A slight change to our forms got us 5x as many conversions

What’s a multi-stage form, and when should I use them?

Sometimes, a single-stage form is the right tool for the job.

For capturing very simple information - your visitors’ email for a monthly newsletter, for example - it simply wouldn’t make sense to drag out the process over multiple pages.

A multi-stage form, on the other hand, is when you do split up a long data-entry form over multiple pages.

The first page might only ask for the user’s name and email address; after they submit, they’ll be taken to a second page which asks for more details like their company name, job role, and credit card details.

This is perfect for when you need to capture more detailed, qualified leads.

You may still be wondering how much of a difference multi-stage forms really make, so let’s get a bit more specific about the benefits…

More people complete multi-stage forms

Being bombarded with a million fields to fill in at once is overwhelming. Your prospect is likely to take one look at your form, sigh, and click the ‘X’ in the top right corner.

A multi-stage form, on the other hand, presents the fields in much more palatable bite-sized chunks.

The psychological effect here is twofold; first, your prospect is not inhibited by knowing the scale of the task ahead of them. Second, after the second page they’re likely to think “Oh go on then, I’ve come this far…”.

You can retarget people who abandon your forms

Let’s say your website visitor fills out half of a big single-stage form but then gives up.

Guess what? They didn’t actually submit any of that data, so you won’t ever know anything about them!

Multi-stage forms submit the data after every page. That means if someone fills in their name and email address on the first page, but then gives up when they see the second page of fields… you still capture their data and you can get in touch for a second shot at converting them.

Thanks to CANDDi’s ability to recognize any of these individual visitors every time they return to the site, we’ve had a lot of success converting people who abandon the sign-up process. You can read Jasmine’s blog about it here!

CANDDi’s experience with multi-stage forms

When we launched our free trial back in March, we knew we’d have to do a lot of manual work on our side to set up trial accounts. As a result, we chose to ensure our sign-ups were serious about trying us out by requiring credit card details during registration.

The issue was that we were using a single-stage form… which meant we presented our prospects with a massive list of fields (including ones for card details) straight away.

Whether because of the daunting prospect of so much typing, or a reluctance to hand over payment details for a free trial… the result was a 3% conversion rate on our free trial page.

After two weeks, we made the simple change of moving the credit card fields to a second registration page. The impact was huge: 16% of visitors complete the first form on our free trial page now.

You might think this is only because we removed the obstacle presented by credit card details. But interestingly, 6% of page 1 visitors now submit BOTH of the free trial registration forms without us needing to get in touch.

So in short, splitting up our sign-up form doubled the number of free trial sign-ups we get. And better still, it gave us more than a 5x boost to new captured leads overall. That’s pretty good going!

Do you have any interesting sales or marketing processes that work well for you? Get in touch - we’re always up for chatting!