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If your forms are not optimized, you’re bleeding opportunities. You better make it your mission to keep improving them to your customers and business needs.

Let’s see how you should do this in four ultimate sign-up form conversion optimization steps.

Forms are built for different objectives and different designs. Here are some examples:

• Sign-up
• Subscription
• Checkout
• Donation
• Survey
• Event registration
• Download (content)
• Contact
• Gift Card request
• Support ticket
• Custom

Quickly, we have got eleven form types. Today, we will work and optimize the sign-up one!

Analytics: Tracking Form Submissions

If you don't already use a web analytics tool you'll need to choose one that can easily track your website visitors and their interactions with your forms and website.

Then, you will need to track form submissions as an event or conversion. If you don’t have the technical, Tag Management, or JavaScript skills, a tool like Weelytics can help you track your website forms without coding.

Form submit event tracking in Google Analytics is also quite easy to set up. Tracking form submissions with Google Tag Manager is even easier.

What Conversion Rate To Expect?

After setting up your forms sign-up conversions, you will see conversions and conversion rates on your analytics tool.

But what's a good conversion rate? That's a little bit of a  "how long is a string" question but Formstack conducted research just for this.

Whether you're above or below your industry average, always commit to optimize your form.

Everything Is An Hypothesis

The best way to optimize your sign-up form is to consider any best practices and advice as hypotheses and to A/B test them. What works for in case doesn't need to work in yours. It may work.

So.... Please, test, test and test!

Start With The Why

According to Simon Sinek, the fundamental difference between the "Apples" of the world and everyone else is that they start with "why."

What does that mean? To explain, Sinek has developed the "Golden Circle" pictured below:

• Why: The core belief of the business. It's why the business exists.
• How: How the business fulfills that core belief.
• What: What the company does to fulfill that core belief.

The closer you can get to providing people exactly what they want, the better your conversions will be.

So on your landing page, instead of showing your product reviews from Forbes and TechCrunch ,or listing the very advanced integration features, why not share your values and how you are making your customers marketing work easier?

Check GoSquared sign-up form below (a real time web analytics tool):

They clearly share the why: Start making your customers happier today

By signing up you will make your customers happier.

Keep It Short

Web attention is decreasing. Attention span in 2015 was 8.25 seconds.

To put that into context: that's shorter than the average attention span of a goldfish.

This is a big reason to get to your form objectives as quick as we can. This may require less form fields.

Some websites use just one field (email address) to quick start the process.

It looks extreme? Don’t forget that you can still ask for follow-up information in a second page or by email.

Social Sign-ups

Heard of “Password Fatigue”? Yes, there is a Wikipedia page for this term!

The immediate result is that your customers will leave, because they forgot, misplaced, or don’t care to retrieve their username and/or password.

As marketers our goal is to avoid this to happen and make our future customers sign-up experience as simple and easy as possible.

Between Facebook, Google, and Twitter, most of our visitors have at least one account on one of those websites. Why not use the information already available and make it a one click process to fill your sign-up form fields?

At Trello.com you can sign-up with a click of a button if you have a Google account. I use everyday and love it. Easy?

What about your sign-up form, How it is working for you?