After all the effort you put into your ad; after making sure your landing page was perfect—you have to put a little more thought on your forms.

What you ask, or don’t ask, can make or break your conversion goals. In fact, 56 percent of marketers say that optimizing their forms results in a significant impact on their website performance.

To be clear, there is no cut and dried approach to form fields. My best advice would actually be for you to balance how much information is required versus how much information your prospects are actually willing to give.

Now, the problem is how can you actually figure out what your leads are willing to fill out?  Follow my tried and tested list below to determine what and how much information you should be requesting from your prospects.

1. How much information can you get someone to give you in just a few seconds? 

Numerous studies have shown that you only have a few seconds—six in fact—before prospects decide if it’s worth staying on your page or if they should bounce off. While this study is commonly attributed to web optimization efforts, it’s a good rule of thumb to apply when it comes to audiences filling out landing page forms.

You have a limited time to capture audience attention, use it wisely. Eliminate any possible elements that can cause confusion or distraction. This will only prompt them to abandon your form. Take note of too much text, distracting navigation, additional call to actions (CTA), or forms with too many form fields.

2. Have you applied best practices on your form? 

Again, this isn’t definitive simply because no two businesses are alike. However, standard baselines recommend three to seven fields on a landing page form. Any less and your form will fail to establish legitimacy and credibility. Anymore and it will be considered too tedious to even bother with.

The use of drop-down menus has also been known to reduce friction as it takes a lot of guesswork out of answering.

3. Have you carefully considered the absolute necessities versus the nice-to-haves? 

In the strictest sense, there’s only one piece of information that’s absolutely necessary on any landing page form—your customer’s contact details, specifically their email addresses. Anything beyond that is not mandatory. Therefore, it’s up to you to actually deduce how much information your leads are willing to give. This will depend on how well you know your customers and the real value of your offer. Carefully weigh these different elements and consider what you think is absolutely necessary for your customers to fill out. Do you really need their Instagram handles, or their mobile numbers when a name and email will do?

4. Have you consulted and aligned with your marketing and sales teams? 

Your own goals as a marketer may not necessarily be aligned with your sales team’s objectives. If you’re trying to figure out exactly what you need to put in your forms, you may want to make sure that both teams—who are responsible for nurturing leads—actually get the information they need to do their job.

If you’re a marketer with experience in developing landing pages and forms, feel free to add to this list and share your own tips. Otherwise, you can reach out to me personally to discuss options on how we can best optimize your landing pages.