Whenever we start a new landing page optimization project we like to start out by checking out all the other sites in the same industry/niche market. It helps us to see what else is out there and gets us inspired to see what the competition is doing (and not doing) these days. This week we focused on form pages for auto loan lead generation campaigns.
We’ve received many requests to make more detailed comments and give example ideas for these landing page inspiration posts. Starting with this post, we’ll break down our landing page optimization reviews into multiple posts. In this series we’ll look at 3 auto loan websites, and will post separately over the next few weeks.
You haven’t made a sale yet!
A big problem with most form pages is that people forget to keep selling their product or service to the customer. Many users will get to a form page and say “ah-yeesh, guhhhhh, see-ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya!” and bounce. You can help prevent this by continuing your sales pitch from your landing page. The form page is a great place to use customer testimonials and well-known trust logos such as McAfee, as well as what’ll THEY will get (Benefits).
Use the copy on the form page to remind your customer of the benefits that your product or service will give them. The last thing you want is to have a customer back out of a sale because they have lost interest due to a lack of information or having not been fully convinced.
At the top of this form, there is a “1-2-3” graphic. Not very motivating. If you gotta have a “1-2-3 step” form (I would debate heavily that you do NOT need to), at least put a little extra subtext that conveys: This form will be worth your time.
You might think that everyone loves the crazy complex forms the DMV makes everyone fill-out in line, and you figure, “Hey, every time I go to the DMV, I see a whole lotta people filling out those crazy, complex, suicidal-thought-producing forms… It’ll work for our site.” Sure, there’ll be some people that will file lock-step behind whatever you put in front of them, but there are actually a good number of people that say “No way!” It would be good to design forms for the 99.247% of the people that do not have sadomasochistic tendencies.
One note on the use of trust logos. Although we have seen trust logos lose their ability to radical bump up conversions (they’ve become ubiquitous), and this site played it smart by not only putting those trust logos on their page, they put it at consistently prime locations. We generally recommend placing trust logos near the CTA (Call to action) buttons or near highly sensitive personal information.
Freebies = More Conversions
Anytime you can offer something special (that they would want) to your visitors as a reward for taking an action, that is pretty sure to help. Discounts, free “insider” information, tips and tricks, etc. are always nice bonuses that help people feel they’ll get a little extra for taking action on your site.
FederalAutoLoan.com even gives a free offer on the form page to further drive the idea that the customer is getting a great product. High fives and a nice “attaboy” for that little add-on. Good way to add a little extra incentive and to differentiate you from the other sites.
Make It Readable
So, which is easier for you to read:
My website visitors all have 20/20 vision, so I save space by making the text really small. Imma sew smahrt.
I consider the average user may not be able to easily read small print, so I’ll make the page longer before I even think about making my site visitors put their face 2 inches from the screen to read.
OK, extreme example, but it is relevant. This particular site is not a worst offender, but at 11px (11 pixels), that’s definitely below the minimum size that we recommend using. We recommend for “small print” to be a minimum on 12px, period. For some of the sites we optimize for clients, we even go to 14px for long form labels. Sounds extreme, but in our tests it makes a difference.
Misc. Changes – Too Many To Count, Oh My!
Oh crap. I’m tired, way to many problems on this site, but I must mention a few more. I need to go to the bathroom, I’ll be right back.
I’m back. (Yes, I washed my hands.)
Let’s run down just a few more problems here:
1. Steps 1-2-3
At the top the show it takes 3 steps, but what are those steps? Nobody knows. This may be because they know the next 2 steps may tick people off, and so they don’t show it. (Just incase you’re wondering, the other 2 steps are Employment Info and Financial Info) But often times letting them know is better than letting the user wonder and get filled with fear of what’s to come.
2. What phone number should you collect? Yikes what a crazy question.
I can tell you without a doubt, that people are fleeing from this page when they see this, because they made the form have no right answer for people without a cell phone or people without a landline at home. We are going to make a separate post on this one for more detailed analysis. What I would guess is that this site is a lead generator/aggregator and is required to have to phone numbers, so what do you do?
Short answer: Make it primary and secondary phone fields, and make the secondary phone NOT required. (If possible, otherwise make a note, use same number in both if you do not have another phone number).
Why is this one important? There are more than 25% of all people in the U.S. that no longer have a “home phone”, meaning they only have a cell phone. And 15% of the population don’t have a cell. That’s 40% of your visitors saying “How do I answer this impossible question?” Since you are not a site for brain teasers, use a different solution.
3. Auto-Tabbing nightmare. Argh!
On every field on the form, except the phone fields, you must tab or click to get to the next field. However, on the phone field they decided to have some fun and “mix it up on the dance floor, yeah baby. Yeehaw.” Not fun. Change-ups are for baseball not long complicated forms.
We recommend requiring tabbing all the way through all fields. In other words, STAY CONSISTENT. If you want to get a little fancy, use JavaScript to automatically tab to the next field in only ONE condition, that they keep typing. And only for the sequence of of area code to prefix, and prefix to the last four digits, nothing else. (Again, we’ll do a more detailed blog post on this one).
Please post any comments on other elements that could be changed to improve these pages. There is still a LOT there to have some fun with! 😉
To see our comments, just rollover the images and our good/try notes will popup.
Would you like to have one of our conversion rate optimization experts review your site? Just click here to contact us today and learn how we can drastically increase your website conversion rate for no money up front, and backed by our guarantee!
Good post. I was wondering what you meant by: “If you gotta have a “1-2-3 step” form (I would debate heavily that you do NOT need to)…”
Typically (in my tests, anyway), having an extremely long form works much worse than organizing into 3 steps. Do you have an example of your thoughts on this?
We might need to save this question for a future blog post (and include some data, rather than us shouting generalities). However, here’s some ANECDOTAL information (hate to say “data”, as I am not including any actual stats). But so far, most (>90%) of the time that we get a long multi-page process form from a client to optimize, it almost always ends up becoming 1 page (or 2 at most).
In the past we would try ever so diligently to increase conversions on multi-page forms (by keeping them multiple pages), but it naturally would morph into a single LONG page over time. And some of our clients’ forms are very long forms. From a design point of view, it seems it would be better to be a multi-page form, in keeping with the mantra we often spout: “above the fold”. But we always try to let the results tell us what works, and a super-mega-majority of the time it would go the one pager direction (or at least fewer pages).
But if you’ve found multi-page works better, then that is the correct answer! 😉 Let the data tell you what works.
Thanks again for visiting, reading and commenting!
Great post, can’t wait to read the rest of the series. FYI, the url in paragraph #9 is incorrect.
FederalAutoLoans.com should be FederalAutoLoan.com
Thanks Ted! Fixed.
I agree totally with your rollover comments above.
The form still does look scary in its current form so i’d challenge a couple of things:
– does your customer really need to get postal address as well as email address? will they be communicating via the post as well as electronically? if the answer is “for the database” then maybe that’s worth challenging as you’d remove a couple of fields
– same for 2 telephone numbers : do you really need both? Do people still use both in the US? Here in Europe you could get away with just “telephone number where we can contact you” That would save you another field and more vertical space
– seems to be a lot of vertical space wastage at the top of the page – can you not put the title inside the progress tracker so that step one becomes “step 1 – Personal Information” ?
– the reassurance logos look a bit strange underneath the cta button, as if they are there to rubber stamp the sending of the form: should they not be further up the page?
– i think the book cover needs some “sexing up” graphically : the page before you get here is very well done, and the book looks a bit out of place here – why not put a photo of a car/person on it to humanise? In its current form im not sure anyone is going to be interested in it, even if it is free
Regards, and good luck with the page 🙂
Paul
Great suggestions. There is definitely a LOT of low hanging fruit still on the page for sure.
One note on the 2 phone numbers. That should always be some of the first questions when working on a new conversion project, “Is this field REALLY necessary?”. (Obviously you’ve done this before 😛 ). Since sites like this are generally lead gen, often times they are required by some of the lead buyers to have specific fields, and this generally is one of those requirements made from someone down the line. I would also recommend instead a “Best Number” type of field instead of 2 numbers, but usually this is something a lead generator will never be able to get around.
Again, thanks for the great comments!
I dont know, in case the only problem is that there are 2 required fields for phone #s, i would suggest finding a second alternative customer, which is what we do in this case (its easier to find someone to buy leads than actually generating leads, at least here in the Czech Rep.), and just segment the leads. Losing leads just because of one form field is just stupid.
Let’s say you have 3 lead buyers, and 2 of them require these 2 numbers (for whatever reason). And let’s say you’re doing 1,500 leads per day (not a large number for some clients). And let’s say you tell those 2 lead buyers (who happen to buy 1,000 lead a day) that you are no longer going to follow their requirements, and only collect 1 number. There walks away 30,000 lead purchases a month. That’s a LOT.
IMHO, we are professional conversion experts, and our job is to make their campaigns ROCK and ROLL to stratospheric levels, within their (sometimes seemingly stupid) requirements.
I might agree it doesn’t make sense, but sometimes you just have to go with the flow. The Client is King, and the King is not always right. 😉
I think being able to get yourself an estimate right from the landing page will make things interesting when it comes to loan. Nobody would want to read stories all they would want is an estimate and the procedure of how they will be able to get that loan.