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All businesses, regardless of their sizes, require online forms. These online forms provide an easy way to collect information from both current and potential customers. The information collected is crucial as it can help companies make better business decisions.
Without these online forms, which are created using a form creator, marketers may find it difficult to obtain information on potential customers and track data about purchases, new leads, customers’ feedback, survey responses, and so on. If you want your business to succeed in this digital world, you should have at least one online form on your website.
But before delving into how online forms can benefit your business, let’s first understand what these online forms are.
What Are Online Forms?
An online form is a web page where your website visitors enter their personal information that is then sent to a server for processing. For instance, visitors can provide their names or email address to sign up for a newsletter or even place an order.
It’s worth mentioning that there is no “one size fits all” when it comes to these online forms. That’s because they vary in format, length, appearance, and content type. They should typically fit your business’s needs and help you gather as much information as you want from your leads. That also means there is no single way to create an online form.
How Online Forms Can Benefit Your Business
Now that you have a better understanding of what online forms are, let’s see how they can benefit your business.
1. They are Easy to Use
The first benefit of using online forms is that they are pretty easy to use. The drag and drop feature of online forms allows creating forms within a few minutes without writing a single line of code.
Most online form builders come with pre-built templates, making it easy for you to create forms from scratch. You’ll be able to arrange your form and give it a more professional look.
2. Saves You Time and Money
As a business owner, you want to ensure that you reduce expenses as much as possible. You can achieve that by using online forms.
Traditionally, companies used to collect forms by sending their teams to the field all day and then enter the data into their systems at the end of the day. Of course, this used to consume a lot of time that could be used for handling other core activities of the business. But thanks to online forms, all these hassles have been eliminated.
Your website visitors can fill out these forms whenever they visit your website, and the data is automatically entered into your system. This not only saves your business a substantial amount of time but also money, which could otherwise be used on paper, toner, printers, cartridges, and more.
3. Generating Leads
Most online forms are designed to help you integrate your marketing strategies and acquire leads in a much better way. Not only will you be able to collect the names and email addresses of your leads but you’ll also be able to set your CRM structure to promote specific actions.
For example, if your visitor completes a form on your website to download a guide, once the download is complete, you can send them a direct and personalized email immediately. Moreover, the form can allow you to offer other essential information or links which are related to the topic that the visitor is interested in.
In other words, you can turn your passive data collection into an active lead in your CRM solution. You can achieve this by performing automatic and specific actions with the data you’ve gathered from your online forms.
4. Communication with Your Website Visitors
Remember that your website visitors are your potential customers. So you need to communicate with them before they leave your website. This is where online forms become crucial as you can use them to communicate with the people who visit your website.
These online forms are usually designed based on various types of circumstances to help you obtain new data submissions in every possible situation. And the best thing is that you can easily design your online form in a way that promotes content downloads, registration for events, subscriptions, etc.
This kind of form will, of course, help you build connections, strengthen relationships, and effectively communicate with people who visit your site.
5. Decreases the Bounce Rate
Lack of the right contract form on your website can significantly diminish the interest of your visitors on your site. Consequently, the bounce rate of your website increases. Bounce rate basically means when your visitors spend considerably less time on your website. So, how can online form decrease your website’s bounce rate?
Online forms come with various features that allow you to control where your users go once they’ve submitted their forms. For instance, you can transfer them to the page where most users tend to start their journeys on your site, or you can move them to another page altogether.
Therefore, you need to make your form not only more attractive but also more engaging to decrease the bounce rate. This can help you get more form submissions on your website.
Different Types of Online Forms
Here are some of the most common types of online forms:
- Newsletter signup
- Sales contract
- Customer feedback
- Online order and payments
- Account signup
- Website Visitor feedback
- Event Registration
- Survey form
Tips to Help You Create a Great Online Form
When creating an online form, you need to consider some essential things that will make your form not only easy to use but very helpful for both your website visitors and your business. These include:
- Make your form visually appealing
- Be direct to the point
- Make the form very organized and easy to read