Hello, I wrote this quick how to guide and thought I would share on GFY!
INCREASE CONVERSIONS WITH PRE-POPULATING FIELDS
WHY?
What is a pre-populating field? A pre-populating field (or pre-pop) is when information is automatically filled into a form field. Imagine a 20 field form, pretty intimidating for a user to fill out, right? Now imagine that same 20 field form but with 18 fields filled in with the users information automatically, basically you are now at a 2 field submit. In general, the less a user needs to fill out, the more likely they are to submit that form and the more likely you are to get a conversion.
HOW?
So now that you know what pre-popping form fields are, let me share with you how to do this. The easiest way for most people to do this is by using php on the form itself and a query string to send the user to that page. If I lost you already, don’t worry, I am going to take you through this step by step.
SETTING UP THE FORM
Before you can send a user to this form, you need to actually set the form up to allow pre-popping fields. I am going to assume you know how to make a form and already have one or that you are sending traffic to a form that allows pre-popped fields (in that case you can skip below to ‘Sending the information’).
Say you have a field for email address that a user would submit to join your mailing list:
<input name=”email” type=”text” value=”” />
By adding just a little bit of php code we can tell it to automatically fill in the value with their email address when they come to the page:
<input name=”email” type=”text” value=”<?php echo $_GET[‘email’]; ?>” />
With this additional code added, we now have the ability to pre-pop this field through the URL! Make sure to change the extension on the page from .html or .htm to .php if you have not done so already.
SENDING THE INFORMATION
Now that the form is set up correctly we can send this information to the form appended to the URL as variables. In the previous form example, located at examplesite.com/form.php, we allow for the email field to be pre-popped. So here is what the URL would look like to automatically fill this information in:
examplesite.com/[email protected]
When anyone follows this link, it will automatically fill in the email field with:
[email protected]
Pretty cool, right?
Notice the’?’ starts the appended variables.
But what if we want to prepopulate more than one field? It’s really easy because variables in the URL can be added by using the ‘&’ symbol.
So let’s say we set up fields named ‘firstname’,’ lastname’, and ‘email’, we could then send the user to this URL to have them all filled in:
examplesite.com/form.php?firstname=Joe&lastname=Smith&email=test@e xamplesite.com
The form would be filled in with Joe as the first name, Smith as the last name and [email protected] as the email. All the user needs to do to get the conversion is to hit that submit button! Collecting data has never been easier!
USING EMAIL MERGE FIELDS
A common place where you could use pre-pop data is through emailing. It is guaranteed that every time you email someone you at least have their email address, so why not pre pop that into the form you are sending them to?
Most email services have merge fields where you can address each email to the contacts first name. Often merge fields would have you enter this data like this {fname} or %fname% or something like that for their first name field, each service or software will have their own variable names. The software then pulls that information out of the record for each contact to put that data in that placeholder.
So figure out how to use the merge field for email address (if they do not have one for email, you might see if you can load the email addresses in for email AND for first name of each contact).
Now add a link to your email, but instead of adding a specific email address to the end of the URL, add the merge field tag. So if your email service assigns this as the correct merge field %email% then your URL link would look like this:
www.examplesite.com/form.php?email=%email%
Now when each user clicks that link, they will be directed to the form but with their own email address automatically filled in.
CONCLUSION
What I have outlined are only the basic principles to doing this. There is so much more you can do with it, I promise! If you are just setting up the form for your affiliates to use, or using your data to its maximum potential, by implementing pre-populating fields you will be able to increase conversions for you or your affiliates with only a few lines of code. So if you have the ability to set this up, I highly recommend it.
WHY?
What is a pre-populating field? A pre-populating field (or pre-pop) is when information is automatically filled into a form field. Imagine a 20 field form, pretty intimidating for a user to fill out, right? Now imagine that same 20 field form but with 18 fields filled in with the users information automatically, basically you are now at a 2 field submit. In general, the less a user needs to fill out, the more likely they are to submit that form and the more likely you are to get a conversion.
HOW?
So now that you know what pre-popping form fields are, let me share with you how to do this. The easiest way for most people to do this is by using php on the form itself and a query string to send the user to that page. If I lost you already, don’t worry, I am going to take you through this step by step.
SETTING UP THE FORM
Before you can send a user to this form, you need to actually set the form up to allow pre-popping fields. I am going to assume you know how to make a form and already have one or that you are sending traffic to a form that allows pre-popped fields (in that case you can skip below to ‘Sending the information’).
Say you have a field for email address that a user would submit to join your mailing list:
<input name=”email” type=”text” value=”” />
By adding just a little bit of php code we can tell it to automatically fill in the value with their email address when they come to the page:
<input name=”email” type=”text” value=”<?php echo $_GET[‘email’]; ?>” />
With this additional code added, we now have the ability to pre-pop this field through the URL! Make sure to change the extension on the page from .html or .htm to .php if you have not done so already.
SENDING THE INFORMATION
Now that the form is set up correctly we can send this information to the form appended to the URL as variables. In the previous form example, located at examplesite.com/form.php, we allow for the email field to be pre-popped. So here is what the URL would look like to automatically fill this information in:
examplesite.com/[email protected]
When anyone follows this link, it will automatically fill in the email field with:
[email protected]
Pretty cool, right?
Notice the’?’ starts the appended variables.
But what if we want to prepopulate more than one field? It’s really easy because variables in the URL can be added by using the ‘&’ symbol.
So let’s say we set up fields named ‘firstname’,’ lastname’, and ‘email’, we could then send the user to this URL to have them all filled in:
examplesite.com/form.php?firstname=Joe&lastname=Smith&email=test@e xamplesite.com
The form would be filled in with Joe as the first name, Smith as the last name and [email protected] as the email. All the user needs to do to get the conversion is to hit that submit button! Collecting data has never been easier!
USING EMAIL MERGE FIELDS
A common place where you could use pre-pop data is through emailing. It is guaranteed that every time you email someone you at least have their email address, so why not pre pop that into the form you are sending them to?
Most email services have merge fields where you can address each email to the contacts first name. Often merge fields would have you enter this data like this {fname} or %fname% or something like that for their first name field, each service or software will have their own variable names. The software then pulls that information out of the record for each contact to put that data in that placeholder.
So figure out how to use the merge field for email address (if they do not have one for email, you might see if you can load the email addresses in for email AND for first name of each contact).
Now add a link to your email, but instead of adding a specific email address to the end of the URL, add the merge field tag. So if your email service assigns this as the correct merge field %email% then your URL link would look like this:
www.examplesite.com/form.php?email=%email%
Now when each user clicks that link, they will be directed to the form but with their own email address automatically filled in.
CONCLUSION
What I have outlined are only the basic principles to doing this. There is so much more you can do with it, I promise! If you are just setting up the form for your affiliates to use, or using your data to its maximum potential, by implementing pre-populating fields you will be able to increase conversions for you or your affiliates with only a few lines of code. So if you have the ability to set this up, I highly recommend it.
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