Putting forms on your website is hard enough work, but making the form appealing is even harder. However, having got someone this far, it’s a tragedy to lose them at the last hurdle because your form is offputting. One of the reasons people don’t litter their websites with individual landing pages for every promotion they do is the pain involved with creating good ones. At a recent seminar, I asked industrial marketing managers if they’d be interested in a service which enabled them to create landing pages, with response forms, just by filling in a few details (on a form!) and uploading some images. The response was “very interested” and we’ll have something to offer you soon.
However, that won’t get over the fact that you need forms on your website, not only for the generic “more information” page but for specific projects, especially newsletter signups, if you’re producing such a thing. In Guidelines for an Effective Subscription Form on B2B Marketing ROI there’s a good summary of an article from the Infobox Newsletter called 11 Tips to Create a Great Subscriber Form. I suspect few of you will ever create forms yourself, so it’s a good checklist to go through before briefing your website manager or designer if you’re going to be asking them to create a form.