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One of the most dreaded parts of the online experience is the web form. Not only does it represent work, it also raises the concern that your information will be sent to spam lists all over the globe.

Establishing trust on your site goes a long way to convincing users to share their personal information. But there are other things you can consider when creating your form that make it far more likely to convert users:

1. Keep it short. Ask youself whether you truly need to collect a particular piece of information. Gender? Title? Studies show that with each additional field, your likelihood of having someone complete your form goes down significantly.
2. Keep your labels short and intuitive. For that matter, make your fields only as long as they need to be. Anything that reduces visual clutter while still being easy to understand is key.
3. Make your validation smart. If your form won’t submit and it’s not clear to the the user why because of poorly marked validation, users will get frustrated and just bail.
4. Consider using mad-libs style labelling. Conversion studies are showing that this fill-in-the-blanks approach to collecting information is seeing positive results.
5. Make it worth people’s while. People don’t want to fork over their info without getting something in return. Enticing them with a freebie or giveaway in order to create a quid pro quo.