Creating online forms is a fundamental part of any business. However, most companies don’t realize just how easy it is to create effective forms. Some forms aren’t really easy to fill out—complicated designs, laggy interface, confusing questions, or just inefficient form tool. The good news is, by using the right software, you can create effective forms online that are not only easy to use but also align with your brand. In this blog, we’ll show you how to create easy and effective forms in 6 steps—improving your form completion rate!

Read more: 10 Tips on How To Make an Effective Survey

Only ask for the information you need

Want to make your forms effective easy to fill out? Then, only ask for the information you need. Forms don’t need to be super detailed and wordy—be straight to the point and ask right away. It’s also important to avoid double-barreled questions as they can confuse your respondents on what to answer.

Only asking for the information you need doesn’t only involve questions, it also means being mindful of your form fields. You can specify which of the questions are required to fill out, or optional. This way, your users would know which fields they should answer.

Use dropdown menu

Does the answer to your question have a lot of options? If it does, then the dropdown menu is your best friend!

The dropdown menu is useful if you’re asking questions that will require a lot of options to answer (country, city, industry, job, etc). A lot of options listed in the form don’t look good—you wouldn’t want to make it look clunky with all the texts in there! Make sure you’ll take advantage of the dropdown menu to make your forms effective neat and much easier to fill out.

Don’t use “submit” on your forms

Are you offering a whitepaper that will be available once your form has been filled out? Or a free template that can help your users? If so, don’t be boring enough to use “submit” in your forms!

Using “submit” in your forms isn’t just plain—it also sounds robotic and unexciting, which can affect your form completion rate. Make sure you’re hyping your main offer to users by using result-oriented CTAs after they fill out the forms (Get my whitepaper now), (Take me to my free template), (Download the report now). This way, your users wouldn’t want to delay completing your pre-filled forms!

Read more: Organizing Events? Here Are the Things You Should Include in Your Registration Event Form

Use pre-filled forms

Not everyone likes to fill out forms over and over again, especially if it’s been done before. The best way to make your forms effective? Use pre-filled invitation forms. Pre-populated forms wouldn’t just improve your form completion rate, it’ll also save the time of your users. PlatoForms’ pre-filled forms are powered with a shareable link that you can share anytime with users: No need to install anything, let them fill your forms out on any device or operating system!

Pro tip: Do you use PDFs? PlatoForms is an online survey tool that can convert PDF to form. Make a fillable PDF and convert your PDF to web form and create pre-filled invitation forms easily! Sign up here to start.

Take advantage of conditional logic

Now, you can create smarter, more responsive, and effective forms with conditional logic! With the help of this powerful feature, you’ll create a short, simple, and personalized customer experience. To add, conditional logic guides your users to fill out their online PDF forms correctly. You can do a lot of useful actions with the conditional logic feature like hiding or showing fields, or creating formulas with numbers, and setting up automatic answers.

Pro Tip: Want to learn how to use conditional logic in your forms? See the full instructions here.

Create effective forms with the right tools

It’ll be impossible to create effective forms with an inefficient tool—so make sure you’re choosing software that can do the job! Below are some of the most productive form tools that you can use to make effective forms:

• PlatoForms: Using a PDF? PlatoForms is an online PDF form converter that lets you to convert PDF to form and make fillable PDFs. If you’re using PDFs, you can convert your PDF to web forms and share them with your audience right away with a link or email invitation. Another great thing? You can paste your form’s embeddable link to your site so your users can see and answer them. Note, sending a PlatoForms link to your users will let them fill out the forms on a browser—they don’t have to install anything!
• FormCan: We just launched a very cool form tool called FormCan—the next-generation form builder! Powered by beautiful design and ready-to-use templates, it’s now easier to create powerful and modern forms. Whether you’re creating one from scratch or using templates, you can create smarter and more effective forms quickly. Another good thing is that you can also connect your forms to different apps, including a payment portal like Stripe and a cloud drive like Google Drive, and more.

Pro tip: Completing online PDF forms and making fillable PDFs isn’t the only way to use PlatoForms—you can now also share your PDF forms through link shares. Submit your online PDF form, publish, and click share—and a link that contains your forms will be generated right away! No need to install another tool.

Conclusion

Overall, remember that the key to creating easy forms is to make your questions simple and use an efficient form tool. The only thing worse than filling out forms is a long, complex form—so make sure you’re creating easy ones! If you follow these tips, you’ll be able to build an effective form that gets the information you need, without wasting someone’s time.