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7 Reasons No One is Filling Out Your Lead Form

You spent so much time figuring out exactly what information you needed from potential customers. You spent a ton of money on ad campaigns making sure they saw the form.  And you really need a lot of those potential customers to fill it out so you don’t look like an idiot.

So why aren’t they filling it out?

Because you made the form all about you.

The good news, you are not alone. Our agency sees this all the all time. The better news, once you know what the problems are, they are easy to fix.

Here are the 7 biggest reasons no one is filling out your lead form.

#1 You didn’t give a clear benefit for why the user would want to fill it out

It’s clear why you want the user’s contact information. But why would they want to give it to you? There could be a lot of reasons. A first time discount. Updates on upcoming sales. A newsletter with the keto recipe of the day. Whatever it is, make the benefit clear and compelling.

#2 You are asking how they found you

If you’re thinking “But I gotta know how they found me!” well, I’ll tell you the answer: The internet.  How helpful was that? A few may even say “TV,” which is interesting since you don’t run any commercials. Almost no one really remembers exactly how they found you. So quit bothering the user with this self-serving question. What you really need to do is  track your ads correctly and check your analytics. That will give you much more accurate and quantifiable information.

#3 You are asking for way too much information

Yes, it would be nice to know the user’s address, their age, their gender, their income and their budget. And you can ask all those questions once you have their main contact information. But to ask all those things upfront is purely for YOUR benefit, not theirs. Only ask what you really truly need to know initially. Remember, the majority of people are filling this out on their phone and every additional field (the boxes the user fills out with information) is one more reason not to fill it out. If you have their contact information, and they are truly interested, you can get all that information later.

#4 You never filled out the form on your phone

Speaking of mobile…what may be easy to do on the desktop can be a big pain in the tochis on the phone. Or the fields may look really squirrelly and the whole form may be formatted awkwardly. Make sure when you design a form that it looks good and functions well on an iPhone and Android.

I discussed this in depth in a previous post, 5 Biggest Mobile Landing Page Fails.

#5 You’re using all the defaults from a template

If all your potential customers are in the US or at least 99.9% then why are you even asking about what country the user is from? And if you really must ask, why don’t you have the US at the very top of the list?  Why make the user scroll all the way down to the United States? It’s because you (or your designer) were too lazy to modify the defaults on some outdated template for forms. That same template also defaulted to include fax number, home number and office number. Fax number?!

#6 The submit button is hard to find

If a user is going to take the trouble to fill out your form, make it stupid easy to find and click on the submit button. Sometimes designers don’t want something glaringly obvious because it looks tacky. So they make it small and subtle, and place it off to the side. Puh-leeze. It doesn’t have to have animated sparkles on it but that submit button needs to be uber easy to find and click on, especially on mobile.

#7 You’re not tracking the forms correctly

Perhaps a lot of people are filling out your forms but it looks like zero because you are not tracking them correctly. You should know how many people are landing on the form page, how many are filling them out, where the forms are going, and how they are being followed up with. It can’t happen, however, if you don’t have the correct coding to track everything and have tripled checked the forms are going to the right place. The good news, it’s incredibly easy to do thanks to a bit of code you can put on the form and the nice thank you page that comes up once the user submits the form. That way you can see the percentage of users that filled it out once they saw the form. As for where the forms go after they are filled out, they can be sent to someone’s inbox or into your CRM (Customer Relationship Management), e.g. Salesforce.

Without proper tracking, you’re wasting your money. And isn’t making money why you wanted people to fill out your forms in the first place?

Got other questions about forms? Contact us.