In the eCommerce world, they battle against abandoned shopping carts. In local services, the parallel problem is people abandoning form fills because they are too long.
So how do you solve “form filler” abandonment?
This is an issue that we faced at our agency, True Blue Collar, when we were designing our HVAC Pricing Tool.
The conundrum we faced was such:
We have to ask enough questions so that we can deliver an accurate HVAC system install quote, but we don’t want to ask so many questions in a long form that we discourage the “form filler” from abandoning the form midway or from even starting it.
The solution we settled on was breaking our long form into a multiple step form.
And now we made human nature our ally rather than our enemy!
We ran a small A/B test with one long form and one multi-step form and we found that our multi-step form had a significant improvement in completion. My hypothesis is that this happened for two reasons:
Consumers are overloaded with daily tasks and when faced with a lengthy form, they tend to make a quick calculation that the reward does not match the effort they must expend. By breaking the form into multiple steps, we take away any perceived difficulty. I should note that our initial steps do not list how many steps there are (no “Step 1 of 9”) as this would immediately add back in perceived difficulty.
The “Sunk Cost Fallacy” is a tendency to feel like we’ve invested enough time and effort into something that we can’t abandon it now.
Our Pricing Tool has 9 Steps before the consumer gets to a price quote for an HVAC system, and the first 5 are questions about their specific needs (type of system, power source, style of home, size of home, & number of zones) before we even ask for Contact information.
And Contact information is where you can expect push back from a consumer.
This is the point where they may feel they are being sold and might be tempted to push back and abandon the form. But as they are now 5 steps into the process, and 5 steps where they actually contributed self-perceived effort, the “Sunk Cost Fallacy” rears its head and the consumer pushes on.
I should note that this is where we add a progress meter to the form. The progress meter no longer represents perceived difficulty, but instead acts as an encouragement to finish and get the prize!
I know that you may not have the resources to do extensive A/B testing so just follow this tried & tested rule when it comes to forms:
If a form looks daunting to YOU then consider breaking it into multiple steps.
Consumers can be hard to fish for so don’t lose one when you have them on the hook.
