Is asking for more information on your forms better for conversions?

The age old question of just how much information you should ask for on your web-forms is what we are going to talk about today.
Now a little disclaimer before we get too far…  What you ask for really depends on your market and what it is that you are offering.
This particular case study is from a company that offers an enterprise solution.  They have lead attribution and lead scoring in place to measure the quality of the leads being generated.
So how much is too much? Again this really all depends on what you offering.  If you are simply trying to give people a simple PDF report, gathering a bunch of information on the form may not fit and will be hard to justify asking for so much information.
In this case we are generating leads for a free trial and/or demo.
The main purpose you should think about in your own marketing is what is the minimum information I need to get in order to increase conversions and drive out other KPI’s such as revenue.
Just 101 in copywriting, your message should be just long enough to get the message across.
Now before this round of tests we had done a bunch of other work on their landing pages to increase the conversions by more than 100%, keeping quality over quantity in check.
The data being collected through analytics and other tracking pointed us to a friction point in the form itself.  So we collectively decided to test just how much weight the form fields had on conversion rates.
In conversion optimization, nothing is off limits and even the smallest change could yield a BIG impact.
This particular campaign’s main traffic source was paid search through Adwords.
They had a form field on there that asked about “How Did You Hear About Us?”.  Which because of tracking we knew exactly led them to this particular page.  Instead of assuming, because assumptions in marketing can lead to failure, we tested to prove how much of an impact this form field had on the conversions.  Now you can probably guess how it went, because the form field wasn’t needed.

The only change on this test was removing the particular “How did you hear about us?” form field.
Doing so resulted in a 70.1% lift in conversion rate.

No surprise there really, but still a nice improvement none the less.
Then we decided to take it a step further and see how much weight other form fields had on the conversions, again keeping lead quality in tact.  This time how much the “phone” field played a role in successful trial requests.

Again the only change made in this test was the removal of the phone number field.
The result was another lift of over 70% this time, 75.1%

When we first started working on the campaign they had less than a .3% conversion rate from this traffic source.
The good news is that by even removing the phone field, the quality of the leads hasn’t changed, which is very important to this company considering their target market and the price tag of their product have a healthy price tag on it.
So my question to you is, what role do your form fields have on conversion rates for your business?  Sometimes “email” only forms could be just what the doctor ordered.  Other times you may need to ask for more to get the results you are looking for.  The main point is that you need to test everything…
Like I said nothing is off limits.
Do you need help with your conversions?  Know you should be testing but can’t find enough time?  Or maybe you just aren’t sure where to start.  Contact us to get a free conversion audit.