4 Best Practices for Web Forms
Posted 06-16-2011 at 09:07 PM by jaiganeshv
You’ve got your site up. You set up your email campaign. You open the web form generator to start your sign up form….now what?
There’s a lot of talk about best practices for email marketing, and they cover everything from list building to messages. It can be hard to sort through them all to find best practices for one component of your campaign, such as how you should design your web form.
So given the broad spectrum best practices cover, you’re probably wondering: what are those best practices for designing your web form? We’ve got four of the big ones to share with you.
1. Grab Your Site Visitors’ Attention
2. Make the Purpose Clear
Another contributing factor for a usable web form is a clear purpose. To establish this, the form needs to answer four questions:
What is this?
Why should I sign up?
How do I sign up?
When will I get the emails?
3. Only Ask For What You Need
Including too many fields can be overwhelming. While you may want all the information you can get, you don’t want the size of your form to scare away potential subscribers or have them abandon the form halfway through.
4. Test the Form
Your form isn’t complete unless it works properly, so you’ll need to test it out. Don’t leave this step out, because you don’t want your new subscribers getting an error message after they fill out the form you’ve worked so hard on.
Once you’re happy with how it looks and what it’s asking for, you’ll need to publish it on your website. From there, you can enter your own information to check out how it works.
How do you know it works? This is what happens:
The thank you page acknowledges the email address has been submitted successfully.
The subscriber knows they’re going to check their email in order to confirm.
The subscriber receives the requested information after confirming.
It’s working? Congratulations! You have a web form that follows best practices.
Aweber Email Marketing Takes Your Business to Next Level
There’s a lot of talk about best practices for email marketing, and they cover everything from list building to messages. It can be hard to sort through them all to find best practices for one component of your campaign, such as how you should design your web form.
So given the broad spectrum best practices cover, you’re probably wondering: what are those best practices for designing your web form? We’ve got four of the big ones to share with you.
1. Grab Your Site Visitors’ Attention
2. Make the Purpose Clear
Another contributing factor for a usable web form is a clear purpose. To establish this, the form needs to answer four questions:
What is this?
Why should I sign up?
How do I sign up?
When will I get the emails?
3. Only Ask For What You Need
Including too many fields can be overwhelming. While you may want all the information you can get, you don’t want the size of your form to scare away potential subscribers or have them abandon the form halfway through.
4. Test the Form
Your form isn’t complete unless it works properly, so you’ll need to test it out. Don’t leave this step out, because you don’t want your new subscribers getting an error message after they fill out the form you’ve worked so hard on.
Once you’re happy with how it looks and what it’s asking for, you’ll need to publish it on your website. From there, you can enter your own information to check out how it works.
How do you know it works? This is what happens:
The thank you page acknowledges the email address has been submitted successfully.
The subscriber knows they’re going to check their email in order to confirm.
The subscriber receives the requested information after confirming.
It’s working? Congratulations! You have a web form that follows best practices.
Aweber Email Marketing Takes Your Business to Next Level
Total Comments 0
