7 Steps to Design a Signup Form

Even if you're a genius in directing traffic to your site, traffic alone won't make you any money.

If your visitors leave without making a purchase, your traffic is as useful as a fork is to eat ice cream. And unfortunately, only a very low percentage of online visitors buy something on their first visit.

That's why you will have to make sure to draw them back to your site, establish a trusting relationship and remind them of the great products you're selling.

How would you do all this?

Use The Power Of The Signup form. The signup form is one of the most critical elements of your website because it gives you the tools to turn a visitor into a prospect.

The moment visitors complete a signup form, they give you the permission and the ability to start a dialogue - a long-term relationship that will hopefully translate into sales down the road. That's why it's so important to design a signup form that attracts your visitors enough so that give you their name and email address.

It needs to offer value and create trust. Designing a signup form might not be as exciting as creating animated Flash movies or experimenting with different website designs, but it is lot more critical to get right.

Signup forms are a very important online marketing tool and usually form the gateway through which revenue is generated. We've seen signup rates go up by 8% just with simple tweaks to the design of our signup forms.

We'll share these tweaks with you in this tactic and show you how to design a killer form.

Designing Forms that Convert Well

1. Keep Your Forms Short and To the Point Shorter forms generally get higher completion rates. So strip your forms down and ask for the absolute minimum amount of information you need from your visitors. For subscription forms this is often just a first name and email address. Sometimes you might want to ask additional questions to gauge customer views or collect marketing data. In this case you need to be very careful. Is the additional information worth the drop in sales you might create from expanding the length of your form?

2. Mention Your Privacy Policy People are often reluctant to give out their email on the internet. Stating a privacy policy in simple terms can often boost form completion rates.

3. Watch Your Submit Buttons Be careful not to create any obstacles to the completion of a subscription. This is an unwise thing to do. How often would one need to actually clear a form this simple and start over? The problem with the clear button is that a significant percentage of users who are in a hurry will click on that button, see their data get lost, and then give up in frustration. Remove all CLEAR or RESET buttons. They don't help and can create problems when clicked on by accident. To improve the form above we would also suggest renaming the SUBMIT button to something more meaningful. Never stick with the default text "Submit." Change it to something like:
·"Subscribe Now for Free Training"
·"Get Your Free Report"
·"Claim Your Free Audio"

4. Make Your Form STAND OUT Often, your form constitutes the core of your most wanted response on a page. In this case the entire goal of the page is to get a visitor to sign up. For pages like this the form should stand out like a zebra on a subway train. It must draw the user's attention.

5. Use Multiple Pages to Boost Signups on Longer Forms Often, you may need to collect more data than just a visitor's first name and email address. Yet, adding more fields to a form usually causes a drop in signup rates. The way to do both is to have a 2-step signup. In the first step, you request only a first name and email address. In the second step, you can ask for any additional data.

6. Always Place Your Form Above the Fold The form should always be on the top fold of your web page. This is the portion of the screen that appears in the average visitor's browser window without having to scroll down. Make sure the entire form is visible above the fold and that the submit button does not fall below the fold on lower resolution monitors.

7. Embed the Form in Multiple Sections of Your Copy In addition to placing the form above the fold, be sure to also place the form at the bottom of the page. It's a good idea to place the form within several sections of the page copy.