How many form fields do you use in basic forms?

[Anonymous]

We're kicking off some new demand gen efforts to build - and enhance the health of - our database. We'll be using ReachForce Smart Forms, so I get to focus on gathering the scoring data that I really want 🙂

Looking around, I see the following as pretty standard fields: First/last name, email and company (especially for folks with RF forms). But the agency doing some of our content is all "you should only use email address" and pushing back. Now, I know I'm the customer and they really should be all "yes ma'am" and not push-back-y, but I'd still love to hear what y'all consider a best practice. 

I'm not counting on more than a second form fill to grab more data, so my thought was to progressively profile with first, last, email, company on the first fill, and job title + role on the second. IF I can get a 3rd fill, was going to go for purchase timeframe and authority...

What are you doing?

VV

[Kim_Allen]

Hey,

It really depends on the content on what type of form we use. We usually do email, first, last, state, company (a lot) for big gated content. We need state to assign leads. We have a short and long contact us form and use them differently.

But we have recently decided to try out a single-field email form. If you look at Marketo's blog that is kindof what we are going for... just an easy way to sign up and then we will progressively profile in the future.

[Anonymous]

The industry best practice is to ask for the least amount of information necessary. As you increase the number of form fields, there is a corresponding decrease in form completion rate. Here is an article that talks about form best practices: 

https://econsultancy.com/blog/62987-12-useful-tips-for-web-form-optimisation


Reachforce is a LaunchPoint partner solution that will help you solve this problem. You can enrich data for a lead if you have a lead's email. For example, if I fill in a form on your website with my email "mmanzur@marketo.com," then Reachforce's solution can tell you my name is Murtza Manzur, my company is Marketo, and my title is Developer Evangelist. This way you can get all the data you need about a lead, while increasing the number of leads who complete a form. The best part is Reachforce's solution is integrated with Marketo. So this will be done automatically for you. For more information, check out Reachforce's LaunchPoint listing: 

http://launchpoint.marketo.com/reachforce/721-smartforms-b2b-marketing-data-collection/