You have one goal with a registration form — to get someone to sign up, whether it’s for an event, webinar, newsletter, free trial, or resource. Capturing user information is an essential part of achieving this goal. If you want to get the most sign-ups possible, you need to make sure your registration form is optimized for submissions.
No matter the type of registration form, it’s important to focus on providing a seamless and engaging experience that also captures essential user data. The less friction your form has, the greater the conversions!
5 Must-Haves for Registration Forms
Tired of falling short of your registration form conversion goals? Following these best practices to help reduce form abandonment, enhance user experience, and ultimately increase form submissions.
1. Keep It Focused
Your registration form should have one clear purpose. Are you collecting newsletter registrations or new account signups? Be sure the questions you ask directly correspond to the purpose of your form.
For example, a newsletter registration may only require name and email fields. Account signups will need more data, such as payment and billing information. Too many required fields or overly detailed information requirements may overwhelm users, but they also create security risks.
Follow data privacy best practices to ensure form security:
- Only collect the data you need
- Add security measures such as SSL/TLS
- Provide clear privacy notices
- Stay compliant with regulations
2. Clearly State the Value
Along with a purpose, your registration form should also have a value proposition. Users are increasingly concerned about sharing their information online and how organizations use the data they collect. Users need to understand the value they will gain by completing your registration form.
Don’t let them question the significance of sharing their data by not clearly offering a comparable benefit. This may include time-sensitive benefits such as early-bird pricing, access to premium content or discounts, or additional free resources.
3. Use Real-Time Validation
As you build your registration form, remember that this process should be as seamless and clear as possible. Will your form include required fields, such as name, email, or password? It’s a best practice to provide immediate feedback for validation or errors. This will prevent frustration by addressing errors early on and guiding users toward the correct input.
Common examples of form fields that benefit from real-time validation include:
- Email Address: Ensure that users add their email in the correct format (e.g., containing “@” and a valid domain).
- Password: Ensure that users meet the requirements for creating a strong password, such as a combination of numbers, letters, and symbols.
- Phone Number: Ensure that users enter their phone number in the format you need (adding formatting hints or placeholder text will ensure correct input).
When displaying error messages, use color, symbols (such as an asterisk), and text to clearly state why the error occurred and how a user can fix it. It’s important for accessibility to include written feedback as well as visuals.
4. Enable Autofill
If you already know certain information about a user, autofill capabilities can help further streamline the registration form process. This can include pre-filling data from existing records currently in your CRM. It could also autocomplete for address fields. Autofill helps minimize user effort because they don’t have to enter repetitive information or information you already have in your database.
Pro Tip: FormAssembly’s powerful Salesforce Dynamic Picklists Feature makes it easy to create drop-down menus in your forms that pull options directly from Salesforce picklists or lookup results. Your users will be spared having to manually input data, which reduces errors and inconsistencies. Since users select options from predefined lists, they are limited to valid, always up-to-date choices.
5. Indicate Progress
Long registration forms can be overwhelming, especially if they are complex. But alleviating this overwhelm and setting expectations is easy. Simply incorporate clear indicators of how much progress a user has made. If your form has multiple steps or pages, be sure a user is clear about the current step and the total number of steps or pages involved.
Consider adding a visual progress bar to the top of your registration form. Provide back buttons to allow users to check or change their inputs before submitting. Add a save and resume button, so that users can come back to a form later without losing any information.
Start Optimizing All Your Forms for Success
Have more than registration forms on your website? You’ll want to be sure these forms are optimized to improve conversion rates as well. Learn more tips and best practices in our Ultimate Guide to Web Forms or by downloading our ebook.
