Form Optimization Case Study

In Summary

Company: Azalp + their agency Fingerspitz

Sector: eCommerce

Country: Netherlands

Results: Customer service requests caused by form issues fell from 2 per day to 2 per week. Time spent in the email field decreased by 26%.

The Challenge

Azalp is an eCommerce site selling high ticket outdoor products such as gazebos, log cabins, saunas & swimming pools. It was crucial to Azalp that buyers enter their email address correctly in the site checkout. Azalp customers are continually informed about the status of their order which can take up to two months for delivery.

If Azalp customers do not receive communication once they have committed to an expensive order, they send impatient emails, call customer service, leave bad reviews or they completely lose faith in Azalp. All of this puts a burden on the customer service team due to a simple error during the checkout process. External partners are also affected by this as they need the correct email address to make a delivery appointment.

Whilst the email field may seem like a simple piece of information to complete, Fingerspitz, Azalps CRO agency used Zuko to show that in relation to other fields, users spent a long time trying to complete it.

Fingerspitz’s hypothesis was that the way the email address was framed in the form was sub-optimal and was causing user errors and the subsequent operational issues.

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The Solution

Fingerspitz constructed a multi-variant trial with different form executions of the email field to test what the effect would be on the successful inputting of the email address and whether this would impact the overall conversion rate of the form. They used Zuko and customer support tracking to see what the effects of the different form executions were.

The variants used were:

Control - Existing form (see above)

Variant 1 - Requiring the user to re-confirm their email address

Variant 2 - Additional microcopy explaining the importance of the field

Version 3 - Additional microcopy + green validation tick + repetition of the email address entered just before the submit button

The Results

All of the test variants actually resulted in a higher conversion rate than that of the control, with variant 3 performing best.

In addition, the group exposed to Variant 3 were spending the shortest amount of time completing the email field (8.3 seconds Vs 11.3 for the control version), indicating that the user experience was improved.

Interestingly, the proportion of users who returned to the email field after entering data was highest for Variant 3 (43% of users Vs 34% of the control group). Given that overall conversion was higher, this was probably due to the additional prompts nudging the user to check their email address and make it more likely that they were correcting any mistake.

Following this test, Azalp changed their form to Variant 3. They immediately saw a significant drop in customer support issues caused by an incorrect email address. Previously they had been getting, on average, 2 of these issues per day. After the changes, that fell to 2 per week, delivering significant operational benefits and customer satisfaction improvement.