How to Optimize Your Forms | Bathroom Break #74

0:01Welcome to a new special series called The Bathroom Break. That extra 10 minutes, you either have to listen to marketing tips or use the bathroom or both. But I don't recommend both, but that's your choice. This collab is going to be super fun. We have Daniel Murray from the Marketing Millennials and me, Jay Schwetelson, from the Do This Not That podcast and SubjectLine.com. Each episode in the series, we are going to go over quick tips about different marketing topics. And if you want to be in the bathroom, fine, just don't tell us about it. Thanks for checking it out. We are back for the bathroom break.

0:35This is Jay Schwetelson from Do This Not That Podcast. I'm here with Daniel Murray, the marketing millennial. And right before recording, Daniel goes, oh, I got to tell you the funniest story. I go, wait a minute, hit record. And so I have no idea what's about to come out of Daniel's mouth. So what's going on? Jay's like, tell me some baby stories. But yesterday I put the baby and the carrier on me for the first time ever. And I was like, I'm going to do this for a call. and one minute into the call the baby just poops and the poop's dripping down his leg everywhere and he's never done this anymore explosion everywhere dripping down he's like everything and i'm sitting in this meeting smelling his poop and then he the minute he poops he falls asleep on me so i'm like sitting i see yellow and green just dripping down his all over my shirt it's the worst experience of my life um and i should ari comes and starts dying laughing in the call this is like an important call this is like with like and i'm like what come on baby your first time in your career you're shitting all over me it's terrible so we're talking about bathroom break he took a bathroom break while i was on a call that is amazing did you stop you're like listen i need to make could they see it or you just no the baby was here that was fine they i'm like here's the they were like i made it all cute but i just felt him doing it and i'm like and then the smell just keep kept coming the whole meeting it was not fun oh my god that sounds like a great day way to go i want there should be like a video of you after it happened call and you're like all right get this off of me it was like that And then also, Ari took a picture of all the...

2:18We had to get rid of his outfit. It was so bad. We tried to wash it. It was so bad. So he wasn't into that call, basically. No, we had to do a hospital sink bath where you just hold him up and just splash water. It was that bad. That's amazing. Well, speaking of that bad, that's what this episode is going to be. Listen, what we're talking about today, hard turn pivot here. we're talking about forms and where you take people to and things you can be doing to convert on those forms and i'll tell you why we're talking about that for my own company we've been we just started testing something that is crushing it has changed our conversion rates which i don't know why everyone's like well we've been doing that for years but we never have which is a no scroll form all of our forms whether it's for our events or our clients our agency clients whatever you take them to a page there'll be a form there and you scroll down a little bit for more information maybe there's a video but anything we came up with this form that you can scroll there's nothing you're stuck on that one page and there's not a lot of fields and our conversion rates went up by like 60 percent just by not having any ability to scroll so uh coming out of that i'm like now i want to retest everything i know about forms um so if you've never done a no scroll page do it.

3:32Daniel, what is your go-to on forms? My go-to is the same principle as a notice goal, but two-step. I think you need to have the first field just grab an email because you need to be able to remarket, retarget. I think a lot of time what happens with forms is even if you have a form with four or five fields, people just stop and say, why am I giving this information? But an email is easy to grab in the second field just second form just have a couple of fields to convert them i i think that you need to get to the least amount of fields as possible but the most amount of fields in the sense to get who your icp is especially for the b2b side of the business um obviously e-commerce is different but what i like to do and i've seen work tried and true is always the two step form or quiz forms or quiz forms.

4:29Quiz forms are great. Yeah. I love those. And in general, what happened is somebody clicked on something and they went to this page, whether it's for a consumer product, business, nonprofit, doesn't matter. And now you're trying to close the deal. You have to get in their mindset. And the number one thing you need to have on that page is social proof. Now you're like, oh yeah, we have a testimonial on there. It says, you got to, we love this product. It's amazing. That's garbage testimonial. So you want to have a quantifiable testimonial. A quantifiable testimonial is when I bought this, it saved me$27 a month and improved my life.

5:03Or my team saved 12 hours a month because it's so productive. You need something where the person can see themselves. And when you have a quantifiable testimonial, it'll increase your conversion rates by over 15 % versus a regular testimonial. But what are other social proof elements, Daniel, that you can have right there in the form that actually help get conversions? I mean, obviously, logos like that company. So if you can get to a place where you understand, if you have something in the background that anonymizes the visitors, you can get to a place that changes logos for who comes on your site.

5:41So if it's a small business show, smaller it goes. If it's a medium business show, that's one way. I also think that a lot of people, when they're looking at conversion, they don't look at the offer. And this is the biggest thing that I've seen in conversion is how you're formatting your offer. Because request a demo is not an offer. Like you need to have something that says like save 20 % today. And then also have it on the top. Like if you fill out the form today, you need to have the offer front and center because nobody is going to just give you your information for nothing in advance or fill out your form to get a fast track to someone.

6:27Like you need to have something that is action based, not just saying click here. Yeah, 100%. And also, as it relates to kind of closing that deal, you may say to yourself, well, I don't have a bunch of client logos to put there or whatever. But you do have logos. You have logos of people that you're partnered with. You could have put random awards that you have won. It doesn't matter if it's the most meaningless award. You need to put stuff on that page where the person is going to feel more confident in the decision that they're making. And also, that call to action button, that final button, if it says submit, you should quit your job.

7:03You're doing a horrendous job because that's ridiculous. It needs to say, yes, I'm in. Yes, I order right now. Yes, send it my way. That call to action button, that final button is your closing statement. And if you're actually not doing an A-B test on the words on that button, you're leaving an incredibly important variable on the table. Sometimes I like also like micro copy for like reassurance, like we'll never spam you. or the sony will take 30 seconds to fill out like give them a reassurance in the copy that this is gonna how long it's gonna take or if you do a multi-step format like a progress bars uh a very good thing but one thing i also two things that are not like really formulated but will help this conversion is make sure that like site speed is good because the last thing you want to do is have that load really slow.

7:57So make sure that you're not overloading the site that makes images load slow, copy load slow, because that could really hurt your conversion if you do that. And another thing I like to do, if you can, the next level of forms is if you have any way to get autofill capabilities of, because sometimes it's just someone's second form fill. For example, if you have downloadables on your website or stuff like that, you want to be able to, the next time they come on the form, they only have to fill out one or two fields. You shouldn't be making people fill out things multiple times. And if you have a process where you're giving an email for a newsletter and the next time they come to the site they you you the email newsletter capture has two forms the next one you only give the extra three you need to have ability to auto fill form form films when they come to your site again dude on on subjectline.com we get the number one complaint that we get is um people saying i already filled this out what i filled out because a lot of people have their cookies turned off or whatever and they don't even realize it and all this whatever and so um sometimes we can't autofill which is the most annoying thing i want to autofill for everyone because i agree with you it is the tactic to do so everybody out there if you're angry at me it's not my fault um so let me ask you a question going back to the baby bjorn i think that's what it called that kind of like so you're talking about the thing that's like when you hold your baby are you talking about the thing that looks like you're like a hippie and it's like a sack or are you talking about the thing that looks like you're about to parachute and your kids in the parachute like about a parachute the problem with that thing that always scared me with my kids and i don't know if you've used it since you had the um the crap explosion but like i never felt confident in the contraption so like i would walk around and still hold my kid because i could see but from all the stories you told me how you were very paranoid at the beginning i think that and also when you probably did that it probably was gonna why did you get together properly um because probably but i do i do i think for the first like five times like i this is the first time i had him in there for like hands free right right but like the first five times i'm like am i suffocating the kid is his legs okay am i gonna break his hips like you know you go through these like checklists and you have like and then i'm looking at is it squeezing him too hard is he gonna overheat and i'm freaking out and he's just chilling sleeping and i'm freaking out as a parent it's not uh it's that's that's the issue is like there's so many variables that you don't know and um i'm so envious of whenever i see people that are like parenting their kid and they're so chill i'm like dude i i i want to be that chill i am not that chill with anything in my life not even like watching tea i i can't chill out i need to work i need to meditate people say that's usually like the parent that has two kids or three kids are always like the chill like they look they're like, I've done this before.

11:11I don't know about you, but you had your kids back to back. Yeah, no. Kids now, when little kids come over my house to me, it's like friends. Whatever it stresses me out. I can't handle it. I'm like, they're going to bang into something. It's going to be my fault. I can't handle it. It stresses me out. Yeah. Ari's dad has a fence around his pool because he lives near an elementary school. I did that. He doesn't have any kids in his house, so he has a fence because he's a lawyer. He's scared that a kid's going to wander in his backyard and fall into the pool. So he has a fence. The one kid to fall into these, like hops the fence, comes into his backyard and falls into the pool.

11:53So that's the reason he has it. No kids come to his house at all. That's amazing. Wow. Very nervous. Well, this has been another amazing episode of The Bathroom Break. And listen, we had the ultimate. Daniel had the bathroom break on him this week. So we'll have to see what happens next week. We also should tell that you actually had a bathroom break on you this last week, too. Oh, yeah, yeah. Bird crapped on me. That was not great. That was not ideal. But you know what's so funny? I put that in my newsletter, that bird runs the bathroom on me. And I got inundated, like, that's good luck. And I'm like, I don't know what to do with that information.

12:28It doesn't feel like good luck in the moment, but great. I'm rolling in bird crap. But amazing. Well, this is the bathroom break. Again, we've had multiple bathroom breaks on us this week. All right. Go follow Daniel's show, The Market Millennials, or Do This, Not That, and we'll catch you at the next one. Daniel, come on, man. I got to get back to work. Get out of there. All right. While he's still in there, this is Jay. Check out my podcast, Do This, Not That, for marketers. Each week, we share really quick tips on stuff that can improve your marketing. And I hope you give it a try. Oh, here's Daniel.

13:01He's finally out. Back from my bathroom break. This is Daniel. go follow the Mark and Millet podcast, but also tune into this series. It's once a week, the bathroom break. We talk about marketing tips that we just spew out. And it could be anything from email, subject line, to any marketing tips in the world. We'll talk about it. Just give us a shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear. Peace out. Later.