Changes to inquiry form to reduce site exits and increase form submissions

Improving Conversions Case Study Part 4 –
Changes to inquiry form to reduce site exits and increase form submissions.

This is Part 4 of the case study to improve conversions on a web site for a software company.

Read the earlier posts:

Part 1 – Adding two “calls to action” to move visitors along to a Conversion Point”.

Part 2 – Moving contact form produces less leads, but higher quality leads.

Part 3 – Deemphasizing a call to action that was performing poorly

Background:
We’re working on a web site for a software company. This company has one key software product along with a number of software “modules” that work with that key product. Most site visitors from search engines and referral sites either land directly on the opening page about this software product or they land on the home page of the site and then visit this page.
In a previous post, part 3, we mentioned that we added the following call to action” about halfway the product page.

The “call to action” opens a Corporate/Product Overview video page. At the bottom of the page, below the video, we added the following call to action:

This call to action leads to an inquiry form. About 10% of the people who view the video click on this link to visit the inquiry form.

Further down on the product page, just after the main body of text, we added the following “call to action”:

The above call to action leads to the same inquiry form page.
Checking Click Tracks Analytics data from Aug 1 to September 18th we see that almost 11% of search visitors to this product page click on the Narrated Video link. Another 6% scroll further down the page and click on the “For more information or to arrange a demo” link.

So we now have about 17% of the search visitors to this product page clicking on a link that directly or indirectly leads to this inquiry form. This inquiry form is now one of the most important conversion points on the site as we deemphasized a call to action that wasn’t converting well (you can read about it in this past post, part 3).

n the past 6 months or so the client has implemented a number of suggestions including reducing the number of required fields, moving optional fields to a section further down on the page, removing a Verify Code Step, and changing the messages at the top of the form.

Let’s check the results.
We’ll use data for about 6 weeks, from Aug 1 to September 18th. During the period 317 total visitors viewed this inquiry form, 142 from search engines (that’s not as much data as I’d like, but enough to see how things are working).

During the period about 20% of all the people who viewed the inquiry form came from the Corporate/Product Overview video page (discussed above).

Overall a little over 50% of the visitors to the inquiry from who reached the site from a search engine either clicked on a link from the key product page or they clicked on the link at the bottom of the Corporate/Product video page to reach the inquiry form.

Excellent, we’ve succeeded in getting significant number of visitors to this inquiry form from the key product page. The other visitors to the inquiry form came from similar links around the web site.

In the following chart we see that the percentage of total site visitors and visitors from search engines reaching this inquiry form has more than tripled since we started working on it some months ago –

(Site Visitors that See This Page)

Month	All Visitors	Search Visitors
May	0.5%	0.7%
Jun	0.9%	1.0%
July	2.0%	3.2%
Aug	1.8%	2.9%

In the following chart we see that the percentage of Site Exits from this page has dropped from the highs of over 50% to about 33%.

(Exits From This Page)

Month	All Visitors	Search Visitors
Mar	41.1%	60.7%
Apr	33.3%	54.5%
May	30.2%	57.7%
Jun	29.0%	44.2%
July	29.2%	34.3%
Aug	26.7%	33.3%

Before we started working on the site and this inquiry form page very few people were reaching it and few of them were submitting the form. Now about 6.4% of search visitors to this inquiry form page (and 4.8% of all site visitors) are filling out the form and submitting it.

That’s a great improvement, but that still means the majority of people do not fill out the form.

I think we’re improved the form submission rate about as much as we can. A Privacy statement or explanation about how the contact information will be used might help a bit. We might improve the form submission rate a bit more by going to a multi stage process where some of the data is not collected until after the visitor has submitted a few fields of information, but I doubt this will make a dramatic difference.

Instead, as we did on another form (see Deemphasizing a call to action that was performing poorly) I think we want to give more conversion options to visitors to this page.

We already added the following “call to action” at the top of the page –

If you would like to contact a reseller in your area click here.

This brings visitors to a reseller locator map (we’ll look at this call to action soon). 4% of visitors to this inquiry form page (and a little over 5% of visitors that came from search engines) are clicking on this link now.

I’m going to suggest that we highlight this link a bit and add a Call Us now link.

Summary
Over the past 3-4 months the percentage of site visitors and visitors from search engines reaching this inquiry form has more than tripled.

Over the past 3-4 months the percentage of Site Exits from this page has dropped from the highs of over 50% to about 33%

Again great improvement, but the majority of people do not fill out the form. So we’ll make some suggestions to add and highlight more conversion options from this inquiry form page and see if we increase conversions.

For more information:

Information on Web Analytics and Click Tracks

Improving Conversion Rates with Conversion Point Architecture