Your hotel has already invested in developing a website, improving search engine optimisation (SEO) and on Google Ads campaigns. Your brand website attracts a decent amount of search traffic. Now, for example, your hotel wants to leverage this traffic to drive more business for banqueting. However, your lead conversions seem to be below par. Have you thought about checking the design of its lead form?

The main objective of a lead form is to drive as many relevant submissions as possible. Here we list down the seven best practices to improve your landing page lead generation form design, which will ensure a higher conversion rate:

Be brief

Craft a lead form that seeks only essential information from visitors such as name, phone number, email ID, etc. You do not want the customer to give this process too much thought. Did you know that every additional field that requests information reduces your fill rate by around 4%? Asking for too much information might also seem like an invasion of privacy and may deter some guests from clicking on the ‘Submit’ button. For others, it might simply be too much work.

Make the form to look small

Adding to the above point, a big lead form may give the impression that the visitor has to provide a lot of information. Try to accommodate the ‘Submit’ button of your lead form above the fold — ideally the entire form should fit on your screen, without the need for scrolling. Placing the ‘Submit’ button in the same fold will help reduce the fill time and increase the rate of conversions.

Make it mobile-friendly

According to studies online, nearly 60% of the world’s population uses the internet, out of which 93% access the world wide web via mobile. Responsive web designs will help you create mobile-friendly forms. Did you know that nearly two-thirds of visitors are likely to return to a mobile-friendly website?

Employ common usability design principles

If your service or product comprises different offerings and the visitor should select only one option, make sure to use a radio button instead of a checkbox or drop-down menu. On the other hand, if the visitor has the option to select multiple offerings, checkboxes are preferable.

Ensure visual hygiene

Ensure that field instructions (name, email, etc) are clear and visible. You could include placeholder text in the field to make this more clear. For example, in the name field, you could prompt ‘Enter your name’. It is also important that the fields are distinguishable from the background colour of your lead form.

Make it customer-centric

It is good practice to send a confirmation or a thank you message to the visitor for submitting a lead. This will let them know that their message has been received. Additionally, ask for consent by providing a brief privacy policy note. Lastly, ensure that your form is compliant with ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), which is a legal requirement in the US and a few other countries.

Other best practices

Your lead form could support Google’s autofill, which will increase submissions exponentially. You could also provide a multi-lingual lead form.
(Learn more about designing optimal landing pages for your hotel website.)

7 tricks to design the optimal lead generation form for hotels