As a business owner, forms are an essential tool for collecting customer data, evaluating your business performance, and fostering long-term engagement.

Magento is a popular and user-friendly e-commerce platform that allows you to open and manage your online store. It allows you to set up multiple stores, customize their look and feel, as well as build long-term relationships with your customers.

Let’s look at how forms can help you grow your online store on Magento and a step-by-step guide to integrating your form on the platform

Understanding the Role of Forms in E-Commerce

E-commerce businesses rely heavily on forms to capture customer data.  You can leverage this information to enhance customer experience, boost sales, and build customer loyalty.

The forms typically include contact information, purchase data, shopping behavior, and customer feedback. This data enables you to gain insight into customer preferences, customize their experience, and improve your products or services.

Most Common Forms in Magento Stores

• Registration forms: allow customers to create an account with your store.
• Order forms: enable customers to purchase products from your store.
• Feedback forms: collects feedback about your products/services and experience with your store.
• Payment forms: allows you to securely receive payments for your products or services from customers.
• Newsletter sign-up forms: allow customers to sign up for the store’s newsletter.
• Product review forms: These forms allow customers to leave reviews of specific products.

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Benefits of Adding Forms to a Magento Store

• Building customer base: Forms allow you to collect information about your customers, including their names, email addresses, phone numbers, and purchase history. As a result, you get to know your customers, build long-term relationships with them, and understand their preferences.
• Improve customer service: Forms, especially feedback and product review forms enable you to identify and address customer pain points, improve the overall customer experience, and build customer loyalty.
• Build Engagement and Interest: You can also use forms to attract customers to your brand. For example, you can offer free samples, gift cards, discounts, or other promotions to your newsletter subscription. This will encourage them to engage with your product, want it, and purchase from you.
• Increase sales: Forms can increase sales by making it easier for customers to contact the store, make purchases, or sign up for newsletters.
• Personalize the shopping experience: You can use the data collected from contact forms to recommend products, offer discounts, or send targeted marketing messages.

Choosing the Right Form Extension for Magento

Yes, you need forms for your Magento store, but not all form builders can help you achieve your goals. Here’s a list of form builders to help you seamlessly create effective forms for your Magento store:

• Formplus is a user-friendly and versatile form builder that allows you to create beautiful and engaging forms. It offers many features, including conditional logic that will enable you to personalize survey questions based on customers’ responses.

Customers can also upload images, files, and videos in their comments to provide more insight into their feedback. Formplus also comes with Zapier integration that allows you access to customer relationship management (CRM), marketing, productivity, and sales tools.

• MageDelight Magento custom form builder: This extension allows you to create custom forms with a drag-and-drop form builder. It also offers a variety of features, such as conditional logic, email notifications, and form analytics.
• Mageplaza Form Builder: This extension is another popular option that allows you to create surveys, collect customer information, and personalize surveys with conditional logic.
• MageMe WebForms Pro M2: This extension is a more advanced option that offers a wider range of features, such as multi-step forms, A/B testing, and form templates.
• LandOfCoder Form Builder for Magento 2: It’s a simple and affordable form builder extension that allows you to create basic forms.

Comparing Form Extensions Using Features, Pricing and Support

The table below is a comprehensive breakdown of the listed form builders to help you compare their benefits and pick the most suitable option:

Extension	Features	Pricing	Support
Formplus	Drag-and-drop builder  conditional logic email notifications payment integration form templates Zapier integration for CRM and marketing tools	$0-68/year	24/7 support
MageDelight Magento form builder	Drag-and-drop builder conditional logic email notifications  form analytics	$179-524/year	24/7
Mageplaza Form Builder	Drag-and-drop builder conditional logic email notifications  form analytics	$199-399/year	24/7
MageMe WebForms Pro	Multi-step forms,  A/B testing,  form templates Drag-and-drop builder conditional logic email notifications form analytics	$185-435/year	24/7
LandOfCoder Form Builder for Magento	Basic forms drag-and-drop form builder	$99-$199	24/7

So, Which Form Builder Should You Choose?

The right form extension will depend on what you need and want. If you want a form builder with sales-focused and customer engagement features, Formplus is at the top of the list.

Formplus is the most affordable option with 24/7 support and pre-built form templates. It also prioritizes customer privacy by encrypting customer data, allowing you to securely collect customer data and payment.

If you’re looking for a support-focused form builder that offers great support, MageForms is a great option, but it is relatively expensive.

Installing the Chosen Form Extension (Formplus)

Follow this step-by-step guide to help you add forms to your Magento store:

Account Creation

• Create an account with Formplus
• Next, go to the template library to select a form that fits your requirements- order form, payment form, etc. You could also create your form from scratch.

Configuring the Form Extension Settings

• Edit the form’s questions to match your data collection goals. You can add conditional logic to personalize each customer’s experience.
• Customize its look and feel to fit your brand- you can change the theme, add a logo, and other branding assets.
• Set up your preferred settings- form privacy, email notifications, confirmation messages, and others.

Embedding the Form in the Magento Store

1. Go to your Magento store’s admin panel.
2. In the sidebar, go to Content > Elements > Pages.
3. Select the page where you want to add the form.
4. Click on the Insert, then select Embed Code.
5.  Paste the embed code.
6. Click on Save

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Tips for Optimizing the Form Fields to Improve Data Collection

• Build user-friendly forms: Your form should be easy to navigate and answer. Don’t use complex words, use multi-step forms instead of lengthy forms to reduce the abandonment rate.
• Use a clear call to action: Don’t use vague call-to-action that can confuse customers, such as “you forget something”. Instead, use a clear call to action such as “Do you have feedback for us.”
• Offer an incentive: Offer people an incentive to form submissions, such as a discount, a gift, or access to exclusive content.
• Personalize your forms: Personalizing your forms builds engagement and a positive attitude towards your products/services.
• Test your forms: Test different versions of your forms to see which one performs best. This can help you improve the form design, question wording, and other content.

Testing the Form Functionality

It’s always best practice to test your forms before sharing them, this will help you to identify and fix any errors or problems before they affect your users. This ensures a seamless user experience and prevents any loss of data or revenue.

What Are the Methods for Testing the Form’s Responsiveness and Functionality?

• Manual testing: manually filling out the form and checking to see if it works as expected.
• Automated testing: using a tool to automatically test the form for errors and problems.
• User testing: opening the form to users to a small sample of users to test the form and provide feedback.

How to Troubleshoot and Resolve Common Form Issues

• Validation errors: These errors occur when the user enters invalid data or missing fields. You can fix this by writing clear error messages that point out missing fields and invalid data to users.
• Submission errors: These errors happen when the form is submitted but the data is not successfully saved. You can resolve these errors by checking the form’s code for errors and by making sure that the form is properly connected to the database.
• Form layout issues: This happens when the form is not compatible across devices. For example, the form displays properly on mobile, while it doesn’t on desktop. You can fix these issues by making sure that the form is responsive and that it is compatible with all major browsers.

Analyzing Form Data and Conversion Tracking

Analyzing your form data helps you see if customers are using your forms or not. It also tells you why customers are not using your forms, allowing you to improve your customer experience and get more of them to use the form.

Here are the best tools to help you analyze your Magento store form data and track conversions:

• Formplus: formplus has an analytics dashboard that helps you monitor form performance and conversion metrics. You can also integrate other analytics tools to monitor customer behavior with the Zapier integration.
• Google Analytics: It’s a free web analytics service that allows you to track different metrics, including form submissions, page visits, and respondent demographics.
• HubSpot CRM: It is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that includes a form analytics tool.
• Salesforce Pardot: Salesforce Pardot is a marketing automation platform that also includes form analytics.

How to Interpret Form Submission Data

• Spot trends: If you look at your form submission data over time, you should start to see some trends. For example, you might notice that there’s a higher conversion rate for specific forms, while some have high bounce rates.
• Identify outliers: These are responses that don’t fit the expected answers. For instance, if you notice that a form has a low conversion rate, it could indicate a poorly designed form or low interest in the form topic.
• Compare data across forms: Comparing data across different forms helps you to understand why customers engage with specific forms and not others. You can use the information to find opportunities for improvement.

Relevance of Conversion Tracking in Evaluating Form Performance

Conversion tracking is all about tracking how many conversions you get from your marketing efforts. Keep in mind that conversion doesn’t necessarily mean sales, it could also be feature adoption, newsletter signup, and more.

Conversion tracking helps you to form performance and identify opportunities for improvement. The simplest method of tracking form conversion is the Formplus analytics tool.  It allows you to track the number of visitors who open the forms, fill out their responses, and submit the form.

Conclusion

Forms are an effective tool for e-commerce businesses to enhance customer experience and manage orders. 

Using a user-friendly and effective form builder like Formplus allows you to create clear and engaging forms. The Formplus analytics tool also allows you to monitor customer behavior and identify existing pain points to improve their experience.