Which channel?

This research document and report focuses on one particular channel for data collection. It’s a channel that should be close to the heart of all digital marketers and one that has helped to build the marketing databases of some of the world’s most successful businesses of the last 10 years.

That channel is the webform.

We’re talking here about the forms on your website and landing pages that you ask your customers and website visitors to complete, when you need to:

• Capture their details
• Learn more about them
• Collect their feedback on your products and services
• Invite them to sign up to your email marketing
• Invite them to enter your latest prize draw or competition
• Join your loyalty scheme, etc.

It’s arguable that after your homepage, the webforms on your website and on your email marketing campaign landing pages are the most important web content and real estate you have.

They can drive (or break) the conversion rate of your website, your email campaigns, your offline-to-online campaigns, your data collection promotions and your whole basis for data-driven, personalized email marketing.

At dotMailer, we wanted to know how the critical importance of webforms in the email and digital marketing process is reflected in the marketing workplace and in the knowledge and approach of today’s marketers.

So we commissioned some extensive field research to find out. Broadly, we wanted to know:

• How do marketers approach the science and art of webforms?
• How clearly do they appreciate the importance of getting their web response forms right?
• How skilled-up and informed are today’s marketers in maximizing the effectiveness of this all-important data collection vehicle?
• How aware are marketers of the toolkit of tricks and techniques they can use to help transform their form response rates, slash form abandonment and collect the customer data they need?

In this report you’ll find a summary of what we discovered, the report findings themselves, and a practical, handson guide to improving your webform response rates, collecting greater amounts of richer customer data and powering up your data-driven email campaigns.

Section 1. The research

1.1 Methodology

The survey, carried out in association with Marketingfinder.co.uk, was conducted at the end of 2013. Promoted via email and social media, the online survey included 21 questions and was sent to a sample of 35,000 marketers, from Marketing Exec to Marketing Director level, using both the MarketingFinder database and the dotMailer database combined.

1.2 Headline statistics

• 24% experience problems with the build or setup time for new webforms
• 17% experience challenges with the graphic design of webforms
• 12% experience issues creating the right content or questions for capturing data using webforms

The issues and challenges

Marketers identified issues in the creation of webforms:

[Table or chart in PDF file - Register or sign in to view]

Research stats at-a-glance

• 72% said they found the use of webforms to be very or extremely cost-effective for capturing data
• 46% rated webforms as an important or extremely important element of their marketing mix
• 63% use data collected from webforms to inform their business strategy, inform their marketing strategy and/or drive data-driven email marketing
• 59% said webforms compare very favourably to other methods of data capture they have used

Therefore the significance and benefit of the use of webforms is clearly understood by the vast majority of marketers.

48% of marketers NEVER A/B test their webforms to optimize response rates and reduce form abandonment. Of those marketers who rarely or never create new webforms for testing or optimization (57%), the reasons were clear:

[Table or chart in PDF file - Register or sign in to view]

70% of marketers either don’t pre-populate fields in webforms or online surveys, or don’t understand what this actually means.

33% of marketers use manual re-keying or a third party to manually append any data they collect through webforms to their email lists.

1.3 Summary

Many marketers understand the benefits of using webforms as one of their key customer data capture points, but are doing very little to maximize the benefits of doing so. Our study found:

• Little or no optimization or A/B testing
• A lack of web and webform design skills
• A lack of knowledge about technology and tools to make the form creation process easy

Which leads us to believe that this same majority group of marketers are effectively throwing away customer data they could have collected, simply because of these challenges they face.

Section 2. Building and optimizing webforms

This report looks to explore best practice in effective data collection via webforms - from thinking about the kind of data that you need to capture, through to creating and optimizing the forms themselves.

Step-by-step, this guide will take you through:

• Identifying and prioritizing the customer data you need to collect
• 12 surefire methods to build and enrich email lists
• Techniques to reduce form abandonment rates, and increase form completion and goal conversion rates
• Split testing and response optimization – how to get it right
• Real-world dos and don’ts of webforms
• Database population and data appending

2.1 Identifying and prioritizing the data to collect

By asking the right questions of your customers, you can improve your database by:

• Building a deeper understanding of current customers
• Gathering essential feedback on your product or service that will help boost sales

There are numerous questions you could ask of your customers and respondents, along with numerous data points you could hope to collect. However, to go after everything all at once is impractical. Your respondents only have the time and attention span to answer a limited number of questions. The first step to success lies in identifying and prioritizing the data you want to collect, through a process called data ranking.

What’s worth knowing?

Before you begin planning which data to capture in your webforms, you need to be clear about your key sales and marketing objectives and the success drivers that will help you reach them

In other words, what are the marketing activities that drive up your sales? What is the profile of customers who respond to you? What is more effective - your email price promotions, or events and experiences you invite customers to, or in-store promotions?

Knowing what already works in your email marketing will help you focus on the data you should collect to drive more success.

For example… .

…if you know that women are more likely to buy your products around the holiday season, then make sure you have collected and populated gender data in time for your Holiday campaigns

Or…

…if you know that offering a free glass of champagne to customers in your restaurant branches on a Tuesday night is great for driving bookings on a quiet night, then make sure you know your customers’ postcodes or nearest town so you can invite them to their nearest restaurant for a free glass of bubbly.

And…

…if you know that businesses with more than 60 employees respond best to your bulk buy offers, then make sure you know the sizes of the businesses in your database, by their employee number bands.

The 5 steps towards effective data collection

• Clarity of intention - Be clear in your intention of whether you are collecting data on end-consumers, or B2B customers
• If B2B, identify whether you need to collect data on the individual, the organization (that they work for) or both?
• Define success – what are the characteristics for a useful profile? What will customers look like, i.e. their geographics and demographics
• Define the characteristics that will be useful to profile what your customers like, e.g. their interests and preferences
• Define the characteristics that will be useful to profile what your customers do – i.e. their purchase history, browsing behaviour, buying patterns, psychographics, email engagement, etc.

Now you will have a clear picture of the data points you can usefully consider for data ranking.

Data ranking – the 9 key tests to apply to every data point you are considering collecting

What data is most valuable to your business? What is the key information needed to improve customer engagement and increase sales? Data ranking requires you to ask the following of every data point you are considering collecting:

• Can this piece of data be used as a key sales driver – and how?
• Are you actually going to use it, or just collect it then leave it redundant in your database?
• How easily and accurately can it be collected?
• How can it be used to feed email marketing personalization and automation?
• Will your customer resist giving me this information?
• What is the shelf life of this information?
• Can it be assumed by proxy?
• Does it truly help me to understand my customer better?
• Can this data be combined with what I already know to make my existing data more valuable?

This approach teaches us to only ever collect data that we are going to use. Ensure there are practical applications for the data you plan to collect. If you’re selling PCs to IT managers, does it really matter what their gender or date of birth is?

Think in very practical terms about how you could use a piece of data: could it be used for relevant personalization? Will it drive effective email marketing automation? Will it help you to sell more or upsell/cross-sell more?

Think in very practical terms about how you could use a piece of data: could it be used for relevant personalization? Will it drive effective email marketing automation? Will it help you to sell more or upsell/cross-sell more?

Some data would be great to have but it’s going to be very tough to get it. For example, you may like to know how much your customers earn so you can target based on ‘buying power’. Consider collecting this kind of data by proxy, i.e. asking them a pertinent question that might indicate their salary through a secondary attribute, for example, ‘How many holidays do you take a year?’

How many form fields is too many?

Our survey found that the majority of marketers ask between 4-6 questions on average in their webforms, followed by 6-10 questions.

Our rule of thumb is that the more fields you have in your webform, the higher your form abandonment rate will be. Research indicates that the maximum optimal number of fields is 4, with one study showing a 160% increase in conversion rates for a 4 field form compared to an 11 field one.

Are marketers asking too many questions in their forms? While our survey suggests they may well be, we believe that only A/B testing can really tell you either way. Test a variation of your form against the control version and try reducing or adding additional fields. See page 21 for more about A/B testing.

Take a look at how Netflix or WordPress are handling these challenges:

[Table or chart in PDF file - Register or sign in to view]

Both these online sign-up brands go for simplicity and minimal data capture at this first stage of the engagement process.

And here’s an example of a webform that’s about as simple as it can get:

Alternatively, here’s one that may well be asking too much:

2.2 10 surefire ways to enrich your email marketing lists through effective webforms

1. Customer satisfaction surveys, online research surveys and polls

These can all be used to collect rich data from prospects and customers. Ensure you use an online survey tool that is integrated with your email marketing platform and automatically appends the data you collect to the records in your existing email lists where possible.

Incentivize survey responses with prize draws or offers to increase response rates.

2. Website newsletter sign-ups

Inviting customers and prospects to actively engage with your emails by signing up to an e-newsletter can be highly effective for all types of business.

Ensure that the newsletter sign-up call to action is clearly and prominently displayed on your website – on the home page, above the fold, and on all of your most visited web pages.

3. Create new customer touchpoints

Set up automated ‘thank you’ emails sent to your contacts when they sign up to your newsletter, complete an online survey or engage with you in any other way online. Use the ‘thank you’ email to show your appreciation, engender loyalty, and collect extra cutomer data.

4. Capture your Facebook visitors’ data

Look for an email marketing provider that offers a social plugin allowing you to embed an integrated data capture webform on your company Facebook page, within the tabs section.

5. Capture blog visitors’ data

Your blog is another crucial touchpoint where you should be providing a webform for data capture. (dotMailer comes with plugin scripts that let you capture and append data straight from your Facebook pages and WordPress blog.)

6. Social sharing

Ensure that you can easily share signup form and data capture form links on social networks.

7. Use simple competitions

Make use of simple competitions such as prize draws to incentivize contacts to pass you the data you want.

8. Segment your database by engagement

Consider identifying those who haven’t opened an email campaign in the last 6 months, or a year, or who have never clicked through. Consider enrolling them into a ‘we miss you’ campaign that asks them to pass over some more data so you can make sure you are sending them better targeted and more relevant emails.

9. Look for compelling ways to engage with your market

By making customers happy, they’re more likely to engage with you and give you the data you seek. An example is a big name sports retailer whose bricks-and-mortar flagship store invites visitors to test their physical strengths in an activity centre. After participating, the brand then asks visitors to sign up on the company website to compare their results to peers and celebrities. B2B marketers can look to undertake research or commission a whitepaper with big implications, which may help your prospects succeed in their business areas. Simply trade this for data in your website download form.

10. Run a viral ‘referal’ competition

A great example of this comes from dotMailer client Rodial. In this example, Rodial use a device that enables them to promote an incentivized data collection program in the shape of a high ticket competition. Here, the user enters the competition by submitting their email address. They are also incentivized to sign up to the Rodial newsletter, with the offer of 10% off all future Rodial purchases.

Once the user hits submit they receive a unique URL to send to their friends or share on social networks to enable others to enter the Rodial competition – served to them dynamically on a webpage, and emailed to them.

Every time someone enters the competition using that unique URL, the original referrer gets another entry into the competition, for an extra chance to win the big prize. Rodial ran this competition over a Christmas period and captured an additional 7,500 email addresses. They’ve been running it successfully ever since.

2.3 Techniques for reducing your form abandonment rate and increasing conversions

Pre-populating form fields

We previously discussed the negative impact of an increased number of fields in a web response form. However, this impact can be mitigated by pre-populating the fields with data you may already hold on a customer.

For example, you may have emailed your customer database, inviting them to click through to your website landing page and complete a form to claim a discount code or download some free content. In this case, it’s not helpful to ask the customer to re-enter their name and email address in the form.

dotMailer enables you to pre-populate or hide fields in your forms for which you already hold data, helping reduce your form abandonment rate.

The use of cookies on your website can also enable you to store data on returning website visitors and prepopulate webforms with data you already hold, again helping to reduce the form abandonment rate

Other website applications allow you to serve content, including form fields, dynamically to signed-in customers on your website, based on the data you already hold on them.

We found that 51% of marketers surveyed do not use any of these straightforward techniques or available tools to pre-populate their form fields.

The ‘Submit’ button

One little word in the action button on your webform can dramatically affect your conversion rates. Aside from ‘Submit’, we found that the use of non-committal or more contextually relevant words on the form completion button work better, such as ‘Click here’, ‘Go’, ‘Download’, or ‘Register’.

Turning the submission button into an offer with a clear call to action improves conversion rates dramatically. Such a display engenders trust in the customer, clearly explaining the user journey after they click. Other phrases to consider include:

• ‘Start free trial now!’
• ‘Download your free guide here!’
• ‘Start saving now!’
• ‘Click here for great offers!’
• ‘Free instant access!’
• ‘Sign up!’

Here’s how we do it at dotMailer:

Incentivizing your conversions

Our survey found that the majority of marketers use incentives of some type to increase webform conversion rates – around 57%.

Typically what, if any, incentives do you offer to encourage the completion of webforms?

The key to making incentives work is to make the offer clear and prominent. Put it above the submit button and include an image where you can A/B test different offers to see which one connects the most with your audience. Focus on perceived value of the incentive – not the actual value.

Incentives that work include ones which:

• Help solve or improve customers’ problems in the short or long term
• Offer specific benefits, with a high perceived value

Some real-world examples

This form offers both relevancy and perceived value in the shape of a ‘free personality test’ in the ‘life-coaching’ field.

Don’t forget, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with offering a ‘bribe’ for customers to sign up.

Say ‘thank you’

In the survey, we found that only 26% of respondents said they always send a ‘thank you’ email after a customer submits a webform. 43% of respondents said they only do so ‘occasionally.’ This is a missed opportunity.

Do you send users to a ‘thank you’ page once they have completed a webform?

Do you send an automatically triggered email to a user after webform submission?

‘Thank you’ emails are a great way for you to collect more customer data, including data that the customer may not want to provide at first contact.

In this example from Harveys Furniture Store, the initial email signup form collects the minimum of data.

An automated ‘thank you’ email is sent following webform submission, inviting customers to provide more personal data:

Data is then collected through an incentivized survey, capturing more user data to help tailor future emails with dynamic content

Webform layout, design, functionality and your landing page

Beautiful, smart design sells. That’s as true for webforms and landing pages as it is for cars or clothes. Take this neat and well-worded webform from Appsumo that helped them quickly garner 500,000 email subscribers:

8 tips and techniques for laying out webforms that drive more response

1. Consider the layout of your webform and positioning within the landing page. Avoid placing the form below the fold. Use A/B testing on your website to identify the optimum position and layout of a form.

2. Research shows that users complete webforms from top to bottom. Forms with simple single-column vertical layouts are more likely to perform well than those with multiple columns.

3. Ensure the landing page creative around the webform is not too busy. Funnel customers’ attention primarily to the webform. Avoid putting links near a webform - why distract the customer and send your traffic off elsewhere?

4. Match your messaging - don’t confuse or disappoint customers by promoting one thing, but offering another. The promise and offer of the landing page should relate directly to the call to action in your webform.

5. Ensure ease of use. Make fields as large and as clear as you can, with clear and descriptive labels inside the fields. Make sure your webform buttons look like buttons: small buttons are a smaller call to action. Amazon are a great example of good button mark-up:

6. Where possible let the customer input data such as a phone number in the way the customer wants to.

Don’t throw an error message back at a user because the number’s not been entered in a certain way – remember you can always clean up in the back-end. Error messages are a block to sign ups. Look to strike a balance between data validation and maximizing your sign-up rate. Again, A/B testing will help with this.

7. If an error message is going to pop-up, make sure it’s clear and indicates what needs to be fixed. Also, ensure that your form doesn’t auto-clear, forcing the customer to start all over again. Here’s a nice example of a clear error message:

8. Optimize your landing page by showing ‘social proof.’ Customers don’t like to think they might be the only person signing up with you, so make them feel confident that they are in good company. If you’ve got a healthy balance sheet of Facebook likes or email subscribers, shout it from the rooftops. Show it clearly on your form or on your landing page along with links to customer reviews and testimonials.

Pop-up, pop-over and narrative webforms

Pop-up forms and pop-overs can substantially increase sign-up rates, despite their potential ‘irritation factor’ and vulnerability to pop-up blockers. A/B testing will show you if this works for your website, for your brand and with your audience

Narrative webforms (or ‘mad libs’) adopt a different approach. Instead of asking customers to complete a conventional grid, they are asked to fill in the blanks in a form arranged like a paragraph, as though they were contributing to the telling of a story. A narrative webform could look like this:

Vast.com increased their conversion rates by 25-40% using mad lib narrative forms. As with pop-ups, you need to consider your customer base and brand before making a decision to adopt this type of approach.

A word about mobiles…

Everything in this paper relates equally to serving your webforms on mobiles, tablets and desktops. However, there are additional considerations, principally:

• Ensure your form is optimized for mobile. Responsive design will enable you to serve a form that works perfectly on the device it is being read on
• Remember, radio buttons can be difficult to use on mobiles, so test the use of drop down menus with a small number of options instead

For further guidance on email marketing for mobile, see our free guide at dotMailer.com/mobilize

2.4 Optimizing your webforms using A/B testing

Are you sure that your webform is performing as effectively as it could be? Testing is really the only way to be sure. Our survey found that 48% of marketers never A/B test their webforms to optimize response rates and reduce form abandonment.

Of these marketers who rarely or never create new webforms for testing or optimization (57%), the reasons were clear:

• 24% have no in-house resources
• 21% have no web design skills
• 12% have no suitable online form builder tools or software

The simplest, most effective way to test and improve your webforms performance is A/B split testing. Contrary to the concerns raised by our survey sample, in-house resources and web design skills are not needed to any great degree in order to run an effective split test.

Tools such as dotMailer’s surveys and forms builder let you quickly and easily design, layout and build forms that can be dropped into your website, so it’s easy to create different variations for split testing. There is also a range of free and paid analytics and split testing tools available that require no IT resource to enact.

Split testing in this context involves taking your current webform (the ‘control’) and testing against a revised webform (the ‘challenger’) where you have made larger or lesser alterations to aspects such as (but not exclusively):

• The copy in the webform
• The offer
• Number of data fields
• Form layout
• The ‘submit’ button
• The use of imagery

Thus a ‘control’ and a ‘challenger’ may look like this:

Section 3. Data capture and appending

Our survey found that 78% of marketers do not automatically append the data they collect to their email marketing lists in real-time.

How do you capture/append the data you collect from webforms in your existing email lists/database?

Automatically appending data to your email lists in realtime offers significant advantages.

• It enables email automation programs to be triggered to respondents in real-time; customer segments can be also be updated in real-time.
• Personalized and dynamic content in emails and automated programs can be kept automatically updated enabling greater email content relevancy.
• Manual re-keying, laborious batch uploading or employing a third party can be time-intensive and costly exercises.

The lack of automated data appending adopted by marketers in our survey may explain why only a small minority of them are using data collection and enrichment to drive segmentation and profiling.

It’s important not to miss out on the opportunities for segmenting, profiling, personalization and automation that integrating your webform data with your email marketing can offer