topic Re: Updates to form settings; seeing decline in form submissions? in Lead Capture Tools

Updates to form settings; seeing decline in form submissions?

besszafran — Fri, 26 Aug 2022 15:10:42 GMT

Good morning! Thank you in advance for your advice, our team is experiencing strange trends in form submission after updates to form settings.

I am a marketing specialist and use Hubspot to run a pop-up on our website, with the goal of collecting email addresses for marketing purposes. Our pop-up has been running for many years with a pretty steady submission rate besides a big spike in 2021 caused by a website update (see below.)

My question area is highlighted in the image: we turned off the form completely - for the first time in almost 5 years - in May 2022. It was off for about 2 weeks.

We then turned the form back on. At this time, I noticed settings had changed in the Callout and Form section that impacts the way the pop-up works. Specifically, users experience the callout pop-up window in a specified design and color, very adjustable in the settings. Before, they would click the callout button and the callout button would simply turn into a form field. Now, when they click the callout button the entire callout window turns into the 'form' window, which looks different. It is sort of a new page loading inside the pop-up window.

As far as I can tell, this new form window can't be adjusted to match the 'callout' window exactly. This creates a slightly different user experience than before, and I'm curious if this could be causing our submission decline or if anyone else has experienced something similar?

Thanks again,

Bess

Re: Updates to form settings; seeing decline in form submissions?

kvlschaefer — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 18:57:42 GMT

Hi @besszafran,

Thanks for reaching out to the Community!

I would like to add our subject matter experts to this conversation to see if they have experienced similar behavior.

Hi @johnelmer, @Aakar, @danmoyle - Have you experienced a dip in form submissions in the past few months? Do you any have lead generation form advice or co for @besszafran?

Thank you!

Best,

Kristen

Re: Updates to form settings; seeing decline in form submissions?

danmoyle — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 18:46:14 GMT

Hey there @besszafran. The change in user experience seems like a pretty likely culprit for the dip in submissions. Did the location of the pop-up change? Or the behavior triggers (like exit intent or 50% scroll)? I personally have not seen any changes in pop-up forms in our HubSpot instance, but we aren't currently using many.

Re: Updates to form settings; seeing decline in form submissions?

Jnix284 — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 02:36:46 GMT

@besszafran do you happen to have a screenshot of what it looked like before the change compared to how it looks now? I'm curious what could have changed in the settings. As @danmoyle said, I haven't seen a major product change in that time period for pop-ups, so I'm wondering if it could be something else, or maybe you weren't in a beta previously.

Re: Updates to form settings; seeing decline in form submissions?

besszafran — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 17:24:01 GMT

@kvlschaefer @danmoyle @Jnix284 thank you all so much for your replies!

Regarding timing of a product change to pop-ups, is it possible that the product change happened long before this past May...but since we hadn't touched the form at all, old settings were 'grandfathered' in?

I agree that it would be very helpful to clarify what the change looks like on our end, and show a before and after. Unfortunately, we can't think of anywhere we have a recording of someone interacting with the original pop-up, so these screenshots are from the current one...I think they can still give you the idea.

Before the change, the popup looked like the FORM page (without a callout page proceeding it.) ie: the form sort of looked like this:

Original form looked like THIS - email form AND submit button on same page

Now, it seems in order to have a form collection step, it is required that we also have this preface screen you see below: called a 'callout'. This shows before the above form.

Callout screen that now exists BEFORE form step

There doesn't even seem to be many options to customize the look of the callout to make it a little more cohesive with the form step. I believe the users having to interact with the multiple steps/looks of the callout page --> form step is causing the decrease in submissions.

Thanks again for your feedback and input!

Best,

Bess

Re: Updates to form settings; seeing decline in form submissions?

Jnix284 — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 18:32:43 GMT

Hi @besszafran ,

I don't think I've seen it look like just a single form step since the very beginning, and once the other options were added, the initial "intro" screen was added.

To be honest, it's when we stopped using these pop-ups at my last company, our signups from the banner and slide in dropped from a steady stream to none almost over night.

There are a ton of ideas in the community about pop-ups, none of them seem to be asking for what you're looking for. I recommend adding your idea there (and share it back with us so we can upvote).