Recently, I was at the Rogers Centre to catch a Jays game. My friends were standing in line for $10 hotdogs so I waited near the concessions and did some people watching. After scanning the crowd for memorable characters, I saw some energetic woo-girls giving away free shirts.
Now, if there’s one thing I love, it’s free stuff. I beelined to the kiosk shouting “Men’s medium!” while calculating the price of my ticket after factoring in the value of a sweet new shirt.
Best. Day. Ever.
I reached out my hand and was given a clipboard full of paperwork. What?? Turns out my sweet new shirt was going to cost me the next 45 minutes of my life filling out forms for a credit card. No thanks!
I learned two things that day. Baseball is still boring, and I will never fill out a form that takes more than 15 seconds—offline or online. So, what are companies supposed to do when they depend on sign-ups and registrations to fill their funnel?
Use two-step forms!
Two-step forms are perfect for increasing engagement. When you integrate them with retargeting and email, they’re amazing for generating and nurturing leads.
Capture the critical information first
Ask for the customer’s email address. Nothing more. People are busy, they don’t have all day to fill out forms. You don’t want to scare them away with tons of questions, especially your mobile visitors. An email address is a quick, easy ask, and arguably the most important data to capture. You can later use your abandon list (those who entered their email but failed to complete the second page of the form) for reminder emails.
Save the rest for page two
This is where you ask the rest of your questions. People still hate long forms, but at this point, you can afford to lose the customer because you’ve already grabbed their email address in Step 1.
Sounds pretty simple, but there’s a lot happening behind the scenes of your form. Before going to market, drop an AdRoll pixel into your landing page to track visitors. This allows you to target leads with ads on social media and other websites. By targeting users who visited page 2 of your form but not the completion page, you’re giving leads the opportunity to revisit your form at their own convenience.
Maybe retargeting doesn’t apply to my free t-shirt situation, but the woo-girls could still improve their pitch. Ditch the scary form and just grab my email. Follow up later so I can register when I have time – like when my Uber gets stuck in that post-game traffic jam. There are plenty of tools like Pardot, HubSpot and MailChimp that automate emails, handle lists, and make bulk messaging super simple. You can set up a workflow that automatically triggers a reminder email 2-3 days after a user shares their email but doesn’t finish the form. Again, it comes back to giving customers the ability to register at their convenience.
We’ve had great results using two-step forms. Try them out in your next campaign and I’m sure it’ll be a real home run.
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