10 Non-Negotiable Tips to Designing a User-Friendly Lead Capture Form

In this e-commerce world, it’s equally essential for a brand to maintain an impressive web presence by providing potential customers with an optimum experience. The primary and most common ways to achieve this goal is building a seamless UX.

It’s all about designing every aspect of the website in such a way that visitors find it quick, convenient to use, hassle-free to navigate and get the required information easily. But can you limit UX to these few areas? No, it is connected with every other aspect as well. Even the lead capturing forms of your site should have an amazing UX in order to convert more visitors into customers.

With all these advanced technologies and tools that promise to enhance the overall UX of websites, as per the report generated by Marketing Charts, building a perfect design is still a major challenge for e-commerce professionals and marketers. Let’s explore the details in the image given below:

You might have put serious efforts into optimizing the overall look, visual appeal, and navigation of your online portal. But lead capturing forms get ignored most of the time. But that doesn’t mean that these elements aren’t significant to enhance the performance of the website.

As per MarketingSherpa, 56% of marketers believe optimizing form logic to have a major impact on website performance. But why and how do we achieve this? Let’s look into details.

What Is Lead Capturing Form UX & Why Does It Matter?

Building a seamless form UX is all about concentrating on how visitors interact with each and every aspect of your form. It’s almost mandatory to design UX that makes the form convenient, professional, easy to use, and accessible for the visitors. A good form UX can ultimately help you in improving conversions.

Now, how can these forms with efficient UX encourage visitors to get involved with your brand? Basically, these forms are incorporated to gather personal details from your visitors such as their names, email addresses, contact numbers, etc to help nurture leads and to grow your sales pipeline.

But what would happen if the user finds your form to be:

1. Complicated and confusing
2. Visually unappealing
3. Difficult to understand
4. Too many unorganized fields
5. Vague and monotonous
6. Time-consuming
7. Purposely gathering credentials which aren’t necessary at that point in time

Simply, in all the above-mentioned situations a user will not be going forward in conducting any type of business with you. But all these problems can be easily addressed by focusing on developing a seamless UX for the lead capturing form.

In words of Mona Elesseily (VP – Online Marketing Strategy at Page Zero Media), “Collecting information from prospects with your form is a negotiation, a process of easing into a relationship — and not a sudden event.”

This statement is sufficient for justifying the fact that lead capturing forms have to be designed cautiously. They can’t be built perfectly overnight. And, when developing a simple yet effective lead capturing form you have to pay attention to its UX. A good form UX can benefit your website in several ways some of which are listed below:

1. It allows you to leave a good and lasting impression on visitors
2. Enhances the accessibility and usability through which visitors can complete and submit forms easily
3. Both 1 and 2 will let you provide the visitors with a positive experience and ultimately convert more leads

How To Design A User-Friendly Lead Capturing Form For Your Website?

After getting familiar with the significance of good form UX, now it’s the time to explore different ways in which it can be achieved. So, let’s take a look at top ten tips to help you build successful and thoughtfully-designed web forms for your site.

1. Keep It Short & Sweet

When developing a lead capturing form, the very first motive should be building it as simply as possible. There is no need to incorporate unwanted stuff such as questions, images, words, characters, or fields.

This will help you in keeping your form simple and visitors won’t be getting overwhelmed with a lot of information. In addition, it will let visitors complete and submit their forms quickly without much struggling to identify what’s important.

2. Embrace A Mobile-Friendly Approach

There is a huge customer base who uses their smartphones to surf through sites, filling forms, and purchasing products online. This is why you should focus on making the forms mobile-friendly.

This design will allow your visitors to have a positive and consistent experience with your site irrespective of the device they’re using to browse it. Pay attention to creating a quality end to end experience for visitors by developing a seamless UX.

3. Implement Autofill & Autocorrect Options

The autofill features help users completing form fields on the basis of common responses fed into the site or the browser in the past. On the other hand, the primary function of autocorrect is to fix invalid responses typed by visitors.

Enabling both these features will simplify and streamline the entire form filling and submitting process. You will be able to save a lot of time for your visitors and ensuring them that the information they’re submitting is accurate.

4. Create A Single Column To Organize The Form Field Layout

Remember to incorporate a single column form layout with all the essential fields in one place. It’s not a good idea to place multiple fields in the same row as it becomes visually confusing. By following a single column form layout, the visitors will be able to flow through the fields at one glance naturally and conveniently.

5. Design Clear & Obvious CTA Buttons

Call to action buttons are crucial for your lead capturing form and this is the reason you should keep them as clear and obvious as possible. Ensure that these buttons are bold and bright so that the visitors can notice them easily. Clear CTA buttons will enhance the accessibility of your form and help visitors in submitting the required information easily.

6. Make Sure To Mark Form Fields As Required vs. Optional

Marking form fields as “required” or “optional” lets your visitors identify important fields quickly. Also, it improves accessibility as visitors will have specific expectations when filling out the form.

This saves their time and ensures that all of them are on the same page in terms of the information they’re submitting. You can do this either by inserting an asterisk next to the required fields or simply by writing “required” or “optional” in a small font subsequently to the field.

7. Make Use Of Inline Fields Labels

These labels are located inside the fields only and make them appear sleek and clean. This is probably the best way to label your fields for your visitors so that they have no confusion while filling and submitting.

8. Incorporate Multi-Step Forms Whenever Required

Such forms are specifically used in situations where there are multiple form fields that can be classified into different categories. Some of these fields are “billing”, “personal”, “shipping”, “payment review”, etc. Organizing form fields in this way make it much more usable and manageable for the visitors. Also, it lets them complete and submit the forms quickly in a hassle-free manner.

9. Include Inline Error Messages

These messages notify visitors to a mistake in their form by stressing on the issue in line with the field in which it’s sited. Also, these messages can provide visitors with ways to correct their errors. This element makes your form look professional and thoughtful.

10. Offer Input Constraints To Limit Responses

In case your form has a long-form text entry box make sure to include input constraints. This will stop visitors to add text beyond a certain word count and prevents you from reading through long responses. Input constraints provide your visitors with certain parameters. They get a clear idea of what’s expected out of them which helps them from wasting time writing lengthy, pointless responses.

Good form UX is a powerful marketing tool to create a positive experience for your visitors. Such forms encourage customers to come back and get engaged with you and your company frequently.