Using Website Forms to Drive Phone Calls

Did you know that they way your company designs contact forms on its website influences whether a prospective customer will follow up with a phone call? The only problem is figuring out which type of form prompts them to take action and which type of form they’re more likely to ignore. It’s the standard A/B principal of testing both short and long contact forms to determine which ones bring the most phone calls and ultimately sales.

You also need to know the type of information you should collect from a prospective customer to ensure the best results and how to go about including them on your company website. The founder and lead conversion scientist at the company Conversion Sciences has studied these questions in-depth. The market research he conducted tells the rest of us how to create and implement website forms to generate the most customer follow-up.

Don’t Fear the Long Form

It’s common for marketing departments to hesitate or even avoid placing a long form on the company’s website and ask customers to complete it. The forms are often overwhelming and not at all user-friendly. If your company’s primary goal is to get visitors to your website to complete and submit their contact information, you might want to skip the long form.

However, long forms with many questions to answer tend to work well when it comes to call optimization. Conversion Sciences ran several tests to determine whether website visitors followed up with a call more frequently after completing a short form, long form, or no form at all. Each type requested the visitor to call the company.

Its surprised the research team to discover that pages containing the longest and most complicated forms resulted in the most phone calls. Even more surprising, calls dropped by 56 percent when companies with long forms completely removed them from the website. It appeared that the more complex the form, the more phone calls the company received.

What seemed to capture people’s attention the most was the invitation to call for more information rather than continue to fill out a long and complicated form. Picking up the phone seemed much easier by comparison. With shorter forms, the website visitors completed and submitted them without making a phone call.

Not having any form at all but still asking website visitors to call the company didn’t work out as well as expected. As the lack of phone calls proved, it was easier for people to ignore this request.  After all the research completed by Conversion Science, it comes down to the fact that longer website forms prompt the most calls from visitors.

It’s easy to test this theory for yourself by placing a call to action with a unique call tracking number for every version of form on your website. It’s also important for the call tracking number to be a dynamically inserted number to allow you to assign every caller to the lead source or specific consumer touchpoint.

When it comes to testing the effectiveness of website forms, you can’t afford to be without tracking numbers. If you want to know more about placing long forms on your website or using dynamically inserted numbers, please contact us at Call Sumo.