What You Can (and Should) Ask for on Your Landing Page Forms

Your潜在客户生成形式可以实现或破坏您的在线转换目标。因此，很少有其他页面元素受到的关注与lead-capture form。

In fact,56% of marketers consider optimizing form logic to have a very significant impact on website performance,还有另一个46% consider optimizing their form layout to have a very significant impact as well， 根据营销Sherpa。

So why is the form so vital? Well, it’s basically the entire point of alanding page-- and the entire crux of lead generation! We marketers need our prospects to provide us with their contact information, because once we have that, we can define these people as leads and funnel them into our various marketing campaigns. And the more intelligence you have about the leads in your contacts database -- whether it be personal information, information on their website activity and behavior, or both -- the better you can segment, target, nurture, and effectively market to them. Thus, the better the likelihood that you'll be able to close them as customers!

铅捕获形式的重要性意味着您可以通过大量研究筛选有关潜在客户生成表格的信息。在研究着陆页两年后，我花了很多时间在这些统计数据中。

What I've learned is,there's no hard and fast rule that governs what fields are mandatory for all landing page forms。Instead, marketers need to review their sales and lead generation goals and平衡他们从潜在客户中绝对需要多少信息与这些潜在客户实际上提供的信息的数量。

Seem like a tall order? It really all boils down to thinking strategically about your marketing goals, and making sure your online tools -- such as your lead gen forms -- match those objectives.

Follow these steps to help you determine what information you can (and应该是）要求您的形式。

步骤1：了解页面摩擦

快速思考！您可以让某人同意在六秒钟内给您多少信息？

That's right: You have roughly six seconds from the time a reader visits your site until they decide whether or not to click the back button. While this statistic is most commonly quoted for website optimization, you can also use this rule of thumb to gauge the attention span of people who are deciding to fill out your forms.

So if you have a limited time to grab a visitor’s attention, you want every part of your site doing its job. And to help you do just that, you also need to消除任何摩擦在您的着陆页上。摩擦是您网站的任何元素，令人困惑，分散注意力或给访问者造成压力，这可能会使他们离开您的页面，从而使他们离开您的页面abandon your form。Examples of friction-causing elements include dissonant colors, too much text, distracting website navigation menus, overwhelming the landing page with additional calls-to-action, and … landing page forms with too many fields.

还原形式的长度和adding other friction-reducing elements on your forms such as links to privacy policies or accreditation seals, are great ways to boost conversions. Still, the whole point of landing pages is to drive leads, and so you can't do away with forms entirely. So let's get right into how you can strike the right balance between form length and getting the information you need from your leads ...

步骤2：从表格最佳实践开始

因为很多研究已经进行您应该制作领先的一代形式多长时间，关于最佳形式的长度是大量最佳实践材料。同样，由于每个业务都是不同的，因此您的理想形式长度可能与这些最佳实践略有不同。

The industry baseline varies a bit, but most recommend somewhere between three and seven fields on a landing page form. As you can see inthis chart from Eloqua，引用最多10个字段的平均值，在三个和七个字段之后，总体转换率的下降相当大。

I find this chart somewhat fascinating, if for no other reason because it indicates that some marketers actually ask 16 questions on their landing page forms andstill从中驱动转换。这只是表明那里有一群人有动力获得某些报价和内容，他们愿意提供16件个人信息来获取它！

如您所见，没有单一的规则 - 只是基于人们通常在线行为的指南。请记住，根据您的特定目标，您决定的表单字段数可能会有所不同。对于那些负责产生更多高质量线索的营销人员，他们可能希望使自己的表格更长地淘汰那些不是那对他们提供的东西感兴趣。对于营销人员解决总体领先地位volume，较短的形式引起的摩擦较少可能更有意义。但是稍后再详细介绍...

步骤3：考虑您的所有信息能Ask For

在线数据可能是神奇的，因为每个类似的访问和单击，可以在某个地方的电子表格中跟踪和分类。但是为什么我们首先收集所有这些数据。

那么什么类型的信息能够您在着陆页面上询问吗？任何你想要的。唯一真正的限制可能是您可以在您的中跟踪的字段CRM system。But why would you want to ask 300 questions? What does that do for you?

On landing pages, the goal is to collect information to inform yoursales and marketing策略。有一系列的信息it might make sense to collect, which will help you personalize your content, inform future lead nurturing campaigns, and frame future sales conversations.

For example, on HubSpot's standard lead-capture form for new visitors (see right), we require 10 pieces of information:

• 名
• Last name
• Email address
• Phone number
• bob全站app公司名称
• Website URL
• Number of employees
• Whether their business primarily sells to other businesses (B2B) or consumers (B2C)
• Job role
• Whether they work at a marketing agency

Beyond endemic information, you can see that we also include a few drop-down menus, and a non-mandatory open comments field and check-box opt-in field. Giving prospects the option to mention their biggest marketing challenge is incredibly helpful in informing future sales conversations.

Step 4: Decide What's好的-to-Have vs. What'sMust-有

根据定义，只有一次信息在每个潜在客户形式上绝对必须是强制性的：即，通过电子邮件或电话与人联系的一种方式。除此之外，它成为了直觉的游戏。您的潜在客户愿意提供多少信息以赎回您的报价？这将取决于您提供的内容的价值以及您的前景有多大的动力。换句话说，您的听众认为报价的价值越小，潜在客户愿意填写的表格越少。要提出很多greater perceived value, prospects will be more likely to provide more information. Keep this in mind as you're deciding about form length.

最终，您需要多少个表单字段确实是一个数学问题。您要求的信息越少，摩擦就越少，因此您获得的转换越多。更长的表格可能令人生畏，导致人们避免他们，并且abandon your landing page。但当我们米entioned earlier, the more fields you require, the better quality those leads will be (and the more information you'll have to qualify them). Deciding how many fields to include on your landing pages should be a balance between how much information you reallyneedfrom your leads, and how many net new leads you need to drive into your funnel.

仔细考虑您的公司目标，理想的买家角色以及领导一代bob全站app和销售策略，然后确定哪些领域是“必须”的。对于大多数B2B公司，这应该至少包括三个主要信息：

• Name
• 电子邮件地址
• Job Title

从那里开始，您还有大约两到五个字段在最佳实践告诉我们您会得到戏剧性的转换。取决于您的其余表格，但总的来说，您应该只询问您肯定会使用的信息。添加表单字段，因为您认为他们会很有趣 - 或者因为您可能想使用它们有一天如果您的营销策略发展 - 是浪费空间和关注。如果您要求潜在的生日，他们希望您使用它。

Step 5: Talk to Both Marketing & Sales

又怎样确切地do you decide what additional questions are essential to your lead gen forms? The best approach is to talk to the people who are nurturing and selling to your leads. Since that audience is generally your市场营销和销售teams, a really helpful strategy in developing and optimizing your lead gen forms is to ask the following questions:

• 您的形式的长度是否与营销的主要加属目标（例如数量与质量）保持一致？
• 市场营销想要进行哪些类型的主要培养活动？
• What types of铅智能您的营销团队是否需要从捕获表格中收集segment和个性化他们的营销活动？
• Does Sales have everything they need to properly contact a lead?
• Does Sales have enough details toqualify leads？他们还将包括什么？
• What are Sales' primary deal breakers? Is there a way to further pre-qualify those leads?
• What routinely surprises your sales team? Is there information that would alleviate that?

请记住：在制作太多摩擦之前，您的表格上的空间（和注意力范围）有限，因此您与营销和销售团队的对话应该努力使最重要的数据tidbits结晶，这两个团队都需要做他们的工作。作为奖励，这种开放式交流也是一种很好的方式弥合销售营销差距存在于许多公司。

步骤6：使用智能表格和渐进式分析来填写空白

Right about now, you may be asking questions like, "But do we need to ask the same questions of our leads over and over again if they've already downloaded content from us?" Or, "What if we have an incredibly complicated sales process, and we reallyneedto ask 13 questions in order to know whether people who download our content are a good fit?" (This can, in fact, happen for niche industries such as regulated energy markets or other specific pharmaceutical sales.)

First, I would make sure that you have sufficiently streamlined your processes. Once you’ve done that, you can also look to technologies such asSmart Forms和进行渐进分析以优化您的表格。

Smart Forms, for example, is functionality on your landing pages that remembers visitors who are already in your contacts database. If someone has already converted on one of your landing pages in the past, this means you already have information about that lead, and a Smart Form will autofill information into the fields they've filled out in the past, making the process of filling out your forms less painful. For example, this is what that same form we showed above might look like to a lead we already have in our database:

A lot less daunting -- and less friction-inducing -- isn't it?

Furthermore,progressive profiling technologyallows you to set up dynamic, iterative forms, which allows you to choose which questions appear on a form based on what you already know about a lead. That way, each time a lead fills out a form, you are progressively collecting valuable new information about them while keeping your forms short and easy to fill out -- not squandering the opportunity by asking the same questions over and over.

（对于HubSpot客户，智能表单和渐进式分析都是HubSpot's marketing software。)

Step 7: Test to Optimize Landing Page Conversions

As with most marketing strategies and tactics, the best way to determine which form fields and form lengths work best for your particular business is totest it。正如我之前提到的，确定理想的形式场合是一种平衡行为。真正了解听众会做出什么反应的唯一方法是在您的着陆页面上尝试一下并了解它的发展。

So, go ahead.Experiment with your lead gen forms。看看您的听众是否真的需要一个简短的表格，或者他们是否会在更长的情况下进行转换。

What form length works best for your audience? Which form fields are essential to you?