How to increase user engagement with online forms

If you’ve been in business for five minutes, you know that creating a high-converting website and setting up your social media channels is a lot of work.

And yet, it’s just the beginning. For a successful business that consistently brings in prospects, clients, customers, and revenue, you can’t simply “build it and they will come.”

You need to focus on user engagement.

What is user engagement, and why is it important?

At its simplest, user engagement is when visitors to your website or social media channels interact with your content in some way. This can take the form of reading or sharing your content, downloading resources, filling out online forms, clicking through your calls to action, or completing surveys and quizzes.

In a nutshell, user engagement means your website visitors and social media followers are clicking around and sticking around, and that shows they’re interested in discovering more of what you have to offer.

User engagement is essential because engaged users are much more likely to sign up, subscribe, click through, and — more important — buy. It’s engaged users who convert; even huge traffic numbers don’t necessarily translate into better conversions and more buyers unless they’re actively engaging with your content.

One way to achieve a higher level of user engagement and increase conversions is to incorporate interactive components like online forms — surveys, quizzes, feedback forms, and multistep forms, for example — into your website and social media accounts.

The types of online forms most useful on social media are surveys and quizzes, while websites benefit from feedback forms, including multistep forms, in addition to surveys and quizzes.

Let’s take a look at three types of online forms that help increase user engagement.

Forms that increase user engagement on social media

Surveys

Surveys are great for gathering customer feedback on your products, understanding public opinion about your brand, conducting market research, and collecting other relevant data for your business.

This information is a gold mine for vetting ideas about new products, enhancing customer service, gauging areas for business improvement, understanding the kind of content your audience finds useful, and making sure customers think that you listen to and value them (which goes a long way toward creating brand loyalty).

If you want to see what kind of survey might be just right for your business, check out our free online survey templates here.

You can select one of the premade survey forms or build one from scratch. After choosing your preferred survey template, use the Jotform Form Builder to design, format, and customize your survey form.

Once you’ve created the form, you’ll be able to get a link to your form and share it on your social media channels (or embed it on your website).

Quizzes

Online quizzes are another effective way to increase user engagement. Your quiz can be light-hearted and fun or more formal and serious, depending on your audience, the data you want to collect, and your business goals.

And let’s be honest — it’s pretty hard to resist a quiz, even if it’s not the standard Buzzfeed “Who’s your Disney villain alter ego?” variety.

But quizzes aren’t merely a fun tool to increase user engagement. Treat your quiz like any other marketing initiative — begin with market research (which you can conduct using a market research survey), determine your audience’s challenges based on the feedback you receive, then create a quiz that shares information to help your audience overcome the problems the market research survey revealed.

Quizzes are also great for lead generation because users are often happy to share their email address in order to receive the quiz results.

You can use Jotform’s quiz form tool to easily turn forms into quizzes. And again, once you’ve created the form, you can easily grab your form link to share your quiz on social media.

Forms that increase user engagement on websites

There are many ways to increase user engagement on websites, including creating actionable content for your target audience, linking to other resources, offering useful downloads, and embedding quizzes and surveys.

Feedback forms

Feedback forms, including multistep forms, are another excellent way to increase website user engagement while making your customers feel valued. 

Types of feedback forms include customer satisfaction forms, restaurant evaluation forms, product survey forms, patient feedback forms, and website survey forms among many others.

Multistep forms

Multistep forms are a proven way to increase user engagement. A multistep form is simply a longer form broken down into a series of shorter pieces or multiple steps, allowing users to fill out their information one small chunk at a time. This makes a form that asks for lots of information less intimidating and more fun to fill out, which increases conversions.

Jotform’s drag-and-drop Form Builder enables you to create a beautiful multistep form that matches your brand — without requiring any coding.

If one of your business goals for 2020 and beyond is to maximize user engagement (and, in turn, power up profits by converting users into paying customers), then surveys, quizzes, and feedback forms are tools worth considering.

And the great news is you don’t have to be a tech genius to create custom online forms and make them work for you.