Everyone these days and in these rough economic times is looking for ways to increase their customer's conversions without a lot of time, effort, and financial outlay. Working with over 50 clients on their web development projects I've noticed that many people over think their signup/onboarding processes and are losing out on a lot of business due to site visitors abandoning the signup process part way through it.
1. People tend to like to use the same username for each site they signup for and unfortunately with no standardized system for users in web development this is not always possible. I advocate using email addresses instead of user names to simplify things.
2. Only make people type their password once and offer an option for them to view the password unmasked to make sure it's the one that they wanted.
3. Automatically fill in the city and state based on the user's postal code. Also, put the most common countries for your site as the top choices if you deal with international users.
4. Have an option to automatically fill in the user's shipping address using their billing information.
5. Ditch captchas and replace them with a mandatory hidden text field that is added via javascript.
6. Set your forms to autofocus the first field so that users can begin typing immediately.
These are just suggestions to get you thinking how many things could be simplified on your site. The general idea here is to reduce the number of pages that a user must navigate through in order to complete your signup or checkout process. Also, anytime we can reduce the amount of typing and the number of clicks required to complete the process we will significantly increase the amount of people who successfully complete the process.
By joining the VAUSA family you'll have access to our team of experts ready to help simplify your signup and increase your conversions from prospect to paying customer. Contact us today to see how we can improve your business processes to maximize earnings and the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.