this way, submitting any of these two forms (one in each variant of your test) will be recorded as a conversion.
Where to Display Form Labels
An article by Luke Wroblewski from a buch of years ago, a reference in form design, compared the pros and cons of displaying field labels above or to the left of each field.
If you have noticed in the previous example, one of the problems with vertical forms with many fields is that they can take up too much space. One of the alternatives that you can try, and that I personally find makes the forms very clean, is to not display the field labels as separate entities and write a placeholder in them instead.
In case you use Nelio Forms, it is as easy as indicating in the field settings that labels should be hidden, and then you simply write the appropriate placeholder:
This way, you will have reduced the height of the form and the user will easily see what to type in each of the fields.
Submit Button Text and Color
Testing different colors and different call-to-action texts is also a very popular type of test to improve conversion. You will find people telling you that one color or another works better, or that the message should be so and so… but our recommendation is to test and confirm what your visitors like the most. This is precisely what we did on one of our websites, testing different button colors and seeing what worked best for us.
In the case of using a plugin like Nelio Forms, which is fully integrated into the block editor, it’s just a matter of having as many forms created as alternatives you want to test, each one with the color, style and button text that you are interested in. To do this, it’s as easy as copying the original form and modifying the button’s characteristics as you would on any page or post.
Information on Data Privacy
Finally, another test you can do with forms is to try different wordings about the privacy of the data you collect and see what impact it has. People don’t want to be spammed so, to build trust, it can help to explicitly highlight that you won’t share any data to third parties.
Try different alternative wording with different styles and analyze the impact that each of the alternatives may have.
Nelio A/B Testing
Native Tests for WordPress
Use your WordPress page editor to create variants and run powerful tests with just a few clicks. No coding skills required.
Conclusion
Today we wanted to share some ideas you can test on pages with contact forms to improve their conversion rates. Remember that, no matter how many recommendations you find, only after performing an A/B test will you know for sure what works best on your website: whether it’s changing the location of the form within the page or testing different form contents, run several tests and see how you can get more leads, subscribers or customers.
If you use native WordPress plugins like Nelio Forms to create forms and Nelio A/B Testing to perform A/B tests, testing pages with forms has never been easier!
Featured image by Robert Anasch on Unsplash.
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