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Forms are an essential feature on any website. They are versatile, carry out different functions, and your audience expects to see at least a contact form on your site.
A form is a vehicle that helps grow your business in many ways. Need some evidence?
Here are just a few form statistics that showcase how powerfully forms can support and drive your business success.
- 50% of marketers claim that their website forms are their biggest sources of leads
- 74% of companies use web forms to generate leads
- Using a quiz-like form to capture your audience’s details can triple conversions.
- Multi-step forms can lead to 300% more conversions
- The mean conversion rate for online forms sits at approximately 21.5% although this varies based on the industry
Sounds impressive, right?
With more and more businesses going online due to the current pandemic, there’s a real need for practical and helpful features on your website.
Let’s check out the different ways you can use forms and grow your business in 2021.
Contact Forms
People expect to find a contact form on your website. They intentionally look for one when they want to contact you.
A good contact form provides your site visitors with the right number of fields and also leaves a success message when the contact form has been submitted.
You need to offer an attractive form that’s user-friendly and also leaves users confident that their message to you is going through.
Small interactions like these go a long way toward building trust and a relationship with your audience.
So, make sure that you create your contact form and make it easily accessible through your About Us page. Also, add it to other frequently visited pages and on your menu bar and in footers.
Top Tip for making your contact form: Use as few fields as possible to avoid form abandonment and to boost conversions.
Lead Generation
Lead generation is probably the most significant activity that a business can do to create conversions. This means that your lead generation tools need to be reliable and effective.
Forms act as the primary tool that makes or breaks your conversion rates.
It needs to be simple yet attractive. And it should also be easy for you to work with. A form will help you convey your value proposition in an effective manner that leads to conversions.
Your audience’s desire to give their valuable personal information will depend on
- Your copy or content marketing message
- The number of fields they have to fill
- What your value proposition is
- Whether it’s mobile responsive
Also, a form needs to deliver the collected information to your platform of choice. Email marketing still holds the top place for making conversions. Your form tool is the gateway through which you build your email list. A form that integrates with email marketing platforms and CRM is a potent tool indeed.
A quick tip to boost conversions with forms: Make your forms conversational. Conversational forms work by presenting a field one page at a time. They are interactive and create the impression that your user is actually communicating in a more human way.
Get User-Generated Content
Building content is essential but challenging. You have to come up with new ideas and it’s not an activity that you can scale.
But a great way to get an endless source of content is to simply ask your audience to create it for you. Getting guest posts from notable people in your field will also help you create quality content.
A form will help you automate the task of collecting user-generated content. You can build your form so that it allows users to submit blog posts to your WordPress site. Create fields for post titles, the main content, and other details. If you want to get submissions with formatting then create a button that allows users to upload a file.
This ability to gather written content from external users is also a great way to get entries for a writing competition or as an idea-generation tool.
By using a form tool in this way, you won’t just get content for your site, you’ll also build a relationship with an interested audience.
Collect Payments
A great form plugin for your WordPress site will make it unnecessary for you to get more tools for collecting payments. You can simply build a form to sell a product, a service, or to ask for donations.
All your users have to do is to fill in the right details, choose their preferred payment option, and buy. How awesome is it to be able to get paid through a WordPress form!
This type of form plus payment feature can be very helpful if your core business is not an eCommerce one. If you have a few products to sell or wish to ask for a donation or for any other reason, a form can help you charge customers and collect money securely.
Create Surveys, Polls, and Feedback Forms
Feedback from internal and external stakeholders in your business is essential. You need to get regular feedback for many reasons:
- To gauge the wellbeing of your employees
- Find problems in your business and what improvements you need to make
- Learn about customers’ experiences at key touchpoints and to improve their journey with your brand
- To generate ideas
- Show your employees and customers that you’re listening, which will boost trust
- Get feedback from external stakeholders like board members or trustees
- Generate data for creating reports, studies, and white papers
A form tool that is versatile and allows you to carry out Net Promoter Score surveys and Polls is essential. You’ll get quantifiable data to help you make changes that lead to positive customer experiences.
When integrated with email marketing services and other tools, you can use them to automate getting data and even processing it.
Valuable data will help you grow your business and see where you’re falling short or where you can leverage what’s working.
Register Event Attendees
When you’re hosting an online event like a webinar, you’ll need a tool that allows users to sign up. This tool also needs to send out automatic emails with information about the event such as the timing and a link to access the event.
If you’re charging for your event, then you need to automate collecting payments for it. Once the user has paid for the event, they should immediately receive an email with the invoice for their purchase. Can a form tool help? You bet it can!
Form tools are ideal for managing event registrations. You can use the same form features such as fields and payment integrations to set up your event registration form. You now also have a lead generation tool that you can use to nurture your event attendees into paying customers.
Get Contest Entries
One of the best ways to get engagement without a great deal of expense is to create a contest. Contests build a lot of positive emotions such as excitement and anticipation. For your audience, it’s essentially a risk-free proposition where they’re able to get something for free. All they have to do is participate and create content.
Another benefit of a contest is that it can help your social media post go viral. People are more likely to share something that creates emotions.
So, do make contests and giveaways a frequent part of your marketing strategy to build your social media following and to drive more traffic to your site.
If you need to create more elaborate giveaways that include social media integrations, then it’s helpful to use a giveaway plugin for WordPress.
Create Social Proof
Building social proof for your business is one of the most important activities you should perform from the very beginning. This is especially true if you’re a new or small business and don’t have a recognizable brand.
People are unlikely to trust you or buy from you when they don’t know anything about your business. And your own marketing communication will influence them only a little.
What can you do to build trust fast?
You can build social proof.
Do this by building a form for user reviews and testimonials. A good form building tool will not only allow you to accept written reviews but will also have a star-rating option.
When your audience sees that you have real customers giving positive reviews and ratings, they’ll trust you sooner. Social proof, along with other marketing activities, will help you increase your conversion rate.
Conclusion
Forms are incredibly versatile tools that are a must for any business to have a functioning website today. A good form plugin can serve as an all-in-one tool that makes it unnecessary for a small business to subscribe to SaaS products.
It’s vital to invest in a great form tool that has all the features you need to carry out different marketing activities. When choosing one, ensure that it integrates with other key platforms such as CRM tools and email marketing services.
We’ve shown you several ways that forms can help boost your business in 2021. Check out the suggestions given here and apply them to your business to see it grow.
