You’ve done everything correctly: built a beautiful website, added contact forms and marketed your business. Leads are pouring in, but for some reason, they never convert. Your business is suffering, and the problem may be a simple one.

Your contact form isn’t optimized for success.

I have seen long contact forms spanning 30 fields before, and the first thing I thought was: “no one is going to take the time to fill out this form.”

And this leads to our first tip:

1. Limit Your Fields

If no one is going to fill out a long form, what is the ideal number of fields then? Quicksprout and Hubspot found very similar findings in this area.

• 3 fields results in a 25% conversion rate
• 3 –5 fields result in a 20% conversion rate
• 6+ fields result in a 15% conversion rate

HubSpot found that by lowering the number of fields from four to three, that’s just one single field, conversion rates increased by 50%. Your form and users may seem irrational, but take the time to sit down and collect only the most important information from users.

And keep the number of fields at 3 maximum.

You can call or contact the lead back later to ask more questions, but until then, leaving your form with no more than three fields is the golden rule.

2. Proper Use of Headings

Service-based businesses are often called for emergency situations. The plumbing is leaking, the electric is flickering, the heating system is not working. And if you run one of these businesses, you need to leverage this urgency or emergency.

You can do this by finding your customer’s pain points.

I am not going to suggest that I know your business or your customers, but I know that you can:

• Brainstorm pain points of your customers
• Use these pain points in headers

You can even follow a basic example from a company offering trenchless pipe repairs. The company states “Immediate Assistance,” followed by their phone number at the top of the form.

Why is this important?

If a potential lead needs you now, they’d rather talk on the phone and discuss the problem. A major pain point that many people have is time, so since they don’t want to wait to talk to you, let them reach out to you by phone or through a contact form, which is slightly slower.

3. Choose the CTA Button Color Wisely

Your form should never look out of place. Forms will meld into the design of a website in the ideal situation. Forms need to have a fit in your design and layouts, but they also need to pop to draw attention to them.

As you can imagine, this is often hard to do.

Studies shoe that red is the best performing color for a button. If you’re not finding success with red, you may also want to try:

• Green
• Orange

There needs to be contrast and brightly-popping colors for your CTA button to pop out.

Your forms can also benefit from a lot of additional changes. A few of the quick and easy ways to increase your form, which I haven’t mentioned yet, include: removing the CAPTCHA. Captcha codes hinder conversion rates, although they reduce spam.

Studies show that conversion rates fall by 3% when Captcha codes are in use.

A little bit of additional spam may be worth the 3% uptick in people contacting your business. Additional tips that may go a long way include: stop asking for phone numbers, show social proof near the contact form and explain what will happen next when a form is submitted.

If you implement just some of the many tips above, you’ll have higher contact form conversions.