Forms are often paid less attention during the conversion optimisation process, with the bulk of the focus being UX and UI or personalisation. However, forms are the heart of conversions—whether you’re an eCommerce brand or a lead generation one, forms, in different shapes and styles, give you all the data you need from the customer.

In this sixth post of our CRO Insights series, Alun Lucas, Managing Director of specialised form analytics platform Zuko Analytics, talks to us about the trends in the form optimisation landscape, what you need to focus on when analysing forms, and what’s in the pipeline for Zuko.

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What new trends have you observed in the last year in form optimisation?

The pandemic seems to have driven some interesting trends in user behaviour across forms that Zuko has tracked. The savvy form optimiser should be aware of these possible phenomena. Specifically:

• Less “window shoppers”. With more important things to worry about, people were less concerned with idly browsing through forms with no intention of completing a transaction.
• Lower advertising budgets meant that less “wasteful” traffic that will never convert is being driven to sites. This has led to spikes in overall conversion rate percentages.
• More focused users. During the crisis, people have been making more deliberate and researched decisions and are only reaching forms or checkouts when they are pretty confident they are going to buy.
• Greater attention paid to terms and conditions. The time that users spent reading T&Cs increased fivefold in many cases, especially in the finance and travel sectors. The hypothesis for this is they were looking for Covid-related clauses on cancellation. Businesses that subsequently moved these clauses right to the top of the T&Cs saw a decrease in abandonment at this stage.

Note that these trends were most pronounced at the height of the first 2020 lockdown. They seem to have reduced slightly in 2021, so may not hold in a post-pandemic world.

What do you forecast are going to be key for eCommerce in the next 12 months when it comes to optimisation?

Segmentation.

Optimisation techniques have come on in leaps and bounds over the past decade. However, users are too often treated as an amorphous mass that either convert or don’t convert. It is often only when you dig deeper into individual audience segments that you realise what is going on and you take a leap forward in your optimisation performance. At Zuko, we have seen businesses succeed when looking at the following:

1. Traffic sources: Organic and paid traffic sources often behave very differently and they abandon the process at different stages. Analysis of this can reveal what the differences are, and you can use the insights to adjust the experience accordingly. One of Zuko’s clients raised conversion of paid traffic by 5% through a customised form process for this segment.
2. Product selection: Users searching for different products have varying levels of motivation to complete a form. For example, we see that those buying big-ticket items (such as a car) are prepared to part with a lot of personal data. Whereas those looking to spend less may abandon if asked for something as simple as a phone number. Treating those groups similarly will lead to suboptimal conversions.
3. Custom segments: If you’ve already spent a large amount of time and effort segmenting your audience, you really want to be able to import them into your optimisation tools and see how their behaviour differs in action.

What common mistakes have you seen companies make or challenges you’ve seen them face in the field of form optimisation?

The biggest opportunity we see companies miss out on is when they fail to analyse what happens after the submit button is clicked.

Users who spend time filling out a form, try to submit it, but for some reason don’t successfully complete it, are money left on the table. Their behaviour should be analysed specifically to identify why this is happening.

Whether the problem is technical, UI, bad error messages, or something to do with the instructional copy, if you can solve it, it will likely have more impact on the business bottom-line than any other potential change.

How is Zuko Analytics preparing to stay ahead of the game in the optimisation landscape?

Our strategy has been to be indisputably the best tool available for one thing and one thing only: form optimisation and analytics. Our investment will continue to focus on this.

As well as delivering greater insights and features, we will be integrating with broader optimisation tools and offering the ability for clients to pull data into their own systems. This will make Zuko data as accessible and useful as possible.

This is the sixth of a series of posts where we speak with leading customer experience optimisation brands on trends and the future of digital growth. Check out the previous conversations with the likes of VWO, Fresh Relevance, Webtrends Optimize, and Nosto.

Stay tuned for the next one!

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