Campaign Playbook: Application Abandonment

Campaign Goal: To nurture applicants who have abandoned and incomplete the application process.

Executive Summary

The Challenge

For years banking institutions and financial businesses have implemented forms. They are needed to apply for loans, mortgages and new accounts. And despite the shift to digital channels these forms are still long and complicated. Whilst there’s no definitive study on form abandonment in the financial sector various case studies corroborate the statistics that around 60% – 70% of users will abandon their form before seeing it through to completion. For an industry that relies on the completion of forms to onboard leads and assesses their suitability, this presents a huge problem.

The Impact

As one of the solutions many wealth management companies implemented a process to initially request a completion of a short form that then redirects to a longer form. We know from the above stats its that second, longer form that gets abandoned and therefore nurturing is required to 'remind'/'entice' prospects to complete the application process. Once the triggered/nurturing program is created we envision an increase in number of full application completion.

How to Build This Campaign

Included Assets:

1. A form that collects initial Email, First Name and Last Name
2. Confirmation Page - public url of the confirmation page (Act-On landing page or external webpage with Act-On Beacon Tracker)
3. A segment to identify contacts who have landed on that confirmation page
4. An Automated Program to send triggered emails to 'entice' completion of application

Step 1: Configure Your Initial Short Form

Create your initial short form capturing First Name, Last Name and Email Address and decide if you are pushing submissions to a standalone Form Submission List or a Primary List (we are using Primary List in this demo).

Once form is submitted you want to redirect the submitter to the external page where your second form is placed. 

Below are screenshots of an initial form:

Form Properties > Response Page: Redirect submitter to your external webpage where 2nd form resides (https://tatianalea.weebly.com/application-with-form.html)

Video Walkthrough:

Step 2: Create Confirmation Landing Page

Create a Confirmation Landing Page for visitors to be sent to once they’ve completed full application (2nd form) and add as a destination.

Step 3: Build a Segment of people who have visited/viewed your Confirmation Landing Page

Create a Segment of people who have submitted Form 1 (short form) and also have viewed Confirmation Landing Page for Form 2 (longer form).

NOTE: If you are not able to use Act-On Landing page as a Confirmation, you can save the URL of your external confirmation page as a media file and use that in segmentation, so it could look something like that:

Video Walk-through:

Step 4: Create Your Nurturing/Triggered Automated Program

Create a new Automated Program

1. Add your List of people who have submitted initial form under Source List (we're pushing initial submission to a Primary list so therefore using a segment)
2. Set your program to Schedule (if you have them as a segment as shown below in this use case) or Immediately (if initial form pushes submission to its own Form Submission List)
   
   
   
3. Add your nurturing/triggered message template under Program Messages
   
   
   
   
4. Add your Submitted Form 1 and Viewed Confirmation LP segment under Early Exits
   
   
   
5. Add the following program steps under Program Flow
   
   • Wait 1 Day
   • Send Email
     a. Select your Triggered Message 1
   • Wait 3 Days
     
   • Send Email
     a. Select your Triggered Message 2
     
     
     
6. Select ‘Done’ to save your program then ‘Start Program’ from the Actions menu of the Overview page
   
   
   

Some Best Practices to improve the form completion process:

1. Keep it simple 

• Ask for the basic minimum information (name, email/phone number, a reason for contact) to secure the lead before pursuing further information through an automated email sequence or phone call. Even reducing the form fields by one or two fields can help bring a healthy increase in conversions.
• Establish specific landing pages to help you segment the people who sign up via that page. You could run different automated email sequences for sign-ups from each page to learn more about them over time whilst qualifying them as a good lead.

2. Embrace your mobile strategy

• The convenience they offer has been embraced by consumers across the globe with 30% of all online transactions now completed on mobile. Unfortunately, mobile is one area where financial institutions are seriously lagging behind the competition.
• Enlarge entry fields and clickable elements to allow users to easily select and enter text on the smaller display
• Make certain elements like phone numbers or email addresses clickable to save the consumer time
• Reduce address entry to one field by implementing an address autofill
• Use a number pad for number entry (not the generic keyboard)

3. Optimize your copy

• Every piece of copy in your forms needs to be carefully chosen. Finance has the added misfortune of working with the one commodity most users are extremely protective over – money. You can’t afford to make mistakes in any area of your copy.
• As a general rule, you should try to ensure that all copy, from form fields to privacy statements and even your primary CTAs are benefit focused. That means making no mention of words with negative connotations like order, purchase, repayments but instead focusing on words that the consumer wants to hear such as approved and accepted.
• Focus on what they’re going to get and what they can do with it when they do. It’s a simple change intact which can make the world of difference when convincing consumers to take a chance.