Growing your center means encouraging more parents to sign up for tours and enroll their families at your daycare. After parents find your center and browse your website, their next step should be contacting you to learn more or schedule a tour. A web form is convenient for both your staff and parents. Ensuring your form is designed with best practices in mind will encourage more website visitors to fill it out.
Do your website’s forms follow these design tips?
1. Only ask for essential details
Asking too many questions right off the bat can discourage busy parents from completely filling out your form and submitting their information. When you confirm their tour, or even in person, ask for any additional details you may need. We know details help you provide a great tour experience and make sure you’re a good fit for families. However, if your web form is so in-depth it discourages moms and dads from even filling it out, you’ll never have a chance to get to know the family at all!
Reducing forms to only the details you really need has proven successful for businesses in many industries. By reducing their form from 11 fields to four, one company increased form submissions by 120%!
2. Organize web forms logically
Start with the least complicated information and work your way toward details that parents might have to think about. Put fields asking for similar details near each other. Make sure that when you’re done organizing all the input fields, they look nice overall.
3. Add helpful descriptions
If a step is complicated or may stump parents, add text explaining exactly what you’re looking for. This will not only make website visitors more likely to fill out your form, but it will also make things simpler for your staff. When parents submit the correct information, it’s easier to tailor a tour and subsequent marketing to them.
4. Use a descriptive call to action
Instead of a button that says “Submit,” opt for calls to action that describe why a site visitor is submitting the form, such as “Sign Up for a Tour.” If you have multiple forms on your website that lead to different results, this step is especially important. You don’t want parents to think they scheduled a tour when they actually added themselves to your email newsletter list or signed up for automatic billing.
5. Keep mobile users in mind
More than half of all Google searches come from mobile devices, so it’s important your web form design is easy to use on a smartphone. A mobile-friendly form has big buttons, large text, doesn’t require long answers and limits the number of options on dropdowns so users don’t have to scroll.
6. Test your web form
Use your form on different devices to see how easy it is to understand and use. Ask your staff and parents to do the same.
