The Enquiry Form Nobody Finishes

The invisible failure

A submitted form appears in your inbox. An abandoned one produces nothing.

So a form that half the people give up on looks identical, from the inside, to one that everybody completes, and the only visible number is the enquiries you did get.

Which means this failure can run for years without anybody noticing, since there is nothing to notice.

The first step is not fixing anything, it is making the abandonment visible.

The one number to start with

Form views against form submissions, which most analytics can produce with a little setup.

Count how many people saw the form and how many sent it, and the ratio is your starting figure.

You do not need a benchmark, since the useful comparison is against your own figure over time and between forms.

Where two forms on the same site have very different ratios, the difference is the form rather than the audience.

Set this up before changing anything, since otherwise you cannot tell whether a change helped.

That is one afternoon of configuration and it converts guessing into measurement.

Then find where they stop

• Which field they reached and left.
• Which field takes longest.
• Which field produces the most corrections.
• Whether it differs on mobile.
• Whether errors appear before they leave.

The third is the most useful and least obvious. A field people repeatedly retype is one they do not understand, and confusion produces abandonment more reliably than length does.

The fields people abandon at

Predictable enough to check first.

Telephone number, where people are deciding whether they want a call.

Budget, which people resist answering before they know anything.

Address, where it is not obvious why you need it.

Anything requiring a lookup, such as a model number or a policy reference, since the person leaves to find it and does not come back.

And anything with an unexplained format requirement, where a rejected entry is the last thing they try.

Each has the same remedy: explain why you need it, make it optional, or ask for it later.

A worked example

A business had a nine-field form and a steady but modest number of enquiries.

Setting up view and submission tracking showed that about a third of the people who reached the form sent it.

Recording which field was last interacted with showed most abandonment at a required budget field.

They made it optional and added a line explaining it helped them respond usefully.

Submissions rose by roughly half over the following two months, and about a third of people still filled the budget in voluntarily.

The enquiries without a budget were slightly less useful and there were considerably more of them.

Errors are the other half

Since a form people cannot submit is a form they abandon.

Check what happens when a field is filled in wrongly: whether the message is clear, whether it appears near the field, and whether the rest of the form is preserved.

A form that clears itself on an error loses almost everybody, and it is a common default.

Check the format requirements are not stricter than they need to be, particularly on telephone numbers, where spaces and brackets are frequently rejected for no reason.

And check the error appears at all, since a silent rejection where nothing happens on submit is the worst version and produces no enquiry and no complaint.

Test this yourself deliberately, entering wrong values on purpose, which nobody does after the initial build.

Check it on a phone properly

Because that is where most of this happens and where testing does not.

Fill in your own form on a phone, outside, with one hand, as a customer would.

Watch for fields the keyboard covers, dropdowns that are awkward, and the submit button being below the fold with no indication it exists.

Check the keyboard type changes appropriately, so a number field produces a number pad rather than a full keyboard.

And check the form survives the phone rotating or an interruption, since a form that empties when somebody takes a call loses them.

Ask fewer things

The remedy that works most often, having measured where the problem is.

For each field, ask whether you can respond usefully without it.

Anything you could establish in your reply does not need to be on the form, since the person has already agreed to talk to you by that point.

Four fields is enough for most enquiry forms: name, contact, what they need, and roughly where.

Everything else is a preference dressed as a requirement, and each one costs a proportion of the people who would have contacted you.

Check the form still works at all

Worth ruling out first, since it produces the same symptom and is more common than anybody expects.

A form can stop delivering silently after a plugin update, a hosting change, or an email configuration change, and it keeps showing a success message to the person who filled it in.

From the inside that looks exactly like abandonment: the enquiries stop and nothing indicates why.

Submit your own form before investigating anything else, and confirm the message actually arrives rather than that the page said it did.

Then do that monthly, since the failure recurs and is silent every time.

The counter-case

More submissions is not automatically better.

A short form produces more enquiries and some of them are worse, and a business already at capacity may prefer the filtering a longer form provides.

Qualifying fields genuinely save time where the volume is high and the fit varies, which is a legitimate trade rather than a mistake.

The point is to make that trade deliberately, with the figures, rather than discovering years later that a required field was costing half the enquiries.

Measure first, remove what you can justify removing, and watch what happens to enquiry quality as well as quantity.

What to do

1. Track form views against submissions.
2. Record which field is last touched.
3. Check the usual suspects: phone, budget, address.
4. Enter wrong values and watch what happens.
5. Fill it in yourself on a phone, outside.
6. Make optional anything you can respond without.
7. Watch quality as well as volume afterwards.

Step one is what makes the rest possible, since without it every change is a guess and no change can be evaluated.

How many fields is too many is covered in how many fields before people give up.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.