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By Alun Lucas, Managing Director of Zuko Analytics
For those that don’t know (and even those who do), Zuko recently launched form building software which gives businesses and individuals the ability to create and publish online forms with Zuko’s analytics tracking built in as standard.
The primary question we’ve been asked since the launch is a simple “Why?”.
Why step outside our analytics comfort zone to deliver a different product to a different audience rather than continuing to focus on being the best at form analytics? This article aims to honestly set out our reasoning behind the new creation and explain how we came to the decision.
Whilst we've historically been a form analytics product which is installed on already existing forms, we do regularly have folk who stumble across us and ask if they can build a form using Zuko as they want one with analytics built in from the start. We’ve never been able to accommodate them but this latent indicator alongside other demand validation points (search volumes for the category) convinced us that there was mileage in a form builder tool.
As part of our day-to-day analytics and optimization work we get to see a lot of forms. This means that we’ve seen pretty much all of the ways you can mess up the form user experience. We’ve also been part of plenty of experiments and also have our own stock of form user behaviour data, built up over a decade of tracking. This means we’ve got a very good handle on which form design patterns generally work and which don’t. We knew we could leverage this knowledge to create something that pretty much guaranteed a great form-completer experience, minimizing unnecessary abandonment and maximising the number of new customers / leads completing the form.
In addition, when we researched all the other form builders in the market, we realised that pretty much all of them focused their proposition on the user experience of the form builder. Now, of course that’s very important. The builder is your paying customer so they need to have a smooth experience.
But what about the end form user? They are the ones that will ultimately determine the success of any form journey so doesn’t it make sense to optimize for their experience first? By having a relentless focus on the ultimate recipient of a form, coupled with the integration of our award winning analytics product, we knew we could create something that stood apart from the market and deliver an experience not available anywhere else.
Form analytics is our bread and butter. We’re good at it and it has kept the lights on for us these past ten years. However, we are acutely aware that it is something of a niche interest. Those who appreciate form analytics really love what it can do for their website performance but true acolytes are not huge in number. Many CRO / UX participants gravitate towards “sexier” homepage or product optimization projects, believing that forms are more of a “one and done” thing that doesn’t require much attention. Whilst we fundamentally disagree with this stance, we recognise it as a market truth that makes it harder for our analytics business to grow as fast as we would like.
We do have investors so delivering growth is a constant pressure for us. Diversifying our offering into a bigger potential pool of customers whilst not diluting our core competences is a good way for us to kickstart further expansion.
We’ve looked at many brand and product expansions over the years but we always ask ourselves; do we have the right to do this? Are we the appropriate people to deliver? Do we have the credibility to build a solution that works and will the market believe us?
In the case of the form builder the answers came back as a resounding “yes”. Forms are our lifeblood. We’ve sweated over them for the past decade and we’ve got data that proves what works. There’s no-one else with the level of reputation and reliability to create a new entry into the form building space.
After many months of development, we’ve delivered a form building product that has
Of course, we’re “Always in Beta”; continually looking to update and improve based on feedback. We’d love it if you could have a play and let us know what you think. You can get access to the free builder here.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Zuko is the most powerful form analytics platform available on the market. Find out how to improve your form and checkout conversion by taking a product tour.
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