Dos & Don’ts of a Digital Consultation Form (why yours isn't working)

Hello, my friend. Welcome back to the Modern Hairstylist Podcast. Today, I'm gonna be talking about a modern piece of technology that can literally change your life. I'm n- I might be sounding dramatic, but I've seen it happen hundreds of times in my own life and in my students' lives.

I break this down super in-depth within my courses and teach you how to use this to streamline your business and grow quickly, and that is digital forms. So, today what we're specifically gonna be talking about is why your digital forms may not be working the way that you want them to work. I just did a study, a survey, over 500 women located in the United States who go to a salon to get their hair done. And when asked if they would be willing to fill out a digital form prior to booking an appointment, if that were to give the stylist enough information that they need to get them a good idea of what they would pay and h- make sure they have enough time in the book to give them what they need, then 95% of those same women in the United States, across all age ranges, all age ranges, are willing to fill out a digital form prior to booking an appointment.

So, if you have a digital consultation form in place, or any type of digital form in your business right now... I teach to having a bunch of them, a shit ton of them, 'cause you can do so many beautiful things with them. There's so much power in digital forms. If you have one in your business right now and you feel like it's not working or you feel like you're not getting as many submissions as you want, then this episode is for you, because we're gonna be talking about the dos and don'ts of your digital form, and maybe why yours is not working.

So, if you're ready to get into it, let's go. What's the tea, friend? My name's Hunter Donia, industry business educator for hairstylists, but my friends just call me Hunty. Whether it be growing your clientele, making more money, or automating and streamlining your systems, in the next 20 minutes or so, you'll be hearing realistic, actionable strategies to create a beautiful career for yourself behind the chair.

So, if you're ready to get into it, welcome to the Modern Hairstylist Podcast. Okay, so the first thing that I see that drives me up a wall is that people have their clients go straight to the form link before going through some sort of nurturing process with you, okay? The nurturing process I'm referring to should be your website, okay? It's important that you have a proper website that you've built out, that walks somebody through a journey, that makes them really excited to book an appointment with you.

Because otherwise, they're not going to be willing to fill out a short form or be willing to book an appointment at all. Instagram, Facebook, Google My Business reviews, they are not enough to get somebody to fully make a decision and say, "Hell yes." They need to go on a website that is personalized, customized, and speaking to that exact person, their pain points, et cetera, et cetera, to push them through a sales process, all right? Now, sales may feel icky to you.

Sorry about it. Guess what? You're a CEO. Tough news.

You're in sales. You're in marketing. You are in operations. You are in sales.

Let's get real comfortable with it, okay? Let's, let's get real comfortable with the fact that you are a business owner. You have to make money. Money does not come without sales.

So, sales and marketing, they work together in tandem, and your website is a marketing into sales machine, and you need to make sure that the copy on your website and everything that's built out on your website is pushing somebody to actually want to go ahead and take the next step with you. Your website should not just be informational. It should not just say, "We lo- we're located here, here are the prices, and this is about me. This is a little bio about me."

It should have specific copy speaking to specific pain points and showing the person what's possible for them and walking them through that journey, right? So, when you take away, when you rob your client of that step and you're pushing them right into this form, they're like, "I don't even know what price I'm paying yet. I don't even know if this person's the right fit for me or not," right? You're not allowing them to go through that process with you first.

So, if you have a link in bio right now and you're allowing people to go straight to your form instead of having to go through your website journey first, fix it. Make it so that way people are going to your website first and then getting to the form. The next step is embedded forms on websites, okay? So, oftentimes people will think it, like, looks a lot cooler to ha- or, like, a lot sleeker to have your form embedded onto a web page.

So, that looks like instead of somebody clicking a link to go to another page to fill out the form, the form is actually just right on the we- the same website as your own. So, this is something that actually comes included in a lot of different website builder hosts, right? Like, they have their own, like, form that can be filled out, and I highly recommend that you do not have those and use that feature whatsoever. You should be using either your own form software or your own email marketing software, depending on what you're trying to capture from somebody.

But embedding a form on the website in any way, shape, or form is not, uh, recommended, and here's why. Number one, there's a lot more chance for error, so there's a lot more chance for somebody loading it on mobile for it to not show up in a really nice way, because it's pulling from a different URL. Like, it's pulling from a completely different website into that website, so it's oftentimes not gonna be optimized for that website and the user's experience. Therefore, they may not go through your form process because it's too glitchy and too weird for them to work with.

Furthermore, when you have somebody on one landing page, like on one form page, and that's the only thing that they can see is the form, there's less distractions, okay? So, there's more things for them to, um, to get distracted by and click back on if they are on your website filling out the form. If they're on the landing page, after they've gone through your nurturing process, after they've explored the website already, let's get them to fill out the form. Like, "Okay, girl, you've gone through the website.

Now go ahead and fill out the form." So when they click the form link and they go to that form, uh, web page, there's not as many distractions. It's, there's one goal, which is filling out that form, right? So, you'll oftentimes find a lot more effectiveness and completion rates of your form if you actually push them into its own separate landing page.

So, there should be a button that links over to the form. The next thing is not understanding the clear goal of the form. So, what I mean by this is, you should have a very specific goal as to what you're trying to figure out or what information you're trying to get from this person with this one form. And the goal should be specific.

It should not be general. It should be very, very, very specific, such as, "I want to know what they need to book online, and I want to know if they're the right fit for me or not," okay? It shouldn't be, "I'm just trying to get to know this person. I'll get all their information and sign my policies."

Like, that's way too general. You wanna be specific. And the reason why you wanna be specific is because it will allow you to include and not include the right and wrong questions. Which brings me to the next point, which is making the form way too long.

When you understand the clear goal of the form, you then will only include questions in the form that are only helping you achieve the goal of the form. Everything else, any other questions that you think might be a cute question to throw in there, or anything that's not extremely helpful that might seem a little bit extra, it should not be in the form, okay? Anything that isn't allowing you to get to that sole purpose of the form, it should not be in the form. Because the longer your form is, the less likely somebody's actually going to fully complete it, the more that sh- your people are gonna complain that it's a long form, et cetera, et cetera.

So, make sure that you are streamlining your questions and keeping your questions as short and as sweet as possible, and you're making sure that you don't have a million different steps for them to go through to be able to get to that next step and press the submit button. And I think that this kind of depends on what part of your journey that you're in as an entrepreneur. Like, if you are wanting to make sure that somebody goes through a really vigorous process with you and you wanna make sure that there's somebody, you, you only let people into your business that are willing to fill out a long form, then that's a different story. But if you're yearning for new clients and if you are like, "I'm willing to take, like, a lot of people right now because I need to get clients into the door," then your form shouldn't be insanely long, because you're adding more friction where there doesn't need to be, right?

Then, on top of that, we're not personalizing the form enough. So, I teach a lot of really cool tips and tricks, um, with my students in, in pre-visit pathway in my programs, where you can make it so the form shortens and lengthens and shur- certain questions show and certain questions hide based upon this person's answers. So, let's say somebody's a haircut client and you don't need to ask them as many questions versus a color client. So therefore, you should be able to, on the form, only ask people the haircut questions, and then ask people the color questions if they're a color client.

And what that'll allow you to do is just personalize the form to make sure that there's no irrelevant questions that they don't need to answer. You can require questions, right? Because you wouldn't wanna require a question to be filled out if it was a color question if the client actually was a haircut client, right? So, in your digital form and in modern technology that offers digital forms, you oftentimes can make cool shit like this happen where they're only s- uh, shown certain questions and certain elements based upon what their answers are.

And what should also be mentioned here is that you should try your best always, just for organizational purposes, to streamline those forms as much as possible. So, if you don't absolutely have to make two different forms for two different, um, goals, right, then don't make them. Consolidate them into one form and then use conditions and use the technology that they have in these forms to personalize the form to actually get the job done. Next thing is we ask people to do way too much work and think too hard.

We have to remember that these people who are coming through this process, they didn't go to beauty school. They don't understand a lot of the terminology that we, that we understand, and a lot of the terminology that we'll often ask people to get the information that we need to understand what they would want to, uh, book with us for, right, and what they actually need done with their hair. So, what we'll often do is we'll leave these, like, long form elements. So, we'll have somebody type in their own answers a lot of the time, and that is asking somebody to do way too much work, okay?

I think that a maximum of, like, two long form elements in a form is exactly enough, okay? We shouldn't be asking for them to manually type in anything more than twice in any form that we have, unless it's a specific circumstance. Because the more that you ask somebody to type in their own answer, the lower your completion rate is gonna be. It's too fatiguing for the person and they, they might be nervous or anxious about having to even come up with an answer in any way, because you're asking them about something that they're already so not confident and so not knowledgeable about.

So, instead, giving them single choices and multiple choices. So, allowing them to select the options and making sure that you're using language that they understand makes it a lot less fatiguing and makes somebody more willing to actually go through a form. The last thing is not enough testing. So, I talked about, um, five numbers and KPIs, I think.

Five unique numbers to track the health of your business, I think is another podcast episode on the Modern Hairstyle House Podcast that you can check out. And in there, I was talking about testing. I was talking a lot about testing. And what you can do with your forms is you can test what the completion rate actually is.

So, you can go ahead and you can see, like, "Okay, I had this many people actually open up the form, but how many people who opened up the form actually filled it out?" So, let's say that your completion rate is 10%. So, let's say that out of 100 people who visit your form, only 10 of them actually fill it out, right? Let's say that you have a goal of getting that completion rate to be 15%, right?

Because the more that you have people fill out the form, the more leads you'll have to actually get them into your chair. So, let's say that your completion rate is 15%. What you can do is, is you can hypothesize and you can say, "Okay, I think if I take out this question and I ask this question instead," or something like that, right? That's just an example.

Then maybe people will be more willing to complete the form. Or I change my form, uh, graphic and design or style or flow from this to this, maybe people will be more willing to fill out my form. So, you take a month's worth of data, you take a month's worth of your baseline data of, like, "Okay, my completion rate is 10% right now for this past month. What I'm gonna do is, is I'm gonna change the form the way that I believe it needs to be changed to get more people to fill this out.

And then I'm gonna leave that change up for a whole month. And then I'm gonna com- compare that month after I made the change to my last month and see if the completion rate changed." And if it did, whether it lowered or went higher, now you have really great data and understanding of what works and what doesn't with this form to get people to fill this out. And it's real hard data, right?

Like, it's, like, you can't argue with the numbers. So, testing those forms, testing that completion rate, and not being afraid to try new things and, and, uh, switch things out every now and again is really, really helpful. The same goes for your website, okay? You should be tracking your website and the visitors and then the amount of people who actually go ahead and take the next step from your website.

But if you don't have systems set up such as this, such as a digital form, then it's really difficult for you to actually track those numbers. Tracking those numbers can be a game changer, I promise you. Um, so take the time to do it, because it really, really can make such a m- massive difference. Okay, my friend, I hope that this episode was helpful for you.

Um, digital forms are 100% here. They're not going anywhere. And your clients are willing to fill them out if you make it user-friendly. You have to take responsibility for your user experience on their end.

If you want your clients to do something, if you want to streamline your processes more, then you have to make sure that you've done the work of taking your clients' experiences in- into consideration and making it an enjoyable and easy process for them. So, hopefully these tips are gonna be, uh, helpful for you doing that. So much love to you. If you enjoyed this episode of the Modern Hairstyle House Podcast, I would encourage you to leave a five-star testimonial wherever you're listening to this.

A written one is even better. It reaches more and more and more beauty professionals such as yourself, who, so that way we can collectively revolutionize this industry, work smarter, not harder, set boundaries for ourselves, and keep up with the crazy standard of the pace of being a successful business beauty entrepreneur in today's day and age. So, so much love to you, my friend. Peace out, girl scout.

Bye-bye.

End of transcript. © 2023 Hunter Donia LLC.