Require the information that changes your next action

A lead-generation form needs a way to reply and enough context to take the promised next step. Make a field mandatory when you cannot contact the person, route the enquiry or prepare that next step without its answer. Leave other questions optional or ask them later.

There is no universal winning field count. A request for a callback and a request for a tailored quote need different information. The useful starting point is the promise above the form: what will the visitor receive after submitting it?

The W3C's form guidance recommends keeping forms simple and asking only for information needed for the process. That is a sound design principle, not a forecast of how much a shorter form will improve your conversion rate.

Write the first reply before designing the form

Imagine the enquiry has arrived. Draft the actual reply your team should send. Then list the information missing from it.

For a local installation quote, the service area may decide whether you can help. For a software consultation, the problem to solve may matter more than the person's job title. If your first reply is always “When would you need the car?”, rental dates probably belong earlier in that particular journey.

For each proposed field, complete this sentence: “When the answer is different, we will…” Choose a different person to respond, offer a different service, check different dates or prepare a different discussion. If you cannot finish the sentence with a concrete action, reconsider making the field required.

Also ask whether the visitor can reasonably know the answer yet. A company exploring a CRM may understand its daily admin problem without knowing its technical requirements or a final development budget.

Decide what to ask now and what can wait

Contact details

Collect the contact method your offer actually needs. A callback requires a phone number; an emailed estimate requires an email address. A name can help you address the reply, but it does not automatically justify separate mandatory first-name and last-name fields.

If the next step works by email, consider making the phone number optional or offering a contact preference. Explain when a call would happen. This is consistent with GOV.UK's phone-number guidance, which recommends collecting numbers only when needed and allowing a choice of contact method.

Service, location and timing

Ask for a service choice if different requests go to different people. Ask for a town or postcode if it determines coverage; a full street address can often wait until a visit is being arranged. Dates belong in a rental enquiry when availability is the next decision.

Use choices your customers recognise. “Website”, “advertising” and “CRM” are easier starting points than your internal department names. Include a valid “I'm not sure yet” option where an initial conversation can resolve the uncertainty. GOV.UK's question-page guidance also recommends allowing uncertainty when it is a legitimate answer.

Budget and company information

A budget range is useful when it changes which options you can responsibly propose. Explain the range or starting price on the page first. Otherwise, you may be asking visitors to price a service they do not yet understand.

Make budget optional when scoping the work is the purpose of the first conversation. Ask for company size, fleet size or an existing website only when someone will use it before responding. Save billing details and a full technical brief for the stage that requires them.

The message box

Give it a specific prompt: “What do you want to improve?” or “Is there anything we should know before replying?” Avoid requiring an essay after the structured fields have already explained the request. The form should also work when an optional message is left blank.

An example brief you can give your developer

Consider a service business offering an initial discussion by email. This is a proposed starting design, not a claim about a measured client result:

  • Required: email address and the service the visitor wants to discuss.
  • Optional: name, current website and a short description of the problem.
  • Conditional: town when an on-site service is selected; phone number when a callback is requested.
  • Later: detailed requirements, billing information and a confirmed project budget.

The button could say “Request a discussion”. Beside it, explain who replies, through which channel, and a response time the team can actually meet. An enquiry should not appear to confirm a booking if availability still needs checking.

My SpainProperty and RentaCar Szeged work covers different decisions: exploring property and requesting a rental. They are useful reminders to design the intake around the service. Their inclusion here is not evidence that one field configuration performs better than another.

Make the questions easy to answer on a phone

Use a simple vertical layout, persistent labels and clear optional-field wording. Test the real form with the keyboard open. A short form still fails if a sticky banner covers the submit button or an error deletes the visitor's answers.

Ask your developer to enable the appropriate keyboard and autofill. For email fields, type="email" and autocomplete="email" support this; allow pasted addresses too. These are practical recommendations in the GOV.UK email-address pattern.

Show a useful message next to an invalid field and provide a clear overall result. “Enter an email address in the correct format” gives someone a repair action. A red border alone does not. The W3C's notification guidance explains how to make errors and successful completion understandable and accessible.

Use multiple steps when there is a genuine sequence or branching logic. Splitting three straightforward questions across three screens is a design choice to test, not an automatic improvement. Allow people to go back without losing their answers.

Connect submission to a responsible person

Before launch, decide who owns a new enquiry and how they will find out it arrived. Check that the information reaches the inbox or CRM the team actually uses. A notification failure should not silently lose a request that the website has already accepted.

In my portfolio, MarciCRM brings property enquiries and follow-up together. The general principle is useful even with a simpler tool: record the next action and who is responsible for it. Extra form fields will not repair an unowned inbox.

Keep the enquiry process and any optional newsletter signup clearly separate. Have the data-use wording reviewed for your actual process rather than copying another site's checkbox text.

Measure useful enquiries, not only completed forms

Agree on what “qualified” means before comparing versions. For example: the request is genuine, concerns a service you provide and can be followed up through the supplied contact method. Record unsuitable, duplicate and spam requests separately. Apply the same rules to both versions.

Track accepted submissions and later qualification as different outcomes. Google Analytics provides separate recommended events such as generate_lead and qualify_lead; the latter corresponds to a lead meeting your qualification criteria. These require an implementation that connects the relevant stages. A browser event does not know the eventual sales outcome by itself. See Google's lead-generation event definitions.

My implementation recommendation is to count a successful enquiry only after the application confirms acceptance, then prevent retries from creating duplicate records or success events. Keep names, email addresses, phone numbers and free-text messages out of ordinary Analytics event parameters and page URLs. Google's PII guidance explains this boundary.

Illustrative arithmetic, not client results: suppose two versions each receive 1,000 comparable visits from €600 of advertising. Version A generates 60 enquiries, of which 12 qualify. Version B generates 40 enquiries, of which 16 qualify. Cost per qualified enquiry is €50 for A and €37.50 for B. The lower submission rate can coexist with more useful enquiries.

Those invented numbers explain the calculation; they do not establish a winning form or a likely uplift. Compare traffic sources, follow-up effort and later sales outcomes, allow equal time for qualification, and avoid treating a handful of enquiries as decisive evidence.

What to check before spending more on traffic

  • Can you explain why each required field is needed before the first response?
  • Can someone who is still exploring answer honestly without inventing a budget or deadline?
  • Does the form work with autofill, keyboard navigation and a small screen?
  • Do failed submissions preserve answers and explain how to recover?
  • Does an accepted enquiry reach its owner, with a clear next action?
  • Can you separate genuine enquiries, qualified opportunities and eventual customers?

If your advertising is bringing enquiries that are hard to assess, send me the form URL and describe what makes a useful enquiry for your business. Use the contact page to reach me at hello@davidbuka.com. I can review the landing page, form and follow-up process together.

Sources checked on 12 October 2026. The cover is an editorial illustration, not a photograph of a client system.