How to Decrease Form Abandonment

Do not index

Hide CTA

Hide cover

Abandoned carts are rare in the real world. You might leave behind individual items at the register, unpurchased, but you’re unlikely to go to the trouble of filling a shopping cart with groceries only to leave it behind without checking out.

Online, though, it’s far more common to leave a form or shopping cart behind. There’s nothing to feel bad about, no items to put back on the shelf. And it’s far easier to get distracted when the whole world’s a tab away.

What’s an online proprietor to do? It’s hard enough to get people to come to your site. Once they take that first step and start filling out your form, you’d like to ensure they finish. Here’s how to optimize your form conversion rate by adding design tweaks and form tools to avoid form abandonment.

The best form is a short form

The best practices to boost form conversion apply equally to avoiding form abandonment. Keep things short, with conditional questions, URL parameters to pass data along to the form, and auto-fill fields so users only have to enter necessary information. Split up questions to avoid confusion. Use consistent phrasing. Avoid placeholder text. Use pages to simplify error messages.

Short, simple, and straightforward: That’s the magic combination. HubSpot found that the more fields a form has, the lower the conversion rate—especially if those additional fields are plain text answers. Other studies from Venture Harbor found that both the fields and the descriptions matter. Fewer fields that were more ambiguous or tried to cover more in one question also converted worse. A handful of clearly labeled fields with a mixture of easy-to-fill field types should be the sweet spot.

Finally, stay on topic, and only ask for required details. Your checkout form only requires name, email, shipping details, and billing info—birthdays, household size, or other membership-type details are only additional reasons to bounce. Same for a contact form: You need a name, email, message, and perhaps message category—everything else can likely be inferred from the message.

As Vitaly Friedman cautions, form abandonment can “happen because the form asks too much sensitive and personal information without a good reason.” We’re wary of giving out our details on the internet already. Unnecessary questions about household income or education status are only likely to remind people to be cautious—and click away.

Make forms as easy to fill out as possible

With your form fields listed and simplified as much as possible, it’s time to dig in and see if you can make it even easier for people to add their details.

Some data you can find on your own. Say you’re building a lead generation form for your company. Instead of asking people how many people work at their company or where the company’s located, you could use an enrichment service like Clearbit to find that data for you. Fillout includes that as one of the features in its Conversion Kit add-on; click your email field, select Enrich in the sidebar, then choose to Enrich with Clearbit, and you’ll get all the company data you need from just an email address. More data for your company, far fewer questions for the lead.

Same goes for email addresses. Know how nice it is when you’re adding your billing address online and it auto-fills your city and state or province after entering your postal code? You can build something similar with maps integrations.

At a minimum, your state and country field should be selectors so respondents don’t have to type everything out. Or go the whole way with Fillout’s Google Maps integration. Add an address field, select it and click Autocomplete in the sidebar, and refresh the page. Then try entering an address, and Google Maps will suggest and auto-fill the fields for you. That turns what otherwise would be 5 fields into a single simple step.

How to win back abandoned forms and shopping carts online

You’ve optimized your form. Cut as many fields as possible, made the remainder as easy as they can be. Now for a final step: Form abandonment reminder emails.

The concept’s simple. You’ve started filling out a form or begun the checkout process in an online store. You’ve already entered your email address. Then a message from a colleague comes in, you switch tabs, and forget to finish filling out or checking out.

A while later, that form sends you an email and gently reminds you to finish checking out, if you’d like.

That’s form recovery. It’s a proven way to decrease form abandonment; even if people walk away at first, you’ve got that one chance to get them back.

To build one, you’ll typically need a form with two or more pages. On the first page, ask for the user’s email address and little else. You want to make sure they at least enter their email address. When they click to the next button, your form will save the email and any other first form fields. And if after a while they don’t complete the form, the app will assume they forgot and email them a one-time reminder.

In Fillout Forms, once you’ve added an email address field to a two-or-more page form, click the Settings page, select Conversion kit, and there enable Respondent reminders. It’ll select your form’s email field by default, and you can set how long Fillout will wait before emailing, and you can customize what the email says.

With that, you’ll have the most conversion optimized form possible, one focused on the important questions with a reminder to nudge people back if they forget to fill everything out.

This guide should not be considered as legal guidance. Consult with your legal advisor to understand how GDPR impacts your business.

But: Can you just email people after they entered their email address in your form? According to GDPR—and best practices to keep your prospects happy—you need to make sure they agree first.

“Express consent is given when a person actively agrees to do or receive something,” explains the Snowplow team. “The key to acquiring express consent is, to be honest about the fact that they are signing up for your email list and will receive emails from you, regardless of the technique you employ to get their email address.”

There are a few ways to do that. The most common is a checkbox near the end of a form, agreeing to receive emails after filling out the form. Shopify stores, for example, do this with a pre-checked box under the email address field, saying to “email me with news and offers.” An unchecked box in the same location may work as well for opt-in consent; one at the end of your form, however, is unlikely to get checked if your user didn’t finish filling out the form in the first place.

Another option is to put a label under your form’s email field, noting that you may reach out once about this form or order. Include text along the lines of “By entering your email you agree to receive an email message from COMPANY.”

A third option—one some eCommerce stores and form apps like Fillout use—is to only send recovery emails if users click to the second page of your form. With this method, ask for your user’s email address first, along with perhaps a couple other easy questions, followed by a “Save and continue” button that could include its own tagline noting that you may follow up. You’ll miss out on recovering people who enter their email address but don’t click the button, but will be sure your respondents are aware they’ve opted in.

Finally, shopping cart abandonment especially could be covered by GDPR’s Legitimate Interest Assessment, if your store can show that it's adding value to customers by helping them not forget orders. But to be on the safe side, it’s still best to ask for express consent, too.

Let people opt out of emails as well

People who fill out your forms also need a way to withdraw consent, a way to opt out of your emails and never hear from you again. Form and shopping cart recovery emails should only ever be sent once. That’s how Fillout’s form recovery emails work: Set how soon you’d like to remind people about their form, and it’ll email them once then and never again. If you’re using another shopping cart or email service to send emails, be sure to check that there’s an unsubscribe link, or that respondents will only receive a single email.

Then let the user know, both in your form or shopping cart and on your recovery email that they’ll only receive this single email reminder. In the email, remind them why they received this message—and tell them either how to unsubscribe or assure them that this is the only message they’ll receive.

Make sure to follow your rules there. Never use those emails to reach back out, no matter how tempting. It’s not worth getting your emails marked as spam—or annoying someone who is now even less likely to ever be a customer.

And never use form recovery to add people to an email newsletter. You want to be extra careful that people know what they’re opting into when you’ll be emailing them regularly.

Building better forms

Now that your form’s optimized for conversion and to avoid abandonment, it’s time to optimize what you do with your form data once it comes in. Fillout can collect eSignatures in your form, which means you can make eSign-compliant contracts from a form. Or, you can generate PDFs from form responses and build an entire document control workflow powered by forms.

Signup for a free Fillout account and see how much easier it can be to gather data and put it to work with a powerful, conversion-focused form builder.

Image Credit: Header photo by Gabrielle Ribeiro via Unsplash