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Forms are a key component of Landing Pages (in addition to Offer, Image, Trust and Proof). When a visitor considers completing a form — for lead gen, to subscribe or to purchase — it is the moment of truth.

So, it is sad that so many forms work to chase these ready customers and prospects away.

This article will give you some things to consider as you guide development of your website forms in these areas: Right time of informing about problems/success Right place for validation messages Right color Clear language

We often advocate for "stacked" forms vs. multi-column forms. Here is some research that reinforces that. Stacked forms are completed much faster than side-by-side fields.

I recently went to a website to buy a new keyboard for a laptop. I found the site with the right price and delivery and put the keyboard in my cart.

When I went to checkout, the first question on the billing form was Gender.

Gender?

Why does an electronics part manufacturer need to know if I'm a man or woman?

It introduced enough doubt in my process that I left -- I abandoned my order.

The unfortunate statistic is that 86% of visitors abandon forms of all kinds. It's doubly heartbreaking when they do so in thei cart, because that costs you ready buyers.

The eleven recommendations made here will set you on a path to reduce your abandonment rates. My favorites are: 5. Use a title that explains why the user needs to sign up 6. Show them their password (who said invisible passwords was a good idea?) 12. Put errors in an obvious place and make them visible. Happy Converting!

There are a number of best practices when it comes to creating forms on your landing pages.

Fewer fields increases conversion rate. Avoid conversion killering fields like address unless you absolutely need them. Add qualifying questions only to increase the quality of leads. "Submit" is not a proper call to action. No best practice is best for everyone, though. This infograph does a great job of putting some numbers behind the development of the right form for your landing page.

If all problems are opportunities, then error messages and error pages are generally missed opportunities. Marketing should be policing the errors reported on their website, messages that are usually written by a techie in IT. John Ekman give us five steps toward writing error messages that say "Yes!" instead of making the visitor feel like an idiot.

Great video from aWeber

 @peeplaja "People have an infinite attention span if you are entertaining them."

I get a lot of questions about sales letter styled landing pages. Do they work? Do I need to write that much?

My stock answer is that they do work, but that your copywriter needs to know what they are doing. These kind of landing pages typically work with visitors that already know and follow your business.

Peep says it best: "Buyers are readers." There is more wisdom in this entertaining post.

 @neilpatel While it may sound self-serving to share with you an article on why you should spend money with a company like ours, a conversion optimization company, I think you'll find the points made by Neil Patel are a great guide to choosing your conversion optimization strategy.

Yes, you need a conversion optimization strategy, even if you don't hire consultants.

Given Neil's background of creating companies in the online marketing optimization space (KISSmetrics and CrazyEgg), I hope we'll see some more from him in the form of tools.

 @unbounce has provide a post with a double payoff. First, this is a great list of conversion-related stats and, second, a great example of how to design content to be sharable.

The content is sharable for the following reasons: The title contains the call to action "48 Tweetable Stats..." There's something here for everyone The quotes are Twitter-sized for easy sharing in 140 characters Each quote has a call to action in the form of a "Tweet this" link. Every quote So, if you've got something you really want people to share, follow this recipe. For article-style content, use pull quotes and put a "Tweet this" link with each.

These guys are real smarty-pants.

While Kickstarter isn't a typical landing page, this Kickstarter project does a great job of using video in a persuasive way, and including a call to action tied into the page.

If you're using video on your landing pages, you should point to or reference the form on the page in the video.

We've had the privilege of working with several colleges to optimize their websites. The lessons laid out in this article cannot be overstated. According to SpyFu.com, of 5,050 websites in the "University" and "College" industries who spend more than $5000 per month on search ads, only 275 have split testing software installed. However, 4,208 have some form of web analytics software installed.

The bottom line is that those universities who are involved in testing their sites are going to win more top students to graduate and undergraduate programs.

"Many private universities spend upward of $2,000 to recruit each student who enrolls." A little optimization will go a long way.

Retargeting Emails - Do E-commerce customers like or loathe them? March 10th, 2011Leave a commentGo to comments By Charles Nicolls, SeeWhy At SeeWhy, when we first launched our remarketing service in 2009, Randy Stross wrote a piece about email remarketing in The New York Times suggesting that while remarketing might be a great idea for ecommerce websites, it's not a great idea for consumers. He likened emails following up on abandoned shopping carts to a salesman chasing you down the street if you didn't buy from his store. There are major differences, of course. We've long argued that remarketing emails, when done well, not only drive conversions but also build brand trust. They can deliver great service and provide customers with the confidence to return to buy-either online, by phone or in store. If Randy was right and customers universally resented the intrusion, then these emails wouldn't work. In aiming to answer the question more substantively, I turned to data, and specifically email marketing benchmarks. The key metrics to look at to determine whether customers like or loathe remarketing emails are: the recovery rate the open rate the clickthrough rate the unsubscribe rate Frankly, the evidence is overwhelming: Remarketing, when done well, is appreciated by customers. Here's the evidence: (1) The recovery rate The recovery rate is the percentage of visitors that abandon shopping carts, and remarketed visitors thatthen return and purchase following remarketing. At SeeWhy, we measure recovery rates across all our customers, and currently the average is 20 percent. So, one in five shopping cart abandoners come back and buy, having being remarketed. In some cases, the recovery rate is as high as 50 percent. Moreover, when remarketed customers buy, they spend on average 55 percent more than customers who didn't abandon their shopping carts. (2) The open rate The average email open rate for remarketing emails is currently 46 percent, m

 @marcommadness We've built a very successful and growing business on a foundation of content. Our prospects pull up on road paved by content.

So, I was glad to see this well-written Relevance article that mentioned our content creation service.

These five tips are not typical, and are truly the reasons we have succeeded. Automate Content Development Be authentic and vulnerable Writers should learn to code (huge advantage). Long form content.

Here's a nice story about how data can be used to drive design and content decisions. Click tracking (heatmaps), session recording and user polling are all tools we put to good use here in the lab for our clients.

And if you want a fantastic example of using storytelling to educate and entertain, this post is just such a thing.