Web forms are a reliable and useful tool for modern marketers, but it can be surprisingly hard to get one “just right.” Depending on your audience and value proposition, forms have a wide range of possible fields and features.
Our relationship with them is complicated, too. As consumers of digital content, forms can be irritating. We resent giving up personal information to learn something new from a gated asset. But as digital content creators, we understand how necessary forms are. There are few easier ways to cultivate a database than using forms to restrict special content.
In both cases, certain truths apply to the most effective forms. In this article, part of a series, we’ll explore what is probably the best-known truth: Your form must have an appropriate number of fields. But what is that number, exactly? The answer depends more on psychology than you might expect.
Is the Treasure Worth the Toll?
Good forms can’t have too many fields – that’s an early lesson in Marketing 101. But there’s a more advanced lesson: Good forms can’t have too few fields, either.
Marketing is an exercise in psychology. The burden on marketers to get into customers’ minds. Let’s consider, then: If people fill out forms to receive information, what would be their biggest concern about completing a form (data privacy issues aside)? Most likely, they’d be anxious that the information they receive will prove less valuable than the information they provided – that the treasure won’t have been worth the toll of the gate.
When you add to this the fact that people naturally assume that the higher the toll, the more valuable the asset being guarded, a strange picture comes into focus. A form with too few fields can signal lack of value. When contacts perceive a lack of value, they are less likely to convert, leading to a feedback loop of problems. We need form conversions to generate the data to help improve content and messaging to drive more form conversions.
‘Naïve Theory’ & Value Projection
This concept might sound crazy. We marketers are acutely invested in giving prospects the most seamless experience. Why introduce friction by making the form longer? I understand the doubt, but it’s a concept everyone is familiar with, deep down. As the saying goes, “If something looks too good to be true, it probably is.” Quality outcome demands quality investment.
The same principle that makes you hesitant to buy a new car at a very low price is the same one that makes a customer suspicious of a form that has only a few fields and guarantees an exceptional white paper. This could make them assume the asset is mediocre, because the brand promoting it doesn’t want much in exchange.
This assumption is based on a thought process called “naïve theory” by the Journal of Consumer Research. “Because consumers can’t know everything about a product,” University of Massachusetts Amherst Professor Brad Tuttle explains in Time magazine, “we fill in the gaps with our own (naïve) theories to help us make decisions about whether the cheaply priced product is a terrific deal or a piece of junk.”
Here, it is the content that can be cheaply priced. At some point, almost everyone has felt hoodwinked by a form that yielded bogus content. Therefore, since people believe they get what they pay for, prospects may conclude the shorter the form, the less valuable the content. This risk increases as the discrepancy rises between the number of fields and the quality of offered content.
The key is to project value so your leads perceive value. In my experience testing both B2B and B2C forms, the ideal range is three to five fields. I have skewed toward fewer fields when my organization was making a small demand: For example, fill out this form to gain access to a one-page case study.
I’ve used more fields when I knew meatier content was on the table, and I was sure to communicate that value-add in the language near the form. Are you promoting a report that contains exclusive data? Are you offering expert guides, long-form case studies, trial downloads, or product literature? These assets not only deserve five fields, they need five fields to project worth and overcome naïve theory.
In Conclusion
Of course, this suggestion for the ideal range of form fields is a reflection of my personal experiences in content marketing and demand generation. For other marketers, mileage may vary – especially according to industry, which dictates the kind of content your prospects expect. Moreover, I know it can be challenging to gauge how “meaty” your assets are.
However, when it comes to this fact about forms – that they must have the right number of fields – marketers should keep in mind “right” doesn’t mean “few.” A shorter form is not necessarily more effective, and prospects don’t always prefer fewer fields. Depending on the value of your offer, more fields can reassure leads, aligning more closely with their expectations of payment (their information) for reward (your content). Knowing this can help marketers make better forms that yield more conversions.
