[Music] [Karthik Muralidharan] Thank you for joining us for today's session, The Future of Forms: Experience Success Across the Enrollment Journey. We're going to talk about all things forms from market trends and challenges to practical strategies to help your organization rethink what forms could be, as well as a future-looking view into our innovations this year.
My name is Karthik Muralidharan, and I lead Product Marketing for Adobe Experience Manager Forms. Joining me today is Arun Taneja, who leads our Product Management team.
I want you to think about all the digital experiences your brand is creating today. The campaigns you're running, the web pages you're creating, the mobile experiences you're delivering. You're working with multiple teams across your organization to build these rich, engaging experiences, all designed to delight and entice potential customers.
These customers you are trying to reach all have an intent in mind. Every journey they begin starts with an intent. And in today's world, the distance between their initial intent and then finding the solution or product to solve for that intent is continuing to shrink. Their journeys are getting shorter as they get access to better information, and GenAI helps them sift through their choices faster than ever before. How do we understand this intent? It comes from both implicit and explicit signals. Implicit signals being the data you're collecting and the interaction patterns that their customers are showing, but explicit signals could be more about the information that the customer is directly providing you with. Ultimately, your brand needs a bridge to map the experiences you're building to the intent of the customers you're trying to reach and ultimately capture that intent and activate against it.
Forms plays a critical role in serving as the bridge between these two, and we see it in all aspects of customer engagement. It is the opportunity for you to capture information directly from the customers themselves, which provides explicit intent signals that can be used to guide the customer further down the journey. It starts with acquisition and conversion. How do you bring new customers into the fold? Forms in this area can span from basic contact us or lead gen forms, where you've shown a customer enough content to get them interested and want to progress them onto the next step of the journey, like a demo or a conversation with a sales rep. It could also be more directly tied to a transaction where they're about to purchase your products or services. The forms play a role with your existing customers as well, especially when you think about the many business processes you have in place. For a bank, credit card application form is critical to help capture and process the complex information needed to secure the credit card. Or for a health care institution, it might be an insurance form or a patient enrollment experience. These forms become important in not only getting customers onboarded onto your products and services, but serve as ways to continue to upsell and help them extract more value from the brand.
Finally, forms is also critical when you think about regular communication with your customers. How do you regularly keep them up to date and surface relevant information to them based on the info they provided you with? Think about a monthly credit card statement where you want to keep your customers updated on their latest spending habits, account balance, and the latest offers from your bank.
Every brand today is delivering some type of forms experience. Many examples I showed in the previous slide as an example. But the challenge is they simply aren't working. Across the web, the average conversion rate of a form is under 5%. While this varies based on the use case, vertical, and other factors, the takeaway is that there's a critical volume of customers lost when they land on the form. And this is possibly after they've already engaged with their brand and learned what it has to offer. So why don't they convert? Every brand knows how to build and deliver a form. That's something we've been doing for years, but there are three key areas we are still seeing brands really struggle with.
First, performance is becoming table stakes. If a form is too slow to load or has issues rendering, it will lead to an abandonment.
Oftentimes, forms are also too long and tedious to complete. We've all been in the situation when the length of a form is intimidating and we choose to abandon it, only to find ourselves never returning to it later. The number of fields, complexity of the information required, length of a drop down, all can create a less than ideal experience.
Finally, the forms experience is not consistent with the rest of the journey. Customers are asked to fill in information they may have already provided the brand with. They have clearly indicated interest in a set of products or services, but now maybe being served imagery and messaging related to unrelated items, or the form itself is not branded or designed consistently with the rest of the experiences they've had so far. So on top of all of this, when the experience is not personalized or engaging, that can also lead to this conversion rate being so low. Now these challenges around forms are detrimental to work you're doing across all the upper parts of the customer journey. You're spending money on optimizing SEO, both technical and nontechnical, to ensure you're ranking high in Google and maximizing the organic traffic that is coming to your site. You're pouring money into creative assets and content to best represent your products. But if a perfect experience still results in a subpar conversion rate due to your forms experience not being optimized, none of that work really matters.
Tapping into the full potential of your experience is treating the final step of the journey where you are capturing and activating intent via forms as an equally critical part of the funnel. Forms need to be streamlined, optimized, and delivered in a personalized brand consistent way to ensure you get a high ROI on your marketing spend. Forms are ultimately going to be the gateway to unlocking higher conversion rates across your journeys. It starts with building forms that are agile, meaning they can be easily created by any author and support any input or output. Traditionally, forms authoring has been managed by the IT team, and part of the reason for that is the complexity of dealing with different components, integrations into back end systems, and all the front end customization that's needed. But in order to scale forms across all use cases at maximum velocity, authoring needs to be simplified for the business or marketing persona and using tools that practitioners are familiar with.
In addition to agility, adaptability is critical. Forms need to be delivered across all aspects of the customer journey, whether on web, mobile, or an app experience. But output is only one part of the equation. Forms should be able to be built based on a variety of inputs. This could be by providing an image or the scan of a document or through different interactive elements, such as a chat or prompt fill.
Finally, forms need to be outcome oriented. They need to be built to optimize conversion from a technical performance standpoint, as well as optimize for layout, content, and structure. Brands need the tools to ensure forms are optimized out of the box while also having the ability to quickly identify and action on opportunities to improve. When forms can be built to be agile, adaptable, and outcome oriented, they can become the most valuable tool in your organization that helps you increase the success and ROI of your digital experience efforts. In our next chapter, Arun will talk you through how AEM Forms' latest innovations can help you elevate your forms experience and make them agile, adaptable, and outcome oriented. So over to you, Arun.
[Arun Taneja] Thanks, Karthik. That was a great introduction to the challenges enterprises face and what they need in a good solution. Karthik talked about three key attributes of a good form solution to create and deliver successful experiences that convert. It has to be agile, it has to be adaptable, and it has to be outcome oriented. Let's see how AEM Forms addresses these.
An agile form solution must allow easy creation of all types of forms as enterprises need a variety of different forms. These vary from marketing forms to acquire customers to business unit forms for enrollment or self-service.
AEM Forms allows creating both marketing and business unit forms with ease.
Our integration between AEM Sites and AEM Forms allows unified composition of forms within the same editors.
On cloud service, the page editor allows unified composition using core components.
For edge delivery service, document-based authoring allows more personas across your org to create web content and forms in familiar tools.
For more elaborate forms, universal editor allows specific authoring and unified composition for edge delivery using blocks.
Unified composition ensures branding and styling is maintained across the web page content and the form.
In addition to unified composition, AEM Forms offers other flexible ways to create forms that are compliant to your corporate and brand guidelines. The Wizard UI breaks down the process of creating forms into simple progressive steps and allows forms' authors to create forms quickly based on a template and a theme.
You can configure submission options for your forms by using a variety of out of the box connectors for data storage and business process automation. Now let's take agility to another level. With Forms Experience Builder, you can now leverage GenAI to create forms based on an intent. You can use prompts like create a lead gen product interest form for SecurBank or create an account opening form for SecurBank.
The Form Experience Builder will automatically create the form for you. You can continue to interact with the Experience Builder to modify the layout of the form and business logic and rules and ask product related questions all using prompts and natural language. So as you can see, AEM Forms offers a truly agile solution for both marketing and business unit forms with multiple ways of creating on-brand forms based on your need. Now let's talk about the second key attribute of a good form solution, adaptability. AEM Forms are mobile responsive by design and will adjust to any device form factor automatically.
Headless Adaptive Forms takes this further by decoupling the rendition of forms from their definition.
This means the same form definition along with its business logic can be served across multiple services in a channel optimal way. Example, a web form, a react app, a mobile app, or even a conversational medium like WhatsApp.
The channel controls the optimal rendition of the form for the given surface. Headless Adaptive Forms allow you to meet your users where they are in a channel of their choice. Multi-modal Forms take it further and allow multiple modalities to be used to fill these forms in a given channel. For example, image click based form filling for a kitchen configurator or a car insurance form. Doc scan to fill form fields. AI-powered conversations to fill multiple form fields based on user intent.
Omni-channel Forms and Multi-modal Forms improve conversion of forms by making them more engaging and easier to fill.
Let's talk about the third attribute of an effective form solution. It has to be outcome oriented. The first key requirement is speed and performance of delivered experiences.
Edge delivery services solves this by serving forms with the perfect core web vitals. This leads to reduced bounce off rates and increased user engagement. We are innovating to make form conversion even better through our latest innovation around forms experience optimization.
Our form optimization capability will auto-detect areas of improvement on a form like its CTA, layout of the form, time to fill, its position on the page, etcetera.
AEM Forms will then auto-suggest opportunities for improving the form conversion rate and offer ways to auto-fix as well. All these opportunities will be presented to form authors and business owners to view and take action on. As illustrated, users will be shown auto-suggested opportunities like removing external links, making certain forms omni-channel, or localize them to a specific region for wider reach. Other opportunities as mentioned earlier could include improving the CTA of the form. For example, submit versus sign up versus apply based on the context, optimal placement of the form on a page, etcetera. In addition to optimizing forms, personalization also can improve conversion by serving users personalized offers and options on a given form or a web page that includes a form.
Our AEM Forms connector for RTCDP enables user profile hydration, which enables personalized and contextual experiences for a given user at multiple touch points. This means you can serve the most relevant form at a given point in the user enrollment journey, starting from lead gen forms to enrollment forms to upsell forms for new offers, etcetera.
The entire journey can be orchestrated and personalized for a given user's context using the power of AEM Forms and Experience Cloud with every touch point optimized for conversion.
In summary, AEM Forms checks all the requirements of a solution that's efficient and effective in conversion. It's agile and offers quick and easy ways of creating all types of forms. It's adaptable and is able to serve multi-channel and multi-modal forms to improve user engagement. And finally, it's outcome oriented, enabling higher conversion using form optimization and personalization.
Reach out to us at these email addresses. And if you are attending Summit in person, hope you can make it to these exciting form sessions. You can learn more about forms at the link provided. Thanks for watching.
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