Elementor’s Tips for Perfecting a WordPress Lead Capture Form
Capturing leads is one of the most important steps in the digital marketing process. The better your website converts visitors into leads, the more profitable it can ultimately become.
If you’ve already built a website that attracts traffic, you’re halfway there. Now, your digital strategy revolves around converting some of those visitors into leads who will continue to interact with your content. In return, they’ll give you some information about themselves you can use to guide them further down the sales funnel.
The better optimized your lead capture form is, the more successful this step will be. A smooth, streamlined signup experience will always generate better results than a complicated, time-consuming one.
Take a close look at how your website treats users who wish to sign up for your newsletter or other content. Try to make an objective assessment of the user experience your form offers.
Optimizing your lead generation forms may improve that experience and boost your website’s overall conversion rate.
We’ve studied some of the best-converting forms on WordPress and come up with a few useful insights. Follow these tips to maximize lead generation performance on your website.
Start with the right form builder
Pay close attention to the user experience your form builder offers you as a web creator. Is it easy to create high-quality web pages and forms, or difficult? A clunky, unresponsive form builder will generally produce clunky, unresponsive forms. A professional form builder should offer advanced capabilities without sacrificing its ease of use.
For example, honeypots have proven effective at reducing spam by tricking spam bots into filling out hidden fields. Many form builders support honeypots, but actually making and using them is rarely as simple as it should be. As a result, relatively few WordPress sites successfully deploy honeypots even though they are perfectly capable of it.
A great form builder should offer total customizability without bogging you down in technical details. There is no need to write code when creating a signup form. Everything you need should be available through a simple drag-and-drop interface so you can focus on the work that really matters.
Elementor’s form builder is designed with these principles in mind. It makes it easy for web creators to produce high-quality forms without writing a single line of code. Elementor forms support advanced functionality without compromising the user experience.
Avoid requesting too much personal information
People are more careful with their personal data than ever before. They won’t share personally identifiable information with just anyone. In fact, they may be suspicious if you ask for data they don’t think you need.
In today’s cybersecurity-aware environment successful form building means doing more with less. Find ways to cut down the amount of data you actually need to collect from users, and remove steps from the signup process whenever possible.
This approach carries benefits for web creators collecting data in regulated territories, like the European Union. GDPR compliance requires website owners to ask for consent before storing personal data and to handle that data in a specific way.
If you can structure your website in such a way that it doesn’t require regulated data from users, you can potentially avoid compliance headaches down the line. This means carefully deciding what information you truly need from users, and what you can leave out.
Keep it short and simple
Signing up for a newsletter subscription should not feel like reporting taxes. The shorter and simpler your form is, the better it will perform. One way to avoid the bureaucratic approach is by limiting the amount of data you request, but there’s more. You should make sure each step in the signup process is comprehensible and well-explained.
That explanation doesn’t have to be explicit. It may be suggested by the content that leads users to the form in the first place. If it isn’t, you should be prepared to tell users why you’re requesting information from them and what you plan on doing with it. This will go a long way towards simplifying the signup process.
Consider the Email field. It’s on practically every form out there, but not all websites use that data the same way. If you don’t plan on selling user emails to third parties for marketing purposes, you should say so in a friendly, direct manner.
A small footnote is enough and will help boost the credibility of your website without requiring users to comb through a 50-page Terms and Conditions document. Either way, nobody reads those and you know it.
Pro Tip: Enhance the user experience by adding real-time email verification to your sign up form. This is a great way to keep your form short and simple without compromising its utility while making sure that subscribers sign up with valid and verified emails.
Come up with an out-of-the-box CTA
Forms require user interaction. In many cases, this will be the first real interaction visitors have with your website. The way you solicit that interaction has a major impact on how successful it will be. That’s where your call-to-action comes in.
People are used to website forms and instinctively know what to expect from them. They’ve seen websites telling them to, “get started with your account!” hundreds of times. It works, but there are better ways to get the message across.
Imagine that you’re one of your website users. You are ready to sign up for the newsletter because you believe it will give you regular access to high-quality content about a subject you care about. What should the CTA focus on to stoke your enthusiasm for signing up?
There is only one correct answer here: the subject the user cares about.
Think about CTA text that reminds website visitors about what they get from filling out your form. Keep them focused on that value and you’ll see better conversion results in no time.
Experiment with multi-step forms
A single-step form is a pretty simple tool. Multi-step forms can be a bit more complex, but that complexity can help you drive conversions.
A multi-step form separates the sign-up process into separate pages. This is especially useful for businesses in regulated industries. Website visitors might not know you’re required by law to collect lots of data, so you should make the sign-up experience as fun and interactive as possible.
Animations can make the multi-step signup process less intimidating. can provide users with positive feedback after every step of the signup process. When you break the signup experience into several easy-to-manage steps, you also gain the ability to demonstrate the value of your brand along each step.
One of the easiest ways to do this is by creating animations that explain why each step in the form is important. This can help keep users engaged while completing the otherwise mundane task of filling out a complicated form.
Multi-step forms sometimes work well in simple scenarios, too. If your signup process only requires three fields, you may be able to improve conversions by giving each field its own page, along with a short explainer animation that guides the user through each step.
Optimize your forms to improve conversions
Building forms on WordPress doesn’t have to be complicated, but it should be well thought out.
Using the right form builder is just the first step toward turning forms into a valuable user experience for website visitors.
Take time to fine-tune your forms and look for ways to streamline the process so that new visitors feel compelled to stay in touch with your brand.
Most popular on our Blog
