How Website Forms Drive Phone Calls

Website forms

It may be surprising that the design of your website forms impact whether or not a visitor will pick up the phone and call.

The crux of marketing best practices is to test each idea and then continue to do what brings the best results. 

What is the best practice for website forms? What information should marketers collect? And what type of form fills generate the best results?

Brian Massey is the founder and conversion scientist at Conversion Sciences, the conversion optimization testing experts. His extensive marketing research provides us the answer to how website forms dive phone calls. 

Long Website Forms

Many people may hesitate before putting a long form on their site for visitors to fill out. They seem daunting and even overwhelming. Many long website forms are not user-friendly. If you want website visitors to fill out and submit their information, then the long versions may not the best.  

However, when optimizing for phone calls, tests showed that maybe a long, arduous form was just the right choice.

Conversion Sciences tested which option would get people to call the most often, a long form to fill, a short form to fill, or no form to fill.

Despite the different lengths in forms, each page asked the visitors to call.

Shockingly, tests showed that the page with the longest, most complicated form generated the most calls.

On the other hand, completely taking the form off the page caused a 56% drop in phone calls.

In fact, it seemed that the uglier and nastier the form, the more phone calls went up.

Potentially, the extensive form caught people’s attention, but the call to action gave them a way out. Instead of filling out an ugly form, they could just call. And that phone call felt easy.

A shorter form, on the other hand, was easier to simply fill out. Website visitors just completed the website form and did not call.

Lastly, when a web page did not have any website forms at all but still asked visitors to call,  it failed to catch visitors’ attention. The lack of website forms generated the least amount of phone calls.

So the takeaway from this research is…

The longer the form, the more likely website visitors are to call.

You can test this yourself.  Provide a clear call to action with a call tracking number for each version of your website forms. Also, you will want the call tracking number to be a dynamically inserted number or DNI so you can attribute each caller to the specific consumer touchpoint or lead source.

Tracking numbers are crucial for testing your website forms effectiveness. Prove it to yourself that long website forms drive phone calls.