“Brand” is not an easy thing to measure, because it has such a strong emotional component. While your brand is yours to manage, ultimately it is about how your customers perceive you, rather than about self-perception. After all, it is the customers who determine whether you succeed or not.
Your company’s brand is made up of several components, including your story, your reputation, and definable elements like logos and color schemes. While many of these identifiable elements appear in your marketing collateral and on web pages, they can also serve to positively boost your branding efforts when you incorporate them into customer-facing forms.
Design of Online Forms Is Crucial
When your customer clicks from a shopping page to their cart, and then to their checkout page, the branding should be consistent, so it’s important that you design your customer-facing forms with branding principles in mind. Brand authenticity is hugely important now, and if your customer leaves a beautifully designed product page for a shopping cart or checkout page that looks generic, or like an afterthought, it’s harder for them to carry that positive “glow” from the selection experience to the actual transaction.
But if all your forms are consistent in terms of color choice, font, and logo placement, the feeling of interacting with a brand they like carries forward, making the brand and the experience more memorable. Naturally, you must also use smart form design principles as well, by making forms readable, understandable, and just the right length for the customer-facing process.
Landing Pages and Branding
Landing pages are a special breed of the customer-facing form, because they must capture attention and drive action quickly, and with minimal fuss. Perhaps the worst thing you can do on a landing page is to require excessive amounts of customer information compared to what they will receive in return. For example, if you require their life story in order to obtain a brief executive summary of a study, they’re unlikely to bother.
Also, landing pages should be free from most or all of the navigational buttons a normal page has, because you want your user to focus on the landing form. But that doesn’t mean you should dispense with branding elements that remind visitors of your brand. Landing pages can and should carry on with your brand’s colors, typefaces, logos, and other visual elements.
Thank-You and Follow-Up Pages
The “thank-you” page is an essential component to any customer transaction. Sure, everyone is used to shopping online, but they need to know that their order was indeed placed, and that all the information they just entered has not gone into a black hole somewhere. Your thank-you page and any other follow up pages should also be carefully designed to include your essential branding elements. The consistency of branding throughout the entire customer experience is reassuring, and each and every page and form a customer encounters with your particular branding elements reinforces their memory of your brand.
Designing online forms is critical regardless of who uses them. But it is particularly critical with customer-facing forms. The right form software makes it easy, and PerfectApps is the right form software. With PerfectApps, you can quickly and easily design pixel-perfect forms using a drag-and-drop interface, including the right colors, typefaces, and other visual elements necessary to reinforce your branding at every step. Connect customer-facing forms with smart workflows – which you can also create easily with PerfectApps – and you ensure that every customer interaction happens without a hitch.
Interested in learning more? We invite you to watch the PerfectApps demo video. When you watch it, you’re sure to be inspired to take your customer-facing forms to the next level of functionality and smart design.
