How to Increase Mobile Engagement with Simpler Contact Forms
Columns
Plain and simple: there’s no excuse for using more than one column on a mobile contact form. Leadformly has a beautiful example of a mobile contact form that keeps everything in a vertical line.
Fields
When creating a contact form for your clients’ website, ask yourself: Is each of these fields necessary? Take, for instance, the Shopify mobile contact form:
- Visitors will be frustrated with the extra time spent reading each label, deciding whether or not it’s necessary, and then tabbing over to the next one.
- Visitors will give up before they ever get started because the length of the form alone is daunting.
- Visitors will be confused by some of the fields, wondering what they’re for and trying to figure out the answer to them.
Pages
In cases when you have a lengthy contact form you want to put on mobile, you have to think of ways to keep it from appearing overwhelmingly long. One way to do this is by creating a multi-page form. While you can do this for mobile contact forms that are legitimately lengthy, this is something anyone could use really. Here’s an example from Typeform:


Labels
In your attempts to conserve space in mobile contact forms, you have to be careful with labels, hints, and error messages that appear within them. Just because you make a form faster to get through space-wise doesn’t mean the instructive text won’t cause friction. Here’s a good example from MailChimp you can use:
- Each field is succinctly and clearly labeled outside of the field.
- Any hint text (i.e. instructions on what to do with the field) appears inside the field in a lighter color.
- Error messages immediately appear once a user has failed to properly fill in a field.
Keyboards
Want to decrease the time it takes users to fill out your mobile contact form? Program it to display the correct keyboard per field. Here is how WPForms does this: Basic text fields show a standard alpha keyboard:


Wrap-Up
Let’s be honest: for most businesses, the chances of someone converting from a mobile website are quite low — at least lower than they are on desktop. Until consumers become more confident in converting from a smartphone, we have to find other ways to capture their information so we can stay in touch. That said, just because mobile visitors are unwilling to convert doesn’t mean they’ll be unwilling to fill out a mobile contact form. It’s a low-risk alternative to entering their sensitive data into a mobile website and device, and puts the onus on the company to take the next step. Of course they’re going to prefer this option, so make sure it’s a worthwhile one to take. Featured image via Unsplash.Suzanne Scacca
Suzanne Scacca is a freelance writer by day, specializing in web design, marketing, and technology topics. By night, she writes about, well, pretty much the same thing, only those stories are set under strange and sometimes horrific circumstances.
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