How long should your registration forms be? How many fields should you make people fill out?

Shorter forms will almost always give you higher conversion. But there isn't a single answer to this question for everyone (or even for every offer or campaign with a single company).

If you're filling the top of your funnel with as many early-stage prospects as possible, ask for as little as possible. Name & email. Maybe company and title.

But if you're targeting people further down the funnel, or simply want better qualified leads, you can ask more to help automate the qualification of your leads up front.

I agree with Matt. Less is more. The trick is balancing the need to pre-qualify (with more questions) vs. optimizing response rates (fewer questions). In most cases, the sales or marketing team need far fewer data points than are initially added to the form. For optimal conversion rates, limit your required fields to 3 or 4, then follow up with surveys and other actions that will further qualify the prospect and build out your database for segmentation. For larger forms, up the ante in terms of value proposition: give them more (information/tools/products/swag) for them giving you more (information).

The less friction the better but the fields you ask for should map to your goals. Don't ask for 15 fields just because they're nice to have. You should have a reason for requiring them - whether it's for scoring, routing or data governance.

I see so many forms that ask for crazy amounts of data and I wonder what people are doing with all of it... I know most of these companies aren't sending me faxes or snail mail.

With all the great technology out there for appending data it's easy to go with shorter forms but testing is critical to understand what will yield the best conversion. When possible, if you can pull in some of the data you need from a 3rd party (like Demandbase) then you're probably better off asking for fewer fields.

At the end of the day - your form strategy cannot exist in a vacuum. It needs to be part of a larger lead management strategy. If your company has a lead nurturing process and uses progressive profiling, you can get away with asking for fewer fields because the subsequent touches will collect the additional data in a way that won't tax your prospect. However, there is no guarantee that your prospect will continue to engage so gather the essential data up front and use progressive profiling to collect additional data that you will use to guide the buyer's journey.

The best registration page is no registration page at all ;-)

For B2B campaigns, replacing your registration page with a "Register via LinkedIn" button can result in 60% (or higher) conversion - you just need the user to click on the button - and, for that user to have a LinkedIn account (with populated profile).

The LinkedIn profile may not have all the fields you need, so the key is to capture the lead first and then acquire additional qualifiers in stages. Documentation on the LinkedIn Profile API can be found here:

http://developer.linkedin.com/docs/DOC-1002

Also agree short forms best and besides using just Linkedin as an option for login you could also add a Facebook Login. They offer their API as well

All of the above make relevant points - the only other to add is: TESTING.
If you think your offer will convert better with a short form - do some A/B testing until you find the optimal balance of high conversion with an amount of data that is useful for you to continue a marketing/sales relationship.
FWIW: our own forms tested at almost identical rates with both long and short forms, so on balance we would rather have more data. We are toying with using Fbook or LI logins though.

You should have as many fields to grab information as you plan to use. Don't ask address if you are never going to use it. Don't ask my gender if you are never going to send me gender specific stuff. Its not a question of long vs short and which one converts better. Its a matter of what you intend to do with that information.

For some companies, long forms convert better, for others its short. If you have doubts, then create and on-boarding program and progressively profile people.

Andrew Kordek
Co-Founder, Trendline Interactive
A Cross-Channel Messaging Agency
Twitter: @andrewkordek & @trendlinei
Email: andrew@trendlineinteractive.com

Studies have been done that show that every field you put on your form further decreases registrations. The studies have shown that when you take the number of decreased registrations (through testing), and then divide that number by the cost of the campaign, every field you add increases cost per registration by $3. A best practice is to either use progressive profiling through your Automation solution or, after a registration send that data to a company like Reachforce to have all of the rest of the important segmentation data appended. This way, you get all of the other important firmographic info, keep your regs' high, but only have to ask for a little.

Andrew is right, don't ask if you don't need. But the sign-up form isn’t only about the number of questions. Actually you can have a better performing form with more questions than you would have with less. Here are some things to stress:

* Make sure your sign-up page is well structured
* Your page should be somewhat visually attractive, but in line with the rest of the site
* A good match with the page they came from (don’t break momentum)
* It should contain logical questions and be very conscious about required fields
* Pre-fill fields where possible
* Field checks shout not be irritating
It also makes a huge difference if the fields have descriptions above, left or inside the fields. If you have a lot to ask, you can break the questions up into different stages and divide the questions over several pages.

A good resource is the unbounce blog: http://unbounce.com/blog/
& copyblogger about landingpages: http://www.copyblogger.com/landing-pages/

Hope that helps!

Jordie van Rijn
emailmarketing consultant at http://www.emailmonday.com