Registration forms – how long is too long?

Do you go short or long?

It’s a dilemma as old as events themselves.

Should you be mining prospective attendees for data, asking them lots of highly specific questions about themselves, their company and their preferences before you let them sign up for your event?

Or should you keep things to the bare minimum: just a name and an email address. No muss no fuss.

The first approach promises to get you all kinds of valuable insights that you can then use to personalise your event experience and drive other marketing channels.

The second leads to a faster, lower-friction registration process, which means that more people will complete it, and thus actually get on board, right?

Well, maybe.

An unintended consequence of online registration platforms like ours is that, because you can add as many custom fields, questions and options as you like to your form, some organisers take things to extremes and ask for a bunch of information, really just because they can!

We’re in a privileged position to see a lot of registration forms across a lot of different event types and industries. We also get to see how those different forms perform in terms of conversions.

Here’s what we’ve learned about the whole short form vs long form dilemma.

1 It’s about commitment

The number of fields your registrant is willing to complete to sign up to your event is usually in direct correlation to the scale of the commitment they perceive they’re making.

Let’s consider the example of a free-to-attend webinar lasting 40 minutes. This is at the bottom end of the commitment scale. I might see your online ad, decide I’m interested and click through to sign up. But if I see a form asking for any more than my name, company and email – I’m probably going to bail.

Why? Because (and don’t get sad) people do not imbue free webinars with a great deal of value. As a result, they’re not willing to spend a lot of time signing up (and giving you detailed information that you’ll use to try and sell them stuff).

When our clients start adding lots of fields to short on-line events, their conversion rates drop.

Not only that, their check-in rates don’t improve either (ie the percentage of registrants who actually show up on the day).

Webinars are as casual as it gets. Sure, I have every intention of showing up at the point when I register – three weeks out. But on the day itself, I’m inevitably busy with more urgent stuff. And anyway, they always send a link to the recording.

Now let’s contrast the webinar scenario above with a two day, in-person developer conference for a software company, being held in Las Vegas. This event is also free for the attendee – but it’s anything but free for the host company! In fact, each registrant who ends up being a no-show costs the host around $3,000 in cash – plus the opportunity cost of a place that could have gone to a potential customer.

Do we want a minimal registration form for this event? We do not.

In this case we want to lean into the wisdom of Thomas Paine, who tells us:

‘That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly. It is dearness only that gives everything its value.’

Yes, I did just quote a revered American founding-father, French revolutionary, pioneering inventor, and political philosopher in a post about event registration forms. We’re a long way from the Eventbrite blog, Toto!

Of course, Thomas was talking about liberty (or something) but his words are equally applicable to customer conferences.

By having a relatively (not excessively) long registration form, we’re actually underscoring the exclusivity and cachet of the event. The implication is that, we ask these extra questions: a) because we only accept the best people and, b) because we personalise your experience such that your precious time is well spent and you have a fun, inspiring trip.

In other words, we want to present registering for a high-value, free-to-attend, in-person event as a privilege, and therefore as a very strong commitment on the part of the attendee.

What about paid events?

With paid events, the payment itself represents a significant commitment. So the maxim here is to reduce friction as far as possible and ‘get out of the registrant’s way’.

Rule one of marketing is: ‘make it easy for the customer to buy’ and as a general principle, I would always advise event owners to minimise the number of fields they have on registration forms for paid events.

Once a customer has decided to register for a paid event, the two most common hurdles that might stop them completing the registration are excessive form length (too many extraneous questions) or negative surprises towards the end of the registration flow (such as a really harsh cancellation policy or unmentioned booking fees).

Registrants for paid events tend to be fairly tolerant of extra fields if (big if) the data being solicited is clearly going to be used to customise / optimise their experience at the event.

They are far less tolerant of fields which are clearly just designed to populate new sections of your CRM so that your colleagues in Sales will be better informed when they hit them up later.

Attendees signing up to a free event know that giving you their data is part of the quid-pro-quo. They tell you about themselves in return for some interesting content. Attendees who are paying you see things rather differently.

2 Don’t ask for data you don’t actually have a use for

We see this a lot.

Organisations are tempted to view the registration form as a not-to-be-missed opportunity to gather data on people. So they add a bunch of fields that may or may not be strictly necessary – but that doesn’t do them any favours in terms of the form completion rate.

A lot of times, we can pretty much draw a line between the number of questions an organiser asks on their reg form and the number of abandoned registration emails triggered.

Often the problem is that there are too many cooks in the kitchen, over-seasoning the Shakshuka (or whatever the metaphor is).

Often the event team just wants to ask the questions they need in order to sign an attendee up and deliver the event well.

But the marketing department wants to know a bunch of stuff about how the prospect found out about the event in the first place. So there’s another field. Or three.

Now the sales team are weighing in. They want to add some questions about the prospect’s purchasing authority and the products they’re using now – so they can assign leads and be better prepared on the day.

All of a sudden, you have a reg form with 25 questions, and the potential attendee feels like sales fodder. And the chances of them completing the registration are almost certainly lower than they were before they arrived on the form page.

However tempting it may be to ask for as much information as you can while the person is on the form, always consider whether you really need that information; and if so, whether you could get it somewhere else. Like LinkedIn.

Always ask: why do I need this information?

• Will it help me qualify a prospective attendee?
• Will it help me personalise the experience for this attendee?
• Will it help me improve the event overall?

Who in the organisation is actually going to use the data in any extra fields, and what are they going to get from it? If there are not compelling answers to those questions, the fields should not be on the form.

3 Make longer forms seem shorter with conditional logic

Of course, some events are inherently complicated with multiple days, parallel sessions, lots of different ticket types, options and add-ons. A longer registration form is unavoidable.

Here, the trick is to make your longer form feel shorter by using conditional display logic to only show the user fields that apply to them, at the appropriate time.

Conditional logic essentially automates changes to the form in real-time, based on a user’s input.

You can use it to show or hide certain fields, perform calculations, or to customise the thank you page.

We’ve all experienced frustration filling out a form and having to answer questions that don’t apply to us. Conditional logic will save your registrants from having to answer an overwhelming number of questions that don’t apply to them.

For example, say you have a ticket type just for your speakers. You have a dinner the night before and you need to know who’s coming. So, first of all the question: ‘Are you coming to the speakers’ dinner? would only be shown to attendees with the ‘speaker’ registration type.

Even then, only if a speaker answers: ‘Yes, I will come to the dinner’ do they see the follow up questions about dietary requirements, transportation or anything else you need to know.

And if your registration software is really good, it’ll let you set up multiple conditions that apply all at once.

Conditional display logic is a great way to shorten and de-clutter more complex registration journeys and keep customers from being bogged down by fields that don’t apply to their particular circumstances.

4 Pre-populate every field you can

Whether you have a minimalist registration form or a longer more comprehensive set of fields, you should always pre-populate the form with any data you might already know about this customer.

If you’ve sent me a marketing email or an invitation, clearly you already know my email address. And presumably you also have my name, company, country and maybe some other stuff about me in a contact record within your CRM.

Consequently, when I click through from your email to register for the event, you know it’s me because the click-through URL in the mail is unique to me.

So there’s really no need to present me with a completely blank registration form and ask me to type that information in from scratch. Yet, eight times out of ten, that’s what happens!

5 Even short forms feel longer on mobile

Remember that between 30–60% of your attendees will be attempting to register for your event on a smartphone.

This means your registration form need to be responsive, with fields, labels and guidance text stacking in a clear logical way for a narrow viewport.

They also need to be optimised for touch (conveniently sized tap-targets, sufficient space between fields, no reliance on hover-revealed content etc).

And make sure your form builder lets you use the right field type for the user input you’re looking for so that, if you’re using a phone to fill in the registration form, that field brings up the appropriate keyboard.

So many forms I use implement email address fields just like ordinary text fields, and neglect to trigger the right keyboard for the input type.

If you’re asking for my email address, you should automatically bring up the keyboard that has the @ symbol right there – not make me tap to bring up the keyboard with the symbols on!

So what’s the verdict?

In a nutshell: when it comes to registration forms, shorter is generally better.

Nobody likes filling in long forms, and the more fields you add, the greater the risk of the registrant getting frustrated and giving up.

That said, we find that customers are more tolerant of fields where the purpose is clearly to optimise their experience at the event.

They are less tolerant of questions designed to mine them for marketing data. The exception being higher value customer events, where a series of robust qualification questions can help convey a sense of exclusivity and lead to a higher commitment on the part of the attendee.

In either case, there’s no excuse for fields that serve no useful purpose.

And it’s easy to use conditional logic, field-pre-population and validation to make even the most complicated form a breeze to complete.

Customers expect effortless, intuitive registration experiences these days. If your event or email marketing tools can’t provide this, ask why.

For more hot takes on crafting the perfect registration form design – check out our webinar.