Landing Pages Best Practices: Why People Won't Fill Out Your Form

Landing pages are widely used to launch webinars, products, and other various offers to persuade visitors to give you some of their contact information. And as we all know, once you have a visitors email address you can communicate with them on a much more personal level, which helps to establish relationships and also encourage them to do what you wish them to do.With landing pages, your prospect has initiated some sort of relationship with you. Your landing page acknowledges this and provides additional information – benefits/features – and a clear path to the next step.

Included below are five common reasons why people won't fill out landing page forms. So, if you want more people to convert on your forms, you should steer clear of these mistakes.

The Form is too Long

You may have a clear landing page for one offer, have it free of distractions and have accurate promotions but still have no one filling out your forms because the form is too long. The length of your landing page form should match what the offer is worth. If the form is really long, there should be a good payoff at the end. Basically, it would be acceptable to have a longer form when someone is filling it out to attend an all-day event. That type of offer is valuable and the price of giving over your information seems cheap in comparison, so your prospects will most likely fill out your form. Conversely, if you had a one-page checklist with that same form length, you would likely have some drop off-- that offer probably is not as valuable as the event.

Your Landing Page is too Generic

If your landing page is just a page on your website that says, "Contact us" on it, you are likely not going to have a high amount of conversions. On a landing page, not having a single compelling and clear reason for filling out the form is a definite way to get people leaving your page. Your landing pages forms should be used to showoff offers like templates, guides, ebooks, consultations and trials; basically, all things that are specific with a single, clear value proposition-- not just a general "get in contact with us" form.

Your Landing Page is Distracting

Visitors can feel overwhelmed if you have too many options on your landing page. With too many options on your landing page, visitors may find an option other than filling out your form to be more enticing-- or they just get overwhelmed and leave the landing page. To get your visitors to fill out your form, you have to eliminate distractions, like offers further down your marketing funnel. Your landing page should exist to get people to fill out a form for a specific offer-- and that's it.

Your Form Is Not Mobile Responsive

One major reason that people may avoid filling out your forms is that your landing page or forms are not mobile friendly. Most of the time, trying to fill out a form on mobile is a pretty trying experience. You struggle, pinching and swiping to try and get form to an appropriate size on your screen. Eventually, you give up filling out the form because it is not worth the trouble. If you are the marketer in that situation, you can do a few things to fix this.

First, you should make sure your landing pages are responsive so they function properly on any device. That's a "must" in today's mobile-connected world. Second, you can create a separate landing page experience for your mobile visitors. For instance, you could try removing forms for mobile visitors all together, replacing it with a social sharing link instead. With either option, the main idea is the same: you want to give mobile visitors a reliable experience on your landing page to help them fill out your form at some point in the sales process.