Sign up forms are a critical touchpoint in the B2B customer journey. More often than not, this is the first interaction a wholesale customer has with your business, shaping their initial impression of your brand. To maximize this opportunity, it’s essential to implement sign up form best practices. After all, you’ll want to give your customers the best onboarding experience possible.
In this article, we’ll walk you through actionable sign up form best practices to help you create registration pages that convert. Without further ado, let’s get right into it!
What Are Wholesale Sign Up Forms?
Wholesale sign up forms are typically the initial step in the B2B onboarding process, helping store owners like you establish connections with potential customers. These forms are tailored to capture information about B2B leads interested in accessing exclusive wholesale pricing, bulk ordering, and any other perks tailored for wholesale customers.
While sign up forms in general may come in different types, wholesale sign up forms are a must for store owners catering to B2B buyers. It ensures that potential B2B leads provide important information from the get-go, helping you qualify leads and tailor your offerings to their needs.
Why Optimize Your Wholesale Sign Up Form?
Registration forms may seem simple and straightforward, so why take time implementing sign up forms best practices? Simple: these tools have a profound impact on the success of your business and the satisfaction of your customers.
In fact, according to industry insights, 50% of marketers agree that web sign up forms are their highest converting lead generation tool. When you optimize your wholesale registration form, you unlock an array of benefits that can help drive your bottom line:
- Maximized lead conversion: These tools are powerful lead magnets. By taking time to implement sign up form best practices, you can attract potential B2B clients, convert them into qualified leads, and drive sales.
- Smooth onboarding experience: Your registration process can make or break your first impression to wholesale clients. With an optimized sign up form, you create a frictionless experience from the start, enhancing customer satisfaction and engagement.
- Better understanding of your B2B leads: Implementing a sign up process also provides you with an opportunity to know your potential customers better. By asking for the right information, you can tailor a purchase experience with your brand that leaves them satisfied.
6 Wholesale Sign Up Form Best Practices
The last thing you want is to leave potential B2B customers scratching their heads and looking confused because of a complicated sign up form. As a wholesaler, you want to give them the best onboarding experience possible. So, let’s make that happen!
Below, we’ve enumerated simple yet effective sign up form best practices to help you streamline the registration process for your B2B leads:
1. Keep it short and sweet
When it comes to making effective sign up forms, simplicity is key. One instance of reducing form fields resulted in a 120% increase in conversion rates. Avoid overwhelming potential B2B leads with lengthy registration forms. Instead, focus on gathering only the most necessary details to qualify your leads.
However, it’s also important to consider your unique business requirements. As a store owner catering to B2B buyers, you may need to collect more information from potential leads. For instance, you may want to gather details like industry type or communication preferences to better tailor your marketing efforts and product recommendations.
To strike the right balance, identify the key information you need from potential leads from the start. Streamline your form by asking only the most important information, and make sure that you do not ask for the same information twice. This can frustrate users and lead to form abandonment.
WooCommerce wholesalers can leverage plugins like Wholesale Lead Capture to create and customize B2B sign up forms. With this plugin, you can tailor your registration form to meet the needs of your wholesale business.
2. Use a single column layout for simplicity
Layout matters just as much as content when designing your sign up form. One of the simplest yet most effective sign up form best practices to increase conversion rates is to use a single-column layout. This layout guides your B2B customer to complete the sign up process in an easy, linear way, eliminating the need to scan across multiple columns.
Using this layout is also more beneficial to mobile users. These types of forms adapt better to smaller screen sizes, enhancing accessibility.
3. Ensure wholesale users use strong passwords
Weak passwords are critical vulnerabilities that can compromise the security of your business and the trust of your valued customers. Allowing B2B customers to use easily guessable combinations can leave their accounts susceptible to hacking attempts. Therefore, to mitigate this risk, implement minimum password requirements.
Plugins like Wholesale Lead Capture allow you to enable this for your WooCommerce store. With this plugin, you can require wholesale customers to create passwords with at least 12 characters, one uppercase letter, 1 lowercase letter, 1 number, and 1 special character.
4. Make your spam protection easy to use
While spam protection is another crucial aspect of your website and business security, it’s essential to make it as seamless as possible for your B2B customers. Overly complex or cumbersome spam protection measures can potentially annoy customers. In fact, according to industry insights, complex spam protection measures reduce conversions by up to 40%.
Instead of using complicated verification measures, consider using Invisible CAPTCHA, or utilizing hidden honeypot fields. These solutions operate in the background, deterring spam bots without requiring additional effort from customers.
Tools like Wholesale Lead Capture feature built-in built-in honeypot anti-spam protection. It also allows you to enable invisible CAPTCHA for your WooCommerce registration form.
5. Test your form
Implementing sign up form best practices is commendable, but assessing improvements and ensuring compatibility across platforms and devices is even better! With the multitude of platforms and devices available for your B2B customers, overlooking testing can lead to missed opportunities for conversion. And yet, surprisingly, 36% of marketers never run user tests on their forms.
To quickly identify and solve compatibility issues, make sure to thoroughly test your forms on different browsers, screen sizes, and devices. During testing, pay attention to any inconsistencies and functionality issues. This proactive approach allows you to address performance issues before they impact your potential leads. As a result, you can deliver a more consistent and user-friendly registration experience across all platforms.
6. Let your leads know what happens after they sign up
Successfully getting a B2B lead to sign up is just the first step–you’ll also want to provide them with clear information on what to expect next. After all, they spent precious time giving you valuable information about their business.
You can accomplish this in different ways. For instance, you can redirect users to a dedicated Thank You page. This page can include confirmation of their successful registration and clear insights about what to expect next.
Wholesale Lead Capture empowers WooCommerce wholesalers to enhance the post-registration experience for B2B users. This powerful plugin allows you to set up a custom Thank You page, automate sending welcome emails, and set approval processes for newly registered leads. This gives you an opportunity to guide B2B customers on what next steps to take, improving onboarding.
Conclusion
While sign-up forms may seem like a small component of the overall customer journey, optimizing this aspect of your process can have a profound impact on your business success. By creating a more streamlined registration process, you can attract more B2B leads, convert them into loyal customers, and grow your bottom line.
In this article, we’ve walked you through six sign up form best practices to help you create a better experience for your customers. To summarize, let’s review them below:
- Keep it short and sweet
- Use single column layout
- Ensure B2B customers use strong passwords
- Simplify spam protection
- Test your form
- Let customers know what to expect next
Fortunately, you can leverage plugins like Wholesale Lead Capture to easily implement these strategies. This powerful tool is part of Wholesale Suite–a collection of plugins tailor-made for WooCommerce wholesalers. With Wholesale Lead Capture, you can easily create B2B customer registration forms, automate welcome emails, and set approval processes for your leads.
So, do you have any questions about creating a streamlined registration experience for wholesale customers? Share your thoughts with us!
