On Internet Business

How to increase online enquiries by 25-40%

Posted by Michael under Online Retail

Converting click interest to enquiries is a key part of running a successful online business and LukeW recently reviewed a new way of creating an enquiry registration form, designed by Jeremy Keith.

The key difference between the form, which can be found at Keith’s own site, Huffduffer, and the traditional sign-up for more information form, is the narrative format it uses to ask for information. While classic forms uses boxes – often with a pull down menu offering a choice of pre-set options – the input system on Keith’s form is sentence-based, it allows people to write a phrase in the box.

In all other respects the form operates in the classic way: you can tab between boxes, you can start entering information by select any text box, and if the data that’s entered is in an unacceptable format the form handles the error by posting up an error message with an indicator of where the error needs to be created.

It seems counter-intuitive to suggest that a form that requires more work from the individual (choosing a selection of words and entering them) would increase response rates, but it does. And the evidence comes from Vast – a leading vertical search platform for cars, travel, and house purchase in the USA. Vast ran some online testing, using a ‘contact this dealer form’ that measured the response to a traditional form and a narrative based one. The results were fascinating – narrative-style forms increased conversion by 25-40%.

Standard forms look like the one on the left: classic boxes and lots of pull-down menu items with a three part box for entering a telephone number. It’s the kind of form that most of us see on the internet almost every time we visit a retail- or service- based site.

On the other hand, the narrative based form offers less information about ‘what to put’ and more scope about ‘personalising’ the form according to the viewer’s own wishes. The three telephone number boxes have shrunk to just one field too.

There isn’t enough data yet to work out why the narrative form seems more appealing – but it seems likely that there are two reasons: the first is that we naturally think in sentences, not information bytes, so that language logic of narrative seems more comfortable to us, the second is that having scope to supply information in the form we want seems less intrusive than being told we have to give that information in the form that is acceptable to the recipient – we’re happier to give exactly the same information, if we have the scope to decide the words we supply it in.

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