 So a little bit about myself. My name is James Laws, and I am the co-founder and CEO of WP Ninjas, the creators of a plugin called Ninja Forms, which are on the sweatshirts that you have there. I actually got my first sales job about 20 years ago. I was looking for a change in, I don't know, change in view, a change in direction. And so I applied to an ad in the paper. Now the ad itself didn't really say anything about what the job was. But it talked about the certain lifestyle that I wanted to live, right? I wanted to be flexible and travel. I wanted to be able to buy the house that I want, the cars that I want. And so I kind of reluctantly, and yet with a little bit of anticipation, decided I'm gonna apply for this job. So I called and I set up my interview, at least what I thought was my interview. And actually when I showed up, there were 15 other applicants. And we spent about the first four hours and 10 applicants leaving. Watching what I can only call a propaganda video that was hosted by William Shatner. True story. As he interviewed people who were doing this job that we still did not know what this job was. We knew it was sales, that's all we knew. So some more people laughed. Only three of us made it through. I wanted to see how far the rabbit hole went. And then I found out I was joining an elite and prestigious group that very few get to say they've been a part of. I became a door-to-door vacuum salesman. That's true. On the next day when I showed up, I don't know why I showed up. I should have just said I'm gonna go look for a real job. But I went there, not any vacuum before I say that. Any door-to-door vacuum salesman in the audience. Okay. I really dodged a bullet there. I should have said no, but I decided, you know what? I'm gonna just try this out. I'm up for new experiences. And you may not know this, I'm actually an introvert, so door-to-door sales, cold call, like that's a scary endeavor, but I decided I'm gonna try it out. And they taught me a lot. So we were selling the generation four Kirby vacuum cleaner. Now this is actually an amazing piece of machinery. It was very, I'm not gonna sell you one right now, but it was a lot of fun. We had a really good time with it. They also taught me about all these other vacuum cleaners, how to take them apart, why they were inferior, because really the goal was to destroy their vacuum cleaner so that the Kirby looked all shiny, new, and great. And I've learned other things too, like did you know when you're doing door-to-door sales, you should use the door that they commonly use. Like the door they go to. So if you see a door that's all barred up and locked up, they probably don't use that. You wanna knock on the other door because it makes you an insider. It makes you, they know that, okay, this person gets us. So my first day out selling vacuum cleaners, I came to this house and the front door had this kind of walkway that was gated off with these iron gates. The door was iron and there was like vines growing over everything. So I'm like, obviously they don't use this door, but the garage door was open. And they had a, I feel like you know where this is going. The garage door was open. I'm like, obviously this is the door they use all the time. So I walked in and to my lock, they had a doorbell in their garage. So I pressed it. Now this is 20 years ago. I was a lot younger and naive and maybe just plain stupid. So I ringed the doorbell and I didn't hear a ding. Instead, what I heard was the garage door start to close. But all I had in my mind was a sales pitch, right? So I didn't think that presence of mind of if I press this button again, it'll probably just start going back up again. So I did what any common sense person would do in that moment. I relived all of my action movie days and I went as much as I could Indiana Jones on this garage door. And so I ran for the door and I dove and barrel rolled under the door. And as I picked myself up and dusted off my jeans and my ego, the guy comes out that gated iron door wondering why somebody was in his garage. Needless to say, I sucked at selling vacuum cleaners. In fact, I never sold one vacuum cleaner. But the truth is we're not here to talk about selling vacuum cleaners. We're here to talk about web forms. And most of us in the same respect suck at building web forms. We're terrible at it. And the reason we're terrible at it is because forms are difficult. It's challenging to build a good form that converts if people wanna fill out and wanna engage with you. The other reason is is because you get all these tips and people to say this is what you should do with your forms, but one size does not fit all. You may need different data than somebody else needs. Your form may require more fields. Your market could be completely and totally different. So what we're gonna talk about today is not about a particular form building plugin. Most of the form building plugins will solve your problem. But what we're gonna talk about is techniques that you can apply using, whatever form plugin you're currently using, or if you're really saucy and wanna just hand code it yourself, like you can apply these techniques even though forms suck, they don't have to. We can get better at it. Because here's what we all truly know, right? We all know forms are important. We know that interaction with our users, our visitors, our customers, it's extremely important. Why is it important? Because forms provide data. Forms give you data. Oh yeah, that is funny. Sorry, I forgot what I even had up there. Oh, forms provide androids that will come and give you, so forms provide data, they provide information for you. And this information, after as collected, day after day, year after year, time after time, actually becomes knowledge. And as we all know, right, knowledge is opportunity, right? It's opportunity. It's an opportunity to do a number of things. Because here's the problem, so web forms suck and here is why web forms suck. Most people stop with the idea that web forms collect data. So we build forms that look like this. Now this doesn't have any styling, it's just a form, right? And we say, well, if web forms collect data and data produces knowledge and knowledge is opportunity, then I'm gonna ask every single question I can possibly ask. I'm gonna ask, what is there, you know, kids shoe sizes, what is their pet's name, what is, I'm gonna ask as much information as I possibly can. Strangely enough, this is a little cut off in this and I don't, there it is, all right? This is actually a real form, 1200 fields. And this is actually only 25% of it because my GIF screen capture couldn't record more than 25% of me scrolling through this form. It's pretty insane. But the problem is this is where we stop, right? Forms collect data. But that is a very narrow-minded understanding of what forms are. Remember I said I did door-to-door sales for a little while? And here's something that I realized. There was more important than anything else. What I was really trying to do in that first interaction is not sell a vacuum cleaner. What I was really trying to do is get permission into someone's home so that I could sell them a vacuum cleaner. But if I didn't get through the door, I wasn't gonna sell them a vacuum cleaner on the front porch or in their front yard. I needed to get in the door, right? I needed to have that conversation with them. So part of the problem that we have with forms is we don't realize that forms, yes, collect data, but forms are actually a front door to your user and to your user's home and to your user's email. Not to you. We think of forms kind of this one-way road, right? I have a form on my site and you're contacting me. You're coming into my house. You came to my website. You filled out my form and you've come into my house. But that is actually the wrong way to think about it. Your web forms are a door to your user's house. Your user's email, they're giving you permission. They're giving you access. What are they giving you permission for? Begin a dialogue, right? You collect data. Data's great. It's great to have all of this data. It's great to have all of this information. It's great to have this opportunity, but if they don't give you permission into your email, what do you got, right? You just have a bunch of information that you can't use. And so we have to start thinking about our forms a little differently is the fact that they are actually giving us permission into their email and permission to start a conversation. So now users aren't just coming to your website and reading information on your website and hoping they can find what they want. They're giving you data so that you can custom tailor a response, a dialogue to them. So what is our mission then? If we know all of this is the case. Our mission is simple. We want to increase conversions by building better forms, right? Because our forms suck and nobody wants to fill them out because they're terrible. And they're long and they're 1,200 fields. And I don't know about you unless I'm filling out a tax form. I don't want to even do that. That's what I ask a lot of people, like they're like, I need 1,200 fields for my form. And I'm like, are you like doing taxes through your web form? Like this feels like really excessive. So the first thing that I learned when doing door-to-door sales is you want to keep it simple, right? When I was on the door and I knocked on that door, again, I was not trying to sell a vacuum cleaner. I was just trying to get in the door because once I was in the door, we could have a dialogue. We could have a conversation. I could land on the charm. I could tell them some jokes. I could show them how filthy their home was and what a piece of junk their vacuum cleaner was and how great the Kirby was. And we have this conversation and we sell vacuum cleaners. Although I never sold a vacuum cleaner, so we'll see how that goes. So here's a situation of a basic contact form. It seems it'll be a little washed out so you're not seeing the field. That's kind of terrible. Yeah, that is the worst I have ever seen slides. I should have really added a lot more contrast to this. Well, you'll have to imagine the fields underneath those labels. These are two contact forms that I commonly see, right? They ask for first name, last name, an email address, maybe a phone number, message, an anti-span field. Just look at those two forms. Which are you more likely to fill out, right? You're more likely to fill out the one on the right because it's simple, right? Three points of information and you got it. The question you have to ask yourself is can I get the phone number later? Like, do I need it right now? All I really want is permission into their email box. Once I've got that, everything is great. So I just want to get in the front door. This is the most important thing. Here's a common web subscription form. Again, some of the fields are missing, but lots of these newsletter programs, MailChamp, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, when they you build a list, they immediately give you first name, last name, email address. And so I think sometimes we think we have to use those. And so we put first name, last name, email address. But do you need their first and last name to send them a newsletter, right? You just need their email address. Chances are you haven't even made those two fields required, so some people are not gonna fill it out anyway and so some people are getting a personalized email and other people are getting dear comma, right? They didn't even use it. So you have to think about those things when you're building your form. So this is so much easier, right? I just type in my email address and go. And now I've given somebody, somebody has given me access into their email box immediately. But I know what you're saying, right? I need long forms. Like, I need 1200 fields. If you don't understand, I'm registering for, like that form, I'm doing a camp registration. And there are like 10 kids per family that might register and I need long forms. The truth is there are times when you need long forms. Hopefully it's not the first time somebody is interacting with you, but somewhere down the road you may need a longer form. So there are ways that we can deal with it. So let's talk about tackling longer forms. First thing you have to ask yourself is, can the data be collected later? Like the phone number field or an address. Do you really need a mailing address in the very first contact or is that something that can be done in a follow-up? And saying, all right, now that I have access, now that you've granted me permission, now that you have started a dialogue with me, I am ready now to say, hey, can I get your phone number? Let's connect on the phone and let's have a phone conversation. Or can I get your mailing address so we can send you some information? We don't need that information right from the very beginning. So can the data be collected later? Remember, these are tips that you can apply to any form. You're not gonna do them to every form, but certain things, you may have to look at your demographic, your user, and kind of test which things work. And you may, for a little while, just pull off a few fields and let's see how this form converts better if I don't ask for this information, knowing that I can get it later. The other thing you need to ask yourself is, can the data be retrieved in the background? Like some of this data, do I even ever have to ask the user for it? So most of the plugins that you will use will probably have some sort of a user analytics extension or a feature built into it. And what that'll let you do is you can collect IP address, you can collect the browser they're using, you can collect what kind of operating system you're using. In some cases, they're latitude, they're longitude, the country that they're in, the state that they're in. Like you can get a lot of data and you never have to put those fields on the form. You don't have to bother your user with this. You can just collect it in the background. But if you do have to have longer forms, there's a few other things that you can do to kind of make that easier. So you can break forms into smaller parts. So instead of having one long, huge form, you can have little microforms that they can step through and see their progress and know exactly where they're at. Oh, I'm on page two, I'm on this section, I've only got six fields, it's not a big deal, and then I'll move on to the next section. There's a TV show that I just recently watched on Netflix where she talks about, you know, you can do everything for 10 seconds. So I just count to 10, and when that time's over, I can't start counting again, because that's a new 10 seconds and I can do anything for 10 seconds. And they just keep doing that over and over again, right? You know exactly what I'm talking about. I couldn't remember the name of the show. Unbreakable someone-someone. Yes. And I thought about that and I think, you know, that's why multi-part forms actually work. So like breaking forms down into multiple parts is because I can handle three fields. And then I click next, I'm like, oh, well, I can handle three more fields, like that's no big deal. And I see my progress and I can get that information and that's helpful to me. The other thing you can do is allow users to save and return. If you have a really long form, I guarantee at one time what you've done is in the middle of the form you've asked for information that your user does not have on hand at that moment. And so they have two choices. They can try to leave their computer open in that state forever until they can get that data and it's, you know, God forbid that data is in another location, like at home or at the office. Or you can just say, hey, why don't you just register? And you can come back and sign in and your data will be there waiting for you. And now when I get that data, I can come back and fill it out because the chances are if you don't have something like that in a long form, they don't wanna come back. Man, I just filled out 50% of your 1,200 fields. All I needed was this information to keep going. I'm not gonna even bother. And you may have lost a contact and lost permission into their email. The other thing you can do, which we use a lot, so here's one of our forms. You can collect and present additional information conditionally. This is probably the most important form on our website because this is how people get support. So we have a few options, right? My form or extension's not working as expected. I have sales questions or I hate your product and I want my money back. That's actually my favorite feature, my favorite question. We did that as a joke just to kind of have fun with it and obviously we still get refund requests and that's just the nature of business, but now every one of them has to come back and go, oh, I don't hate it. And I feel so more inclined to refund. I'm like, oh, well, if you don't hate it, here's your money back. That's awesome. That's actually my favorite question right now. But so we have some stuff. Now these different people, depending on what they answer here, we may need additional information from them. So for instance, if they check the last option, my form works perfectly, we just send them right to the form that you cannot see because of my magical ghosting input borders. But nonetheless, we just give them the form, they can fill it out and they're ready to go. Now, we break some cardinal rules here, right? We asked for first name and last name and I said, do you really need a first name and last name? You can just say name. But they want support so they're just gonna fill it out. Our form's a little different. That's why I said one form doesn't fit all. People who are reaching out to us want us in their home. They want us in their email box and so they'll pretty much fill out anything we ask for, generally. I have to say that because, or I have to take that back because we many times don't get information we ask for. But if you pick the other option, this is one of my favorites, right? My former extension isn't working as I expected to. So now we say, all right, well what's your request regarding? So we have like top five, six, seven issues that we know they probably have an issue with and if they click that, click that, we can just give them their answer. We don't have to give them a form, we don't have to give them a submit button. Why bother them to submit the form? We can just give them the answer, just present that information conditionally. But of course in all cases, maybe it's not working even with the solution. They check that box and we give them the form and they can, we grant them permission, if you will. Now regardless of whether you're using longer forms or short forms or some other things that I would highly recommend that you do to increase conversions of your forms. One of those is remove captures. Here's the thing, and I feel pushback. By the way, I have a couple more hoodies back. If you can solve that equation, just come see me and I will give you a hoodie. No, I'll just give you a hoodie if you get, take a gas. I have no idea what the answer to that question is. Remove captures, here's the thing, they're terrible. They're annoying. They're actually, the whole point of a capture is to make it hard to fill out your form. Why would you do that to your users, right? Now I know what you're saying, but I don't wanna get spam. Well first of all, let me explain. Here's another reason why you don't wanna use captures. My partner Kevin used to do, teach some classes at the public library in our hometown. He would work with people, it was kind of like an elderly workshop. I don't know, I don't wanna offend anyone. I don't even know, I'm afraid to even say what I'm saying. It's like anywhere from like 50 to 70 years old and they're wanting to get into tech, right? So they're asking, so one of the things he might do is say, I wanna sign you up for Gmail. And so he'd have everybody set up and set up their own Gmail account, get them in the email. Well at the time Gmail had this really hard capture and none of them could answer the questions. So he'd have a room of 20 people that he'd have to go, computer to computer and enter the capture for them and most of the time he couldn't get it right. Captures are terrible. So what do we do then? We wanna prevent spam. There's a great technique that we use on all of our forms and we get zero spam and it's a simple thing called a honeypot field. And now there are, certainly there are ways that that can be broken but I have, we get tons of traffic and we get zero spam so I have to assume the honeypot is doing something really, really well. Here's the basic idea of a honeypot because you're gonna say I don't understand what that concept is. A honeypot is simply a hidden field hidden generally by CSS and when bots come to fill out your form and you get all that spam, ugly spam, it just generally fills out every field it sees. Every field it comes to, it's just blah, blah, blah, here's my answer, here's my answer, here's my answer and it submits it. A honeypot is hidden and it says basically, I don't wanna be filled out and if you fill it out, the form fails. It just says okay, this is spam because somebody filled this field out and they shouldn't have but because they can't see it. So how did they fill it out? It's a bop, right? So that's basically how a honeypot works. The other thing is it's actually accessible too because there's text in there that tells people if you're using a reader that says hey, this is a honeypot, don't fill it out. Like this field is not meant to be filled out and then they know so this is an accessible solution as well and you don't have to have any of that information on there so that's I think crucial. Most plugins will have some sort of a honeypot solution. It's basically a field that just gets added to your form like a first name field or an email field and while you may see it in your form builder on the front end, nobody sees it. Completely hidden. I have found it, I would never say anything is 100% effective but I don't get a lot of spam and like I said, we have tons and tons of traffic. Was that? 99.9. 99.9 maybe, I don't know. I'm not comfortable putting a percentage on it but here's the thing too. Would you rather get a little spam or not get your customer's access? Like what's more important to you? So you have to kind of gauge that and then consider your market when you're deciding do I put a capture, do I do a math question on there? We've used math questions before and we've put a little excerpt on there that says really we're not trying to test your math skills. Like we try to keep it as simple as possible. Although I have gotten some wrong that were really basic multiple times because I wasn't looking at it right. The other thing you wonder when doing your forms regardless of the length is your form structure. Now we get a lot of questions. Now you can't see this, this is the worst one. This is the worst one. So I have to explain this slide. I had no idea what I was getting into. I have to explain the slide. So in this form right here it says name and then right next to it is a field and then down is email and next to it is a field. Message, next to it is a field. This one just straight down the line name, email, field. So you have labels left positioned to your input field and you have labels above position. Now a lot of people say oh I want my labels left positioned and their theory is right, it makes the form look smaller. Shorter, like in comparison one is shorter than the other but here is the thing you have to consider when you're doing that and that's eye tracking. Like when you're looking at a form what are you visually seeing? It actually takes seven points of eye tracking to look at this form because you're going from label to field, you can't even see it in one shot. So it's label to field, label field, label field to submit where in this other form I can go straight down the form and I can generally see my label and my field in one shot. So you have to think about that, think about the structure of your forms as well when you're talking about conversions. Yes? Say that again? Removing labels in place of placeholder text. That's a solution. I generally am not in fan of using placeholder text instead of labels. There's a number of reasons, accessibility reasons are one. Also depending on how your placeholders are configured, when you click in there you lose the label so now you have to sometimes click out to see what am I filling out here, I forgot. And so that tends to not be a great user experience but it's certainly a way and I would say it depends on the market. So some users may just be fine with that and they don't care about it. So you have to kind of think of your market who you're trying to attract and what will be most appealing to them. I would test it. Like I would do some A-B testing and say all right let's see what's going on here if I do this, what kind of advantages do I get from that. But generally speaking I've never seen labels done in a above the field effect of form inversely and placeholders end up actually being really helpful because my next point is add descriptions and placeholders, right? Like if you're asking for questions and maybe you're unsure the user may not know what to enter, tell them. Add a description so you can say hey we're looking for this information. So in my name field I'm asking for your first and last name. I'm not asking for a nickname, I'm not asking for, I wanna know what is your first and last name. But you can also put a placeholder text so that's my email address in there is placeholder text. Those are options. I would generally use placeholders to guide users as to what to fill not to act as labels for the field itself would be my advice. The other thing you can do is use different texts for your submit buttons. It has actually statistically been proven that the terms like submit and send convert less than actual actionable texts. So what are you trying to do? Are you trying to start a conversation? Are you trying to fill out an application? Are you giving them access to something? Are you trying to give them something for free? Like sometimes just changing the text to something actionable will actually help them entice them to submit that form even more. So this is actually an interesting experiment that I play with like what are the actions? What are you actually trying to get your user to do? This is a really important one and this is one that I see missed a lot. Make your forms mobile friendly. Now this is a really easy fix in almost all cases but you have two forms here. You can kind of see the field that's selected here and over there the field that's selected username. I think it's selected over here, it's the subject. And you can see the keyboard's up so we're already ready to start filling out that form. But one is just a singular column and what you can't tell from the look here is this form is actually bleeding off of the page. So you can actually now scrolling all over the place with the form. So the submit button's over here, you're scrolling over there to get it and it's really bad. Simple fix, right? Your form fields should have a font of 16 points or better because most mobile devices, when you click on that field, it's going to zoom in and make up the difference if it's not at a 16 point font and so you get that kind of weird zoom in on your form. And if you don't wanna do that which is really kind of annoying to me, for the longest time I had no idea what was causing it and I'm like why does my forms keep zooming in? I'm hating this and I hate the experience because now my site is all over the place and I'm dragging, I had this nice single column mobile responsive site and now it's all over the place and it's really ugly and that was it. 16 point font, all your fields. Selects as well, so if you have a select box and you don't have that to a 16 point, you'll zoom in, you'll still get the little selector but you zoom in, 16.5 or 16 pixels. You wanna make sure that you have that and that will actually prevent that kind of weird zoom in and effect. And another thing you can do, real simply, provide a privacy policy. You're asking your users for data and you're asking them to trust them with your email address, maybe their phone number, whatever other information there may be. Provide a privacy policy that tells them explicitly what you plan on doing, what are your intentions with them and you can do it with just a link to a privacy policy, you can actually put that privacy policy right in the form if you want to but just telling them, hey, we're not gonna sell your email address, we're not gonna do bad things, we're not gonna sign you up for porn websites, we're not gonna do any of these things, right? We're just going to start a dialogue and that's all we're gonna do. Here's your information is safe with us and finally, the best way to increase your form conversions is offer something in return. People like getting free things and if you give them something free and if they know at the end of that submission, at the end of that data submit, I'm going to get something out of it, they are more likely to fill out that form and give you information. In the beginning of this talk, I handed out some sweatshirts and I asked some questions, some more personal, like your pets and things like that. And I think just the act of getting a sweatshirt, you're like, oh, you gave me something, I'm gonna dialogue with you, I'm gonna have a conversation, I'm gonna give you that information. So maybe you wanna give them, maybe you have a white paper on a particular topic that's interesting to your users and you can give that away a free. That's kind of an enticing way to get in that. Maybe you have a whole series of content that you wanna drip out to them in your industry and you wanna help them out, that kind of thing will help them fill out your form and convert better. So that's it, that's why your web form sucks, how you can make it better. My name again is James Laws, here's how you can contact me, James Laws on Twitter, JamesLaws.com, WPNinja.com or NinjaForms.com and for now, I'm done. We'll open up for questions and answers. So you mentioned form point 16.5. Generally across the board, I haven't even noticed a big difference. Now granted, I have to be honest, I'm on iOS, we have a few Android users, your Android, yeah, 16.5 is generally, and I said 16 point, sorry, not 16.5, I didn't know if I clarified, I just might have slurred that. So 16 pixel or 16 point font is preferable. These are, we talked about long forms, a form that isn't that complicated, something that I wouldn't use contact seven or possibly gravity forms for, would NinjaForms? Yeah, if you're doing a basic contact form, so there's so many things going out there. So if you're just doing a basic contact form, for instance, Jetpack is here, Jetpack comes bundled with a contact form, so if you're already using Jetpack, it has a contact form, and if that's all you need is those basic fields and no customizations, that works great. NinjaForms can work in gravity forms, they're both work, and there's FormablePro and it's called AirForms, there are hundreds of form plug-ins and they will all work for the basic forms. Like they're all gonna work for a basic contact form. I think where you start to see yourself needing is when you get into things where you need conditionals, where you need breaking your forms into multiple parts, where you need to accept payments on your form, things like that, you start to move into where you need to work, you need a more robust system. Now the other reason you might use a gravity forms, right, the other reason you might use a gravity forms on NinjaForms is just simply because you want the drag and drop interface, right? Like you wanna be able to add whatever fields you want, you wanna be able to drag them into place and sort them and order them, and you wanna make that easy. Yeah, like Content4Seven, you're doing kind of all this code and it's like you're like, I don't even know what this means and like with gravity or an engine, you just, you add your field and you're done. Like it's pretty simple. Generally I suggest that's best done in the theme than the form. Like if you have a theme and you wanna break your page up and divide your page so sidebar and content or you wanna divide your content up in some sort of a grid layout, so you have two columns, that's better done in the theme than trying to force the form into that confines of that. So I would suggest working with some sort of, some something with your theme to do that. It's probably a better solution than actually trying to make the form be like, okay, here's a graphic and content and here's the form. Most forms can do it though. I mean, most forms offer some sort of a text element and if you know a little CSS, you can do a lot and sometimes they will also have certain things that let you style your forms in the UI. Yes, you can. And again, I come back to being platform agnostic on this. Almost all of the larger form plugins will allow you to put text and images and other content right into your form. Absolutely. Yes. Collect all that data. Collect all that data and use that. I can tell you, this is something that we, like for Ninja Forms, it's something that we want to build a better reporting extension so to speak that can kind of collect that data and let you report on data based on that information. But I can tell you Ninja Forms doesn't have anything specific for that at this time. I know there's some, was that? You can export a CSV and do run different things in a spreadsheet and do it that way. Yeah. And that's a solution, but right, it's kind of a, it's not an ideal solution. It would be great to have something right in the dashboard that you could just say, hey, I want to filter and look at these reports based on very specific criteria. I know some gravity folks people are here. Do you guys have a reporting, any kind of reporting in gravity forms? I think we don't, but. So it's more specific for a use case than just general all submissions reporting. And I think you're gonna see more of those things getting built probably into gravity and Ninja Forms. I think that's a need for a lot of users who want to get that data and maybe more generic and maybe even build their own report because they have very custom needs for their data that's coming in. Pieces of data that they have not already submitted to you. Yes, there's a few ways of doing that. Zach, do you want to talk to that? Because I see you nodding. Yeah, we have an extension. If you, if they're logged into your site and you already have their email address that they can pre-populate anything attached to their user meta and we're under the stats. That's probably the easiest way to do it. And there's other ways with like some small code snippets or conditional logic or different things that you can add or manipulate the values in the form too. Yeah. Because that's another way of limiting the amount of information that shows up. You can just ask for what you need like you don't already have. Yeah, and matter of fact, a lot of times what we'll do is we'll have hidden fields that actually populate that data. It still sends us the data, but it's hidden. So they don't even have to see it and change it. We just get that data automatically because they're logged in. Absolutely, yes. You guys have any of your shows? I don't have any colors. I can tell you I'm leery to do conversion numbers specifically because our users are such a broad stroke and they have such different industries. But Formstack actually does not long ago came out with a whole big survey of their forms and what they, you know, the conversion numbers and how just removing this field increased conversions for this particular company by such and such a percentage. So I don't have hard fast numbers but if you just search form conversion in Formstack there is a Google article, there's an article that you can find there that they did that kind of has some numbers for some basic industries. So yeah, yes. I'm going back. Yeah, so there's a few ways you can do that, right? So once you have permission into their email, you probably, I would think you've subscribed them to a mailing list, so you have all of your users and so you can be very strategic about the next emails that come out. I know Mailchimp just recently has edited the ability to do some very specific dripping of content as it goes, right? Like you could say, okay, when I get this email I want to do this in two weeks and then three weeks I want to do this and four weeks I want to do this for a particular customer. So setting something up like that I think would be actually ideal because you get their form, you've gotten permission and then you just turn around and send them a tailored email for the next step. But by getting that initial data and getting that initial contact they're a lot more likely. I wouldn't, my general opinion is I wouldn't the very next time ask for data. I would just have a conversation and kind of soften the water so to speak and then the next time I can come back and say, hey, now that we've had the success if you're interested, if what I've said interests you here's some other information that we'd like to get from you so we can do this. And tell them what you're doing. I mean, when you're asking for information it's really important to ask why I'm asking for this information and that can be very helpful. How do you feel about pop-up forms, like the forms that you get a blogging form? Like automatic pop-ups? I detest automatic pop-up forms. Now here's the thing, there's some great plugins for it. Actually we have one that does a little bit of like pop-up and I don't use it because I don't like it. I feel like most time users don't like it but the numbers show OptinMonster is a plugin that you might look at that does this for subscriptions and their numbers seem to show that people do it. Like it increases their sign-ups and stuff. So I think that's something you have to test with your own users and find out what kind of pushback you get. We had it for a little while on Ninja Forms and we got a lot of flak for it so we were like, nope, mix, done. Pop-up forms in general are also fairly bad experience on mobile devices. So if you're on a mobile phone and you're going to a sign-up that has a pop-up form, the form doesn't look right on a mobile device. So the majority of your users are on a mobile, it's not gonna be a good experience if it's a pop-up form. What did you change? I broke it. I don't know what I did. There we go. Yes? All right, so you're saying like what is an OptinMonster? That's supposed to be pretty awesome, right? Yeah. So that's not a very good user experience as far as the numbers are concerned. So I would think retargeting is probably a better option to promote conversion. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, so things like OptinMonster, pop-up control and different things like that, someone can actually, you can do some segmentation and look at the specific actions. So I don't generally like I come to a website and immediately, bam, I'm hit with a form and I don't even know what I'm looking at yet. Like that puts me off pretty fast. But if I'm doing something and I take a specific action and that pop-up is for that specific action and I can see that it's related to the action that I took, that is something I'm more likely to look into. I don't know of a lot of plugins that do that really well, but ExitIntent is kind of an example of that. Oh, I'm getting ready to click the X, although I get falses on that all the time where I'm like, I'm just trying to click on your menu, stop showing me a pop-up. Like your menu's at the top of your page, of course I'm scrolling up there. Yeah, oh, I see what you're saying. So is it more effective to say, hey, ask for a little information in a very passive way and then as I continue that conversation, I can get more data. Is that more effective than just bam in their face with pop-ups? I would generally say yes. And the reason I say that is because they have grant, again, we talked about it's getting in their home, getting in their email, they've granted you permission. But when that pop-up comes up, I have no relationship with you yet. I've not given you any permission and now it's not like it's kind of, using the door-to-door salesman concept, it's kind of like not only did you knock on my door, but when I didn't answer, you went around and started knocking on my windows. You're like appearing in, like dude, back off. I said no. I didn't answer my door for a reason. So if you have a form on your site and I want to access you, I'm going to come and I'm going to fill that out. If I didn't come to it, Kansas Army, I'm not going to go to it. You can do nice, gentle nudges and not so in your face. Yes? We're creating a post? Yeah. Yeah, we have a front-end post creator plugin that basically you can add a title field, a content field. You can map any field, a custom post meta. So if you have very unique needs for it, you can map all that stuff and any time the form is submitted successfully, you can go ahead and do that. You can also pair that with a payment gateway and say, hey, I want them to pay to submit content and only when the successful payment will go through, will it go. And that can also be saved as a draft to be checked later so you can approve it so you don't just post everything to your site. You can say, okay, this is a draft and I need to review that. Just clarify, if you want to write your custom post type, you have to create the custom post type first. It won't create the custom post type. Yes. We collect the data. That's all we do. And we will put it where you want us to put it. But yes, if you have a custom post type, you would first register that post type and we can connect any of that data. Anything else? Patrick? Do you know any... So like I'm looking at my newsletter sign up form and the wages in the sign bar has a 0.03 conversion rate which just does not sound good. Like do I need to offer something? Do I... It's only first in an email. Right. Submit button. Right. What do I need to do? I'm guessing too that that's probably on every page. That's on every page. I think there is a level of scarcity increases conversion. Like if it's on every page, it's so common I just ignore it. I'm most compliant to it. How many of us ignore ads? Like you see like they have sidebar ads. They're like those 125 pixel ads. I won't even look at them anymore. We just know that's an ad. I'm ignoring it. Like I think that happens with sidebar forms as well. I think when they're so common, I would rather see something like at the top of the page as a call to action or at the bottom of a single page and direct them to that. So I think there is scarcity kind of breeds a little bit more higher conversion I think in a lot of ways. Anyone else? Sidebar which of course everybody involved. You know, is there something like that? Absolutely. I mean I think every one of the form plugins will allow you to do something like that. So you can either in your template file, you actually just call the function for that particular form and it'll display out there. Or if they have widgets and you have like after entry widgets which some lot of themes will put in, you can put that widget in there and it'll show up at the bottom of every post. We do that on NinjaForms.com and WPNinjas.com we sign them up. So the newsletter's there. So after you read the content, hey if you like us and you liked what you read, maybe you want to fill out some more. So absolutely. I think the difference between a sidebar is it's that high priority and it's in that kind of, I think the sidebar gets dismissed a lot. Lot of content and not just forms. I think lots of content in the sidebar just gets dismissed because we kind of know that that's the garbage collection. It's like here's all the things that I think everybody wants to see on every single page of my site and so I'm just gonna throw it all in the sidebar so we ignore it. By putting it at the end of the post what you do is you kind of get them in that linear idea. Like I've read this article and now here's a call to action to get more information. I really like this article, but I don't want to go to this website every single time to get this article. I may sign up for their newsletter and get that information. So I think there is something there that says it's almost like a call to action after the fact. Instead of before on every single page, here's our form, yeah. Yes. So on that is there a way to identify which posts they were actually reading at the time? So there is. So with Ninja Forms we have default values and so one of the default values is the page or post title or the paste or post idea. I think most of the other plugins have that as well. So again, I want to keep that as agnostic as possible. Most of them will probably have that. You should ask if that's a critical need. You might want to ask first before purchasing something because you want to make sure it fits your purpose. And I would generally put that in a hidden field, yeah. So you add a hidden field to your form and you say, hey, I just want to collect when this form is submitted, send me the page title or post title with that content so that I know. And like I said, you can use ID as well if you have more programmatic reasons for using that. You could also use the ID. So anything else? I think that's kind of my time. Is that what they said, 45 minutes? All right, awesome. If you have any other questions about forms, about anything else, we'd be happy to help us. Just check out, look for the red hoodies unless it's somebody that I just gave a red hoodie to. All right, you have all, if you have a hoodie, you've been commissioned. Thank you so much, I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.