Don't waste your time because few people read the instructions. Short attention spans and doing life quick is how we are now programmed. Please don’t take it personally but do keep this in mind when you are setting up your registration page. The time you spent meticulously writing out step-by-step directions or listing out different options that don’t apply to each registrant might have been better used to simplify your page.
What do I mean by this? When people see a wall of text their eyes will glaze over or if the options are out of order then frustration sets in. Don’t fret because there are a few tricks to simplify your busy form.
1. Actions:
Actions. The function allows you to create conditions in which items can hide, change the price, or require information and it’s dependent on a previous selection... This function is gold when your form is long. For example, if you want to register Attendees and Exhibitors for your conference the registration questions are going to be different. With actions, you can hide all the exhibitor questions when your registrant picks attendee and visa-versa.
2. Organize The Page:
A registration form asking questions in a logical order is a better user experience. Your organization is being judged on quality from the start of your registration form. If it’s out of order, hard to navigate, or seems unprofessional you might lose people.
3. Multiple Registrations:
Multi-Reg for short but this is another tool we have designed to shorten your event form. Instead of listing: Name, Age, DOB, T-shirt size, etc, 2-10 times; use the Multi-Reg function to have 1 page dedicated to 1 person at a time. Make your life easier by taking the guesswork out of how many people will register per order. You can use this with actions as well to even further enhance your user experience.
4. Minimize The Fluff:
If your page needs 3 paragraphs of detailed information you might want to think about buying an affordable website from a company like WIX or SquareSpace and hosting the information there. This will give you other SEO benefits, while keeping your registration page simple and straight to the point. If you are not into the extra expense but do need a few paragraphs keep in mind where the user needs to know the information in the registration process. Then refer back to Tip #1 and keep on reading to Tip #5.
5. Save the in-depth directions for the confirmation page:
It might seem logical to give all of your event information to registrants on the registration page but information overload will set in for your registrant. When people are registering, filling in the information should be their main focus. Save information like driving directions, parking instructions and other non-registration related information for the confirmation page.
6. Practice makes perfect:
Have coworkers and friends test the page in preview mode and provide feedback. After spending enough time building a registration page the flow will make sense to you because you built it. Feedback from real people who haven't seen the event form will show you where the hang-ups are, where a future registrant may get confused and where too much information is being given.
Let me stick to Tip #4 and stop here. This should be enough to get your page on the road to a better conversion rate. But I also want to hear from you, what tips and tricks can you share to tidy up registration pages? Share them with us on Twitter or Facebook.
