How Low Can He Go: A Tale of Drastic Signup Form Field Elimination

Common wisdom says that the fewer fields on a signup form, the better it will convert. While it is hard to pin down exactly how much each additional field reduces conversions, this general guideline holds true. But how many is too many, and when do you know your form is just right? There’s no right answer, but less is more. In most cases, you can cut out almost all of the fields on the signup form.

Each customer must go through the customer acquisition funnel. Each step is a chance for the person to learn more and become more engaged with your brand and product. It brings them closer to the goal of becoming your paying customer. Each step also carries a risk that they person will give up and won’t continue.

Temptation

You are building a B2B SaaS. You ask yourself, what information do I want from my customers when signing up for a trial. Too often it is something like:

• First name
• Last name
• Email address
• Company name
• Phone number
• Company size
• Password
• Password confirmation

Now you’ve heard that fewer fields on the signup form equals better conversions. However, it’s difficult to part with these fields. You justify that each of these fields is necessary. You convince yourself that all are needed.

They are not. They are hurting your conversions. You can do much better!

But I Really Do Need Them!

People justify having these fields in many ways:

• Marketing needs this information for following up
• We need to send DRIP emails
• What if a person types the password incorrectly?

The reality is, that a portion of your prospects simply will not fill out the form! Another portion will provide bogus info. It’s great that marketing wants to fill in the company name field in SalesForce. However, they should also be concerned with the fact that 1/3rd of their leads come from “Acme Inc.”.

There’s a fine balance between increasing the number of leads vs. improving the quality of leads. Often, the justification for more fields is that it allows you to better qualify them. But you have to ask yourself, would you like a smaller slice of a big pie, or a bigger slice of a small pie? It’s best to ask for a little info at a time. That way, you have finer-grained steps and you can better quantify how your leads are progressing towards becoming customers.

Who Benefits?

Who do these extra fields really benefit? If you think about it honestly, you will realize that often the answer is “you”, and not the customer. The customer does not gain anything from the fact that you know their first name or phone number!

You should keep the customer’s best interest in mind. A good strategy is to ask for information when it is necessary to carry out a customer’s action, or when it will bring value to the customer. Do not ask for it ahead of time, just in case. You are shooting yourself in the foot.

Just Ask For It Later!

This data is valuable, and there is a right time to ask for it. The account signup form is not that time. Just ask for the bare minimum information when the person fills out the signup form. Once they start the trial, you will have plenty of opportunities to ask the user for more information. At this point, they are more likely to be more engaged and will see the value in providing the information for you.

Field-by-field Elimination Guide

First and last name

Drop it from your signup form. It really is not needed to start a trial. In your application, you can use the person’s email address in situations where you don’t have their name. You can design the UI in a way that does not require a name at all.

Your emails don’t require a name. You can design your emails in a way that will work with or without a name.

In your application, you can offer a small prompt near where you would normally display a person’s name. When a user reacts to it, you can ask them to personalize their experience. This way, you are asking for this information when the user is more comfortable providing it.

Usually, the name is necessary to make a credit card purchase. If you don’t have it by then, by all means, ask for it. Up until this point, it’s a “nice to have” that brings more value for you than the person who signed up. It is just cluttering up your signup form and reducing your conversion rate.

Company name

It sure is useful to know! But once again, it is simply not necessary to start a trial. You may argue that the UI needs to display the company name. If you think about it hard enough though, does it really require it? You can build you app so that the company name is shown if it is provided, but will work if it is blank as well.

For internal purposes, you can get the company name through other means. If your application caters to business customer, you can use the APIs from a service like ClearBit to attempt to guess the company name from the provided email address. While not 100% accurate, it is a good way to get an insight into your leads. Just don’t make this “guessed” company name part of the user’s profile.

Phone number and company size

These two pieces of information are useful only for you. They can be helpful for followup and lead scoring. However, there are other ways of getting this information. You can research the company and phone number manually. Or you can use the afore-mentioned ClearBit APIs to get a good guess at it.

If you insist on this information, then perhaps your sales process is more enterprise-oriented. In such situations, it’s worthwhile to consider getting rid of an account signup form and instead using a demo-based high-touch sales process. The form would be used for requesting a demo. Enterprise customers tend to be less sensitive about this information and more used to such sales processes.

Password confirmation

This is a relic of the past and is no longer considered a best practice.

It’s important to encourage good security habits. This means longer and more complicated passwords, which often necessitate the use of password managers. If you need a user to re-type the password, then it encourages them to choose a shorter one, that they can remember. If they want to use a long one, they will often paste it into both fields, eliminating any type of password confirmation that the second field provides.

There’s always a chance the user will mistype the password. It happens to all of us. In fact, sometimes, I am not sure if I am mistyping a password or if I am using a different password than I initially chose for a site. Either way, the solution is to use the password reset.

If you insist on having a password confirmation, by no means should you prevent people from pasting in passwords! This will guide people to using shorter, less secure passwords. Please encourage good password security.

Down to Two

Now you’re down to only two fields: the email address and the password. That’s pretty good. Many companies stop here. But can we do better?

Get Rid of the Password!

Sacrilegious! How will people log in?

In many cases, they never will! The truth is, a portion of your trial users will never return after their initial visit. This will happen regardless of whether you ask them for a password or not. Save them the hassle of providing a password when signing up. Make it easier for them to try your application. Remove roadblocks, even as minor as asking for a password.

If a person spends time in your app, it is more likely that they find it useful. Many sites use session cookies to keep track of users. Even if the user closes the web browser and returns a few days later, they will remain signed in and will not need to re-authenticate. The password is not necessary for this.

After a few interactions or after some time elapses, you can show popups or alerts that ask a user to fill in the password. If they do provide a password, that should be a strong signal for you that they are becoming a stronger lead.

What happens if a user misses the opportunity to provide a password and gets signed out? Not much! He or she can use the password reset facility to set a password and get back into their account should they choose to.

At this point, we now have a signup form that only asks the user for an email address. You may think that this is as simple as you can go. But the truth it, you can make it even simpler for a user to start a trial in your web application.

Get Rid of the Signup Form Altogether

Crazy talk, right?

Crazy indeed, but in some cases, it just might work. If you think about it, the email address is not really necessary for the user to use your app. When a user enters your application, automatically create a session cookie for them and consider them logged in. Use this as a temporary identifier of the user. As long as the web browser saves the cookie, the person will be able to use your web application. This will even work when they close the browser and return a short time later.

Of course, you should ask the user for the email address and password eventually. The email address is very useful as it gives the user a way of authenticating their account, even if they never set a password. It is also very useful for marketing, for things like DRIP campaigns.

Should you do this? It depends. Such experiences are rare. You lose out on getting the email address from the start, which prevents some email marketing campaigns from the get-go. On the other hand, a friction-less way of getting into your application presents you with many opportunities to engage the user, begin building loyalty, and asking them for additional information. It just may be worth a try.