SherpaBlog: 22% of Registration Forms Include 'Reset' Buttons (!)

Anne Holland November 26th, 2007

Please raise your right hand and repeat after me, “I will hunt down and erase any ‘Reset’ or ‘Clear Form’ buttons on every online form for my brand.”

My golly — there’s just NO EXCUSE.

The ‘Reset Button’ is an archaic bit of submit button design from the early 1990s, back when forms were used by internal company data entry … not prospective customers. Somehow as public Web forms developed, designers unthinkingly copied the buttons, using and re-using them on form after form.

According to new data in MarketingSherpa’s updated Landing Page Handbook, 22% of marketers say their company sites still use these old-style buttons.

Can you say, “response killer”?

Imagine, you spent a great deal of time, energy and budget creating a campaign to drive qualified prospects to your landing page. Your campaign’s entire success rests on getting lots of these visitors to fill out a registration form. Luckily, some of them do, typing in their name, address and maybe even answering a few questions for you. Then they move their mouse down to click on the gray ‘Submit’ button …

… but mistakenly click on the ‘Reset’ button right next to it.

The page blinks, and all their careful typing vanishes in an instant. The form is blank again.

How many of your prospects do you think will bother to type all those answers again? And how many will just give up and leave your site in disgust?

Nearly one out of every four marketers still drives traffic to pages with a clickable Reset button. I just can’t comprehend why you would want to shoot your conversion rates in the foot like that.

If you are one of these marketers, please do whatever it takes to yank the Reset button. Send pizza to the Web department for lunch, or, heck, why not promise a bottle of champagne to enjoy together in celebration of a successful search-and-destroy mission?