Why customers abandon your registration form (and how to get more of them to convert)

Having run a commercial conference business, I can honestly say that few things are more frustrating than successfully acquiring a prospective attendee, moving them through the marketing funnel and getting them on to your registration page – only to lose them on the form before they hit ‘confirm’.

You know they’re interested. Why didn’t they just convert! Dammit!

Well, there are a bunch of reasons you’re losing registrations prior to the payment stage. Today we’re looking into the eight biggest factors that cause potential attendees to walk away at the last minute.

The good news is you can fix at least seven of these.

Let’s get into it.

What is form abandonment and do you even have a problem?

Form abandonment is when customers leave your site after starting the registration process.

The first thing you need to do is understand how many customers are giving up part-way through your form. Really your event platform’s dashboard should show you this metric.

But to calculate the form abandonment rate, simply divide the total number of completed registrations by the number of abandoned forms, and subtract from 1. For example, if you have 300 visitors starting the registration process, and 100 completed registrations, then your form abandonment rate is 66%.

Across wider ecommerce, on average, 70% of customers will leave after adding an item to their cart. 

The rates we see for registration form abandonment are typically lower than this, but they vary enormously – from as low as 23% to as high as 64%.

Why do people start registering and then quit part-way through?

That is the question. The best-case scenario is that your customer just gets distracted mid-way through the form. The baby wakes up, the Amazon delivery arrives, Tom Cruise makes an emergency helicopter landing in the front garden – that kind of thing.

In these cases, your automatic abandoned registration emails will kick-in after a set time to gently prompt your customer to finish the job via a magic link URL that lets them easily pick up where they left off.

Obviously, you can’t do anything about babies crying or Tom Cruise’s helicopter. And even if you could, forget it, because distraction is not the main reason people abandon your registration form.

1 Oh no! They want me to create an account!

Forcing users to create an account before they can register for your event is usually the number one reason they’re bouncing from your registration flow.

Your registrants have limited bandwidth and patience. They already have too many accounts and passwords to remember. They don’t want another one and if you force them to set one up, there’s a good chance they’ll think, ‘Forget it. I’ll do this later’.

If you’re still using this antiquated approach to accessing customer data, your registration sales are surely taking a hit.

And it’s totally avoidable. Just use magic links instead.

Magic links are a password-less authentication method that allows users to log in to an application through a unique, one-time-use link sent to their email.

A registrant can (if you choose to allow them to) click the link to re-access the form at a later date to update their information. And when it comes to registering for a future event, you can simply pre-populate fields using their email.

Making people set up a username and password just to register for an event is almost always a bad idea, and a secure, tokenised magic link gives you all the functionality you need.

2Whoa! How many questions?!

A long bath is great. A long weekend, even better. But literally no one likes a long registration form.

What attendees want is to sign up and move on, so make sure that your forms contain only the most essential questions so that you get the data you need, and your visitors can complete their registrations as soon as possible, with no hassle.

Make sure you’re using conditional logic to streamline your attendees’ registration experience. Conditional logic helps direct your attendees through the form, ensuring they only ever see the fields and questions that are relevant to them based on data you already know, or have just asked. It’s the best way to help customers complete their registrations sooner – especially when you have multiple options, ticket types and pricing.

And make sure your registration provider is able to pre-fill any fields where you already hold data on the registrant in your CRM, and that all inputs are auto-saved and available to the user if they do get interrupted and come back later.

When preparing your registration form always ask yourself ‘what will I actually do with the data in this field?’ If you can’t answer that question, get the field off the form!

Colleagues in marketing and sales will typically want to add a bunch of questions about demographics, purchasing authority, inside leg measurements … You need to push back!

If there’s data you really want from attendees which isn’t necessary for the registration itself, consider requesting it at the event – through the attendee app for instance, or a post-event survey, prize draw or similar. But don’t discourage them from registering in the first place.

3Hang on, this is more expensive / complicated than I thought it would be!

Always be upfront about things like additional fees, taxes and session bookings.

Buyers like to know what to expect. They don’t like surprises late on in the registration journey because surprises have the effect of undermining trust.

So if your pricing is ex-sales tax, or subject to additional costs, booking fees etc, make that abundantly clear before users start working on the form.

Similarly, if you need attendees to choose from and commit to complex options (like picking which sessions / workshops they want to attend), or even fill-in any advance talking points – make this clear on your agenda page and elsewhere. Don’t hit them with it at the end of the registration flow, just as they’re getting their card out.

4Wait! Should I have a discount code?

These days we all get flooded with discount codes and promotional offers. We’re now so accustomed to this that many registrants seek out coupon codes or even wait to register until they have found one. That’s right, even for business events!

‘I bet there’s a code for this event. Let me just check my inbox … Nothing? I’ll just Google it!’

This is bad. Because now they’re distracted, convinced they’re about to over-pay and there’s a chance they’ll defer registration as a result.

By all means offer customers discount codes as part of your marketing. But to avoid people tumbling down the above rabbit hole, design your checkout so that discount codes are not an obvious component of the checkout, but are still accessible to customers who have one. The idea here is to make sure you don’t deter customers without a code from completing registration, while making the field easy enough to find for customers who do.

Our clever pricing rules technology can be a better way of making sure you link specific pricing offers and discounts available to particular groups - without having to have a discount field on the form at all.

Either way, if you give people a discount code, it has to work.

5Wow! This cancellation policy is harsh!

Registrants often get information on the cancellation policy towards the end of the registration journey. An unnecessarily harsh cancellation policy will inevitably cause some customers to leave.

After all, a prospective delegate never knows for sure whether they’ll still be free to attend your conference in, say, four months time – or even four days. An urgent meeting, personal emergency or travel disruption could always mess up their plans.

So, if your business model allows it, offer customers a good cancellation policy, including options to send a substitute or get a credit against future events or other services if your company provides them. Link clearly to the cancellation policy early in the registration process so that customers are comfortable confirming the registration.

6Why is this page loading so slowly?

Digital impatience is a thing.

Just a decade ago, we were all more than happy to wait a few minutes while our computers fired up and we were genuinely delighted that we could buy stuff without actually going to the store.

Not anymore! According to Google, the likelihood of users leaving a site increases by 32% when the page load time increases from one to three seconds! To make matters worse, the average web user perceives load times as being 15% slower than is actually the case.

If you want your registrants to finish their forms, your pages need to load lightning fast at all times. Now, you might think that as we approach 2025, slow page-load times would be a thing of the past. Like President Trump.

Think again. Actually, lots of registration systems are shockingly badly engineered.

The culprit can be anything from inefficient code, inadequate API server response times (cheap infrastructure), too much JavaScript or CSS running on the form pages, a lack of proper caching mechanisms, or even the geographical location of the platform servers relative to your visitor.

Whatever the cause, you can’t afford it. So check your registration form pages, and if they’re slow, ask your provider why.

7This site looks … sketchy

We see a lot of bad registration forms. Poorly designed, cluttered, amateurish and (often) generic – as in very much off-brand. If your registration pages don’t look serious, don’t be surprised if customers doubt your ability to deliver the event you’re promising.

Amateurish forms that look dated and unloved do not inspire trust in the minds of customers thinking of giving you their card details to pay thousands of dollars for an event happening in the future.

At the same time, phony pages are becoming terrifyingly accurate and difficult to differentiate as phishing attacks are becoming more common.

In digital marketing, trust stems from professionalism and consistency. You want your registration form to look, feel and behave as similarly to the rest of your event website as possible. The forms should pick up any accent colours, fonts, visuals and branding cues that you use elsewhere on your site.

Too many registration providers are unable to get this right and it hurts conversions. It’s vital not to create any feelings of disorientation or doubt in the mind of your registrant, right at the point of booking. Yours is the brand they know and trust. They must be certain it’s you they’re doing business with – not some third-party (legitimate or otherwise).

8You know what? I was actually just checking you out

Of course, in the end there are some abandoned forms you can’t do much about.

People will always start the registration process with no intention of completing it – just to see what’s involved.

Some of them might be your competitors. Or they might be us.

When we prepare a demo for a new client, the first thing we do is register for one of their existing events to see how they structure things and what could be improved.

Even if you implement all the best practices above, you’ll never entirely eliminate abandonment due to the fact that some people just like browsing.

As a general rule though, you can reduce the impact on form abandonment by giving customers the best and most complete information about your event, your terms and pricing before they start to register. This eliminates the need to initiate the registration flow just to access these details, which (of course) reduces abandonment.