If you’re tired of filling out online forms that are unreasonably lengthy then you are not the only one. But what about forms with conditional logic in them? You’ll find out in today’s article.
Let’s not start listing out the reasons for filling out or building forms online. Because it’s a huge thing to mention. Sometimes people can quickly finish up a form and carry on with their respective tasks online. But most of the time, painfully long forms, piled up fields to fill up, make them avoid submitting.
This Can Hurt Your Conversion Rate
Now that poses a problem for online or eCommerce businesses.
Because many times they have to make customers go through a bunch of forms of which some are optional while others are compulsory to be filled out.
If the form complexity or a number of fields are more than necessary and irrelevant to a customer’s experience then that will result in form abandonment.
You are going to have to say goodbye to getting form submissions if you make your forms really complex with the number of fields you are putting, hard-to-understand questions you are asking.
Stats That Will Raise Your Brows
Marketing Insider Group says that around 78% of internet users’ purchase intention increases by relevant content from quality brands.
On the other hand, when the experience is not relevant to the users, the effectiveness of marketing campaigns can drop down by a staggering 83%!
That means all your marketing plans and strategies can be ruined with the wrong methods of building online forms.
How to Turn Your Boring Forms into Smart Forms?
To solve the issue mentioned earlier above, building smart forms with conditional logic can turn the tables and get you more user submissions.
WP Guidant built a Multi-step Guided Selling Process & Smart Forms to Convert 10X More Traffic Into Leads & New Customers.
That being said, with the help of conditional logic, you can make your forms more attractive and easy for your users.
Collect the much-needed information from them with conditional fields, without making them annoyed.
This will put a good impression on them and of course, will increase your eCommerce store’s conversion rate a lot.
But before we dive into making WordPress smart forms, we should be clear about the concept of conditional logic.
What is Conditional Logic on WordPress Forms?
To put it in simple terms, conditional logic is an “if-this-then-that” type of rule that makes a WordPress form more responsive and dynamic.
A set of predefined rules that changes based on user inputs on specified form fields. This can improve user experience by showing or hiding fields based on a user’s choices.
That way you can tailor your forms to show your customers only what they are actually looking for.
So if you want to make your forms short but want to collect all the necessary information from your users, then conditional logic is the way to go.
It can do wonders for you if you apply it properly on your WordPress forms. Most importantly it can reduce the form abandonment rate to a great extent. Because people nowadays prefer a personalized experience while shopping or seeking any service online.
If the customers are bombarded with unnecessary choices, complex and lengthy web forms then sure you will lose reputation, and eventually your site and service will lose value to people.
The scenario gets worse with mobile users as they will not spend a second more on your form if the above-mentioned condition is true for your site.
Which is why using smart forms with conditional logic can be a lifesaver.
Let’s Put Things into Perspective
To make things clearer, let’s draw an example. Imagine you are an event organizer who has a WordPress site displaying services to people.
Now, if you create a form that includes query fields regarding all the services you provide, imagine how long and cumbersome your form is going to be. In fact, even you will be hassled or annoyed to fill up your own form.
The reasoning for that is really simple actually. If a person is planning to hold an office event, they will surely not go through your service for a wedding event, right?
If they go for the office event option, other relevant questions such as “How many people will attend?”, “Do you need a caterer”, “Do you have a venue selected?” and such relevant questionnaires should appear.
Now if they choose another type of service, another set of questions should be shown to them that is relevant to their choice.
Conditional Logic Saves The Day
That is how applying conditional logic with conditional fields makes it smarter and better compared to the boring and less effective ones.
Stay rest assured that your customers will have a better user experience while filling out your form.
Give them what they are looking for and hide the information and form fields that do not concern them by building forms with conditional logic.
Important Form Practices Regarding Conditional Fields
Let’s look at some best form practices that will help you improve your customer experience while maintaining a better conversion rate.
Follow these tips when you are adding conditional fields to your forms.
1. Simplicity is The Way to Go
Now that you know how conditional logic works, try to use them smartly and do not overdo things. Just because you can hide your fields using conditional logic that does not mean you can go ahead and add as many fields as you desire.
Shorter forms with relevant and to-the-point conditional fields ensure better customer experience and improved website conversion rate as well.
A study run by HubSpot on 40,000 landing pages shows that conversion rates decrease when the number of form fields increases.
The sweet spot in the number of fields is between 3 and 5. More than that will have negative effects on the conversion. If you have more queries then you can simply break your forms into smaller portions and then showcase them sequentially.
Do not overburden the users with excessive amounts of fields which might infuriate them and make them leave your site at once.
NOTE: Check out this blog for more details on best form practices that will increase your chance to score more audience and form submissions.
2. Mention Whether a Conditional Field is Required or Not
It is always important to let your customers or users know whether a specific conditional field is required to be filled up or not. It is quite an important thing to keep in mind while making forms with conditional logic.
Because obviously everyone might not know about which fields to leave from the get-go. And, it really hampers the overall user experience if they get an error at the end of the submission.
The best thing to do is put a required sign or tag on the form fields you do not want them to miss.
3. Build Relatable Trigger Fields for Their Conditional Fields
This one is simple to understand but many people still make mistakes on this.
Always make the fields that will trigger the conditional fields relevant and meaningful. For example, let’s say, a customer has clicked on “Get email updates” on your form.
Then it is only reasonable to build forms with conditional logic that shows options of the type of email content they want to receive.
Such as product updates, promotional email, blog or post updates, insider news, etc.
Now if they opt-in for the email updates and the next thing that appears is a bunch of irrelevant questions such as “What is your favorite holiday destination” or something like, “What is your first pet’s name” and so on, then the user will start scratching their head and may abandon the form.
If the users find the conditional fields as obscure or irrelevant as mentioned, then there is definitely a high chance of them not answering them.
So keep that thing in mind if you are trying to create smart forms with conditional logic.
How Does Conditional Logic Work on WP Guidant?
WP Guidant has the option of using condition logic while building guides. While it is not completely similar to a usual form builder with conditional logic. WP Guidant plugin has a different take on that.
You can make your product recommendation guides more attractive and precise with the proper application of conditional logic. Give your customers a totally impressive personalized shopping experience by building smart forms with conditional logic.
See the way it works is, the guides have various filters such as form, slider, and card.
With the help of conditional fields, you can narrow down to user-specific options or recommendations of products and services. Which means that only the relevant filters will show up based on the previous input.
And, that will save your customers the trouble of going through unnecessary options.
Check out our YouTube tutorial on how to set up conditional logic in the WP Guidant plugin (click on the image).
If you find it a bit hard to apply this at first, do not worry, it will not take much time to get used to building smart forms with conditional logic.
Final Words
In this article, we have talked about the importance of WordPress smart forms with conditional logic elaborately. Conditional logic can really do wonders if you know how to use them properly.
But with that being said, even if this technique is cool in action, do not add unnecessary conditional fields to your forms. That is a bad practice to avoid.
If they do not pose as something important to be filled up then do not go for them. The main concern should be keeping your forms as simple and straightforward as possible.
Do not forget to leave a comment down below and share your thoughts with us.
Until next time, stay safe!