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Forms are often an integral part of a buyer’s journey, and most companies already use web forms as part of their marketing strategy.
In fact, 74% of companies use web forms for lead generation, and 49.7% say their online forms are their highest converting lead generation tool.
Forms can vary greatly in purpose — you might use a form to get more sign-ups to your email newsletter, collect email addresses to send coupons and special offers, create gated content for viewers, or allow leads to sign-up for free versions of your product.
Ultimately, a form is often the fastest and most effective opportunity for you to collect leads and nurture them into sales.
But creating a form can feel like a tricky endeavor, particularly since a form’s design can have a major impact on whether a visitor fills it out, or abandons your site altogether.
Here, we’re going to dive into how to create your first web form to get you started.

How to Create a Web Form
For our purposes I’m going to show you how to create a form in HubSpot’s free form builder, but you could also use Google Forms, WordPress, HTML, or another tool of your choice.
1. To begin creating your form within your HubSpot account, go to “Marketing” > “Lead Capture” > “Forms”.

2. In the upper right, click “Create form”.

3. In the left panel, click “Regular form”. Then click “Next” in the top right.

4. Select Blank template to start with a blank form, or a pre-made template for a specific use case. Once you’ve selected your template, click “Start”.

5. Here, you have the option to drag-and-drop any elements on the left side that you’d like in your form. Generally, although not always the case, shorter forms perform better, so try to only ask for the most critical information from your form recipients.

6. Once you’ve chosen your desired form fields, click “Option” at the top middle of the screen. Here, you can decide what message you want your recipients to see when they complete the form.

 
7. Finally, click “Style & preview” at the top right of the screen to preview how your form will look on desktop, tablet, and mobile. Additionally, you can make some changes here to the style of your form — for instance, choosing a round or sharp-edged “Submit” button, or changing the colors and fonts of your form.
When you’re ready, click “Publish” at the top right of your screen.

8. Once you click “Publish”, you’ll see this pop-up. Copy and paste the code into your website to embed the form onto one of your web pages, or share the link with recipients via email.

While we created this form using HubSpot’s free online form builder, there are other form building tools at your disposal — take a look at 21 of the Best Form Builder Tools for 2019 for a complete list.
Additionally, check out Form Design Best Practices: 15 Tips to Boost Conversions and UX to ensure your form is ready for optimal conversions.

Do you remember your first A/B test you ran? I do. (Nerdy, I know.)
I felt simultaneously thrilled and terrified because I knew I had to actually use some of what I learned in college for my job.
There were some aspects of A/B testing I still remembered — for instance, I knew you need a big enough sample size to run the test on, and you need to run the test long enough to get statistically significant results.
But … that’s pretty much it. I wasn’t sure how big was “big enough” for sample sizes and how long was “long enough” for test durations — and Googling it gave me a variety of answers my college statistics courses definitely didn’t prepare me for.
Turns out I wasn’t alone: Those are two of the most common A/B testing questions we get from customers. And the reason the typical answers from a Google search aren’t that helpful is because they’re talking about A/B testing in an ideal, theoretical, non-marketing world.
So, I figured I’d do the research to help answer this question for you in a practical way. At the end of this post, you should be able to know how to determine the right sample size and time frame for your next A/B test. Let’s dive in.

A/B Testing Sample Size & Time Frame
In theory, to determine a winner between Variation A and Variation B, you need to wait until you have enough results to see if there is a statistically significant difference between the two.
Depending on your company, sample size, and how you execute the A/B test, getting statistically significant results could happen in hours or days or weeks — and you’ve just got to stick it out until you get those results. In theory, you should not restrict the time in which you’re gathering results.
For many A/B tests, waiting is no problem. Testing headline copy on a landing page? It’s cool to wait a month for results. Same goes with blog CTA creative — you’d be going for the long-term lead generation play, anyway.
But certain aspects of marketing demand shorter timelines when it comes to A/B testing. Take email as an example. With email, waiting for an A/B test to conclude can be a problem, for several practical reasons:
1. Each email send has a finite audience.
Unlike a landing page (where you can continue to gather new audience members over time), once you send an email A/B test off, that’s it — you can’t “add” more people to that A/B test. So you’ve got to figure out how squeeze the most juice out of your emails.
This will usually require you to send an A/B test to the smallest portion of your list needed to get statistically significant results, pick a winner, and then send the winning variation on to the rest of the list.
2. Running an email marketing program means you’re juggling at least a few email sends per week. (In reality, probably way more than that.)
If you spend too much time collecting results, you could miss out on sending your next email — which could have worse effects than if you sent a non-statistically-significant winner email on to one segment of your database.
3. Email sends are often designed to be timely.
Your marketing emails are optimized to deliver at a certain time of day, whether your emails are supporting the timing of a new campaign launch and/or landing in your recipient’s inboxes at a time they’d love to receive it. So if you wait for your email to be fully statistically significant, you might miss out on being timely and relevant — which could defeat the purpose of your email send in the first place.
That’s why email A/B testing programs have a “timing” setting built in: At the end of that time frame, if neither result is statistically significant, one variation (which you choose ahead of time) will be sent to the rest of your list. That way, you can still run A/B tests in email, but you can also work around your email marketing scheduling demands and ensure people are always getting timely content.
So to run A/B tests in email while still optimizing your sends for the best results, you’ve got to take both sample size and timing into account.
Next up — how to actually figure out your sample size and timing using data.
How to Determine Sample Size for an A/B Test
Now, let’s dive into how to actually calculate the sample size and timing you need for your next A/B test.
For our purposes, we’re going to use email as our example to demonstrate how you’ll determine sample size and timing for an A/B test. However, it’s important to note — the steps in this list can be used for any A/B test, not just email.
Let’s dive in.
Like mentioned above, each A/B test you send can only be sent to a finite audience — so you need to figure out how to maximize the results from that A/B test. To do that, you need to figure out the smallest portion of your total list needed to get statistically significant results. Here’s how you calculate it.
1. Assess whether you have enough contacts in your list to A/B test a sample in the first place.
To A/B test a sample of your list, you need to have a decently large list size — at least 1,000 contacts. If you have fewer than that in your list, the proportion of your list that you need to A/B test to get statistically significant results gets larger and larger.
For example, to get statistically significant results from a small list, you might have to test 85% or 95% of your list. And the results of the people on your list who haven’t been tested yet will be so small that you might as well have just sent half of your list one email version, and the other half another, and then measured the difference.
Your results might not be statistically significant at the end of it all, but at least you’re gathering learnings while you grow your lists to have more than 1,000 contacts. (If you want more tips on growing your email list so you can hit that 1,000 contact threshold, check out this blog post.)
Note for HubSpot customers: 1,000 contacts is also our benchmark for running A/B tests on samples of email sends — if you have fewer than 1,000 contacts in your selected list, the A version of your test will automatically be sent to half of your list and the B will be sent to the other half.
2. Use a sample size calculator.
Next, you’ll want to find a sample size calculator — HubSpot’s A/B Testing Kit offers a good, free sample size calculator.
Here’s what it looks like when you download it:
Download for Free
3. Put in your email’s Confidence Level, Confidence Interval, and Population into the tool.
Yep, that’s a lot of statistics jargon. Here’s what these terms translate to in your email:
Population: Your sample represents a larger group of people. This larger group is called your population.
In email, your population is the typical number of people in your list who get emails delivered to them — not the number of people you sent emails to. To calculate population, I’d look at the past three to five emails you’ve sent to this list, and average the total number of delivered emails. (Use the average when calculating sample size, as the total number of delivered emails will fluctuate.)
Confidence Interval: You might have heard this called “margin of error.” Lots of surveys use this, including political polls. This is the range of results you can expect this A/B test to explain once it’s run with the full population.
For example, in your emails, if you have an interval of 5, and 60% of your sample opens your Variation, you can be sure that between 55% (60 minus 5) and 65% (60 plus 5) would have also opened that email. The bigger the interval you choose, the more certain you can be that the populations true actions have been accounted for in that interval. At the same time, large intervals will give you less definitive results. It’s a trade-off you’ll have to make in your emails.
For our purposes, it’s not worth getting too caught up in confidence intervals. When you’re just getting started with A/B tests, I’d recommend choosing a smaller interval (ex: around 5).
Confidence Level: This tells you how sure you can be that your sample results lie within the above confidence interval. The lower the percentage, the less sure you can be about the results. The higher the percentage, the more people you’ll need in your sample, too.
Note for HubSpot customers: The HubSpot Email A/B tool automatically uses the 85% confidence level to determine a winner. Since that option isn’t available in this tool, I’d suggest choosing 95%.
Email A/B Test Example:
Let’s pretend we’re sending our first A/B test. Our list has 1,000 people in it and has a 95% deliverability rate. We want to be 95% confident our winning email metrics fall within a 5-point interval of our population metrics.
Here’s what we’d put in the tool:

Population: 950
Confidence Level: 95%
Confidence Interval: 5

4. Click “Calculate” and your sample size will spit out.
Ta-da! The calculator will spit out your sample size.
In our example, our sample size is: 274.
This is the size one your variations needs to be. So for your email send, if you have one control and one variation, you’ll need to double this number. If you had a control and two variations, you’d triple it. (And so on.)
5. Depending on your email program, you may need to calculate the sample size’s percentage of the whole email.
HubSpot customers, I’m looking at you for this section. When you’re running an email A/B test, you’ll need to select the percentage of contacts to send the list to — not just the raw sample size.
To do that, you need to divide the number in your sample by the total number of contacts in your list. Here’s what that math looks like, using the example numbers above:
274 / 1,000 = 27.4%
This means that each sample (both your control AND your variation) needs to be sent to 27-28% of your audience — in other words, roughly a total of 55% of your total list.

And that’s it! You should be ready to select your sending time.
How to Choose the Right Timeframe for Your A/B Test
Again, for figuring out the right timeframe for your A/B test, we’ll use the example of email sends – but this information should still apply regardless of the type of A/B test you’re conducting.
However, your timeframe will vary depending on your business’ goals, as well. If you’d like to design a new landing page by Q2 2021 and it’s Q4 2020, you’ll likely want to finish your A/B test by January or February so you can use those results to build the winning page.
But, for our purposes, let’s return to the email send example: You have to figure out how long to run your email A/B test before sending a (winning) version on to the rest of your list.
Figuring out the timing aspect is a little less statistically driven, but you should definitely use past data to help you make better decisions. Here’s how you can do that.
If you don’t have timing restrictions on when to send the winning email to the rest of the list, head over to your analytics.
Figure out when your email opens/clicks (or whatever your success metrics are) starts to drop off. Look your past email sends to figure this out.
For example, what percentage of total clicks did you get in your first day? If you found that you get 70% of your clicks in the first 24 hours, and then 5% each day after that, it’d make sense to cap your email A/B testing timing window for 24 hours because it wouldn’t be worth delaying your results just to gather a little bit of extra data.
In this scenario, you would probably want to keep your timing window to 24 hours, and at the end of 24 hours, your email program should let you know if they can determine a statistically significant winner.
Then, it’s up to you what to do next. If you have a large enough sample size and found a statistically significant winner at the end of the testing time frame, many email marketing programs will automatically and immediately send the winning variation.
If you have a large enough sample size and there’s no statistically significant winner at the end of the testing time frame, email marketing tools might also allow you to automatically send a variation of your choice.
If you have a smaller sample size or are running a 50/50 A/B test, when to send the next email based on the initial email’s results is entirely up to you.
If you have time restrictions on when to send the winning email to the rest of the list, figure out how late you can send the winner without it being untimely or affecting other email sends.
For example, if you’ve sent an email out at 3 p.m. EST for a flash sale that ends at midnight EST, you wouldn’t want to determine an A/B test winner at 11 p.m. Instead, you’d want to send the email closer to 6 or 7 p.m. — that’ll give the people not involved in the A/B test enough time to act on your email.
And that’s pretty much it, folks. After doing these calculations and examining your data, you should be in a much better state to conduct successful A/B tests — ones that are statistically valid and help you move the needle on your goals.

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Today, we do everything on our smartphones, from catching up with friends and finding love to reading our emails, ordering cabs, banking, making dinner reservations, and buying things we need. Mobile shopping, in particular, has become so popular that it accounts for more than 54% of all eCommerce sales. Yes, more than half of online…
The post 5 Reasons To Adopt Mobile-First eCommerce Site Design appeared first on Benchmark Email.

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Starting and running your own business can be incredibly stressful. One survey of small business owners from Capital One found that 42 percent of them are currently experiencing burnout or have experienced it within the past month. This is why having a good support system is invaluable for entrepreneurs. Having a space to share the ups and downs of small business ownership and having people around you who understand your challenges can help make you more resilient and able to weather the storm that is small business ownership.We spoke to several incredible small business owners who are juggling multiple growth challenges, growing families, and all the while being focused on ensuring they get the support they need to be the best version of themselves and take their businesses forward.Holly Howard, a longtime business consultant says it best “I always say there’s no business growth without personal growth.” She goes on to say, “it’s about how we show up and how we take care of ourselves.” And the data supports it; in the same Capital One report, they found that more than half (53 percent) of business owners report that when they experience burnout, it is a barrier to success for their business.In Small Business, Big Lessons, season two, episode six, we detail how the owners of Harlow, SparkToro, Made With Local, Zingerman’s, Destination Unknown Restaurants and Paynter Jackets approach getting support as small business owners.Set healthy boundaries and intentional work policiesThe first place many small business owners mention when talking about support is getting support through setting healthy boundaries. Those can be in the form of setting healthy boundaries for themselves, as well as supporting those boundaries through intentional work policies that protect their team from burnout as well.Kelly Phillips, the founder of Destination Unknown Restaurants, a group of restaurants based in Washington, DC, knows that boundaries often start with her as the leader. “I am very respectful about time off and not texting, not calling, not emailing when I know people are off when they’re on vacation.” She leads by example when she’s not working, “I try not to let myself get caught up into work when I’m off. I know that I’m a better leader if I have time to rest.”Kelly is also focused on the environment that she cultivates at her restaurants. “I try to have a stress-free environment. Yes, it does get stressful. Yes, it does get busy, but I’m a big fan of lightening the mood by making a joke or, you know, giving somebody a high five or just saying something that’s gonna perk them up a little bit and make them feel good about themselves.” This environment makes a difference when her team is more supportive of each other through the highs and lows, “We know it won’t always be hard, you know, we’re gonna get through this. We have to close the doors eventually, and tomorrow will be a new day.”Intentional work policies can make a huge difference when it comes to burnout and cultivating a supportive network. Andrea Wildt and Samantha Anderl, co-founders of Harlow, a software designed to help freelancers with their business, know this first hand. They quit their nine-to-five jobs because those jobs didn’t work for them, so they built their business in a way that supported them and future employees. “So we have this saying actually at Harlow, that we believe that we are all better and more creative when we’re living well-balanced lives.” Samantha shared about their approach.They put into place policies to have limited meetings and a work culture that takes away the feeling that everything is urgent. The result? Both co-founders say they’re showing up as better versions of themselves. “Our brains don’t function in this ‘on state’ for eight, nine hours a day. We need downtime, we need breaks. And I think that. A lot of corporate environments just aren’t conducive to that at all. And so Samantha and I really wanted to build something different where we could foster more creativity.”♥️Read more about how Kelly Phillip’s approaches business in her post about putting employees first, not customers.Build up a community of other founders and of your customersAnother way to get support is to build up a community around yourself — both of other founders who understand what you’re going through and are facing similar challenges, and also to look to your community of customers, who understand your business better than a lot of others.Holly explains it as, “Who are those people that you can go to, that you can speak to about what you are going through?” She says that gathering can be really powerful because “everybody goes through the same challenges as an entrepreneur, and when we see our peers, and we have that camaraderie with our peers.” And this group environment is better for growth, too. “It’s actually much easier to change than when we’re isolated. So that support network of other people who understand what you’re going through and you can lean on each other is really important.”The co-founders of Harlow have been doing this since the beginning, proving that it’s never too early to start building a community. Samantha explained that they’ve been building up their community for the past eight years, it includes other founders and freelancers, and it has a very positive effect on them because, as it stands, Samantha said, “I don’t think we ever have a problem that we need to solve, that we don’t have somebody in our community that we’re like, ah, we should go talk to that person.”Community can also be found through more traditional business groups. Sheena Russel is the founder and CEO of Made with Local, a Canadian snack bar company and a certified B-corp. She’s found a lot of support through the movement. “I absolutely feel like we’re part of an incredible purpose-led business community.” Sheena knows the importance of community through her own experiences, “It can be lonely out there as a founder and as an entrepreneur.” She looks not only to her community of other entrepreneurs but also to her customers. “We have an amazing community around us of other businesses, but also of our customers as our community.”The theme with all of these business owners, as Rand Fishkin, the co-founder and CEO of SparkToro, is that he calls “an intentional investment in building a network of like-minded founders and like-minded companies.” There are a lot of ways to go about building up a support network through community, the key is just to get started.Several members of the Made With Local team.Join an existing network of like-minded people through groups or social mediaSometimes there is already an existing community where you can find support. Kelly is a part of an organization called Re: Her, a national non-profit driven by women restaurateurs. The organization’s mission is to empower women entrepreneurs, specifically in the food and beverage industry. She explains, “We have regular calls where we discuss issues in the restaurant community, and we have resources for each other. And even if it’s just checking in to say, Hey, how’s everybody doing? Oh, you know, prices have gone up on this. Does anybody have a good vendor for that? We really help each other.”This kind of existing organization can be a huge advantage for gaining support and making like-minded connections. These groups can be found online through tools like Meetup, Facebook Groups, and LinkedIn Groups. You can also ask around in your industry to see what organizations others already know about.Social media is another powerful tool for finding existing communities, groups, and resources. Sheena, who runs Made with Local from a smaller city in Canada, turns to digital platforms to connect. She shared, “If you’re an entrepreneur that’s struggling to connect with a community or with some mentors, I would say start looking online, honestly, through social media is an incredibly algorithmically driven way to find people that are doing things just like you are. Whether it be through Instagram or LinkedIn. It’s a really nice way to figure out where your people are.”Samantha from Harlow has had the same experience. “I’m very active on Twitter. I’m very active on LinkedIn on Instagram. And so I am constantly making connections there.” When it comes to joining those communities, Samantha’s advice is: “People are there, and people are having the conversations, and you just have to throw yourself into it.”Look for professional support through therapySupport comes in many forms, and sometimes the kind of support that you need might be professional support in the form of counseling or therapy. Holly, who in addition to being a long-time business consultant is a trained therapist, explained that with her background, “often I end up recommending that clients go to therapy. And a lot of times for entrepreneurs, it’s the first time they’ve had an experience of therapy before.”Ari Weinzweig, the co-founder of Zingerman’s Community of Businesses, has personal experience with getting this kind of support. “I started going to therapy, and then at that point, I was ready through pain, and I wish I would’ve gone at 10. I mean, it’s like having a coach at the gym. There’s nothing weird or wrong about it. Who wouldn’t want a grounded, thoughtful, caring, slightly disengaged with your day-to-day emotional struggles, person to talk to?”Ari is definitely not alone in seeking this kind of support. Rand has had the experience of looking to therapy after a particularly difficult time. “I am a few years away from my experiences with mental and emotional challenges, depression, and anxiety. And I’m very grateful to be through those times. But it was absolutely heart-wrenching and awful going through it. When I experienced that, I ended up stepping down from my CEO role at MOZ, and eventually away from the company.” Though Rand says that “talking to a professional coach and therapist helped“ he’s also hesitant to give advice on the topic because “I don’t think that what worked for me will work for everyone. In fact, what I hear over and over again from other founders and other people who’ve been through this kind of thing is the solutions are often different, right?”Now, Rand is taking a different approach to his mental health. “One of the things that I’ve done to try and prevent that same pattern from reemerging is to prioritize personal health and happiness over work, as hard as I can.”Rand Fishkin alongside co-founder Casey Henry.You can always pause as wellThere are a lot of different avenues for getting support as an entrepreneur and small business owner. It’s important to remember that that support can sometimes also look like showing down.Becky Okell and Huw Thomas, co-founders of Paynter Jacket Co, a company that creates limited-edition jackets four times a year, both have healthy perspectives on slowing down when needed. Huw shared, “When you get momentum going in your business and you sort of keep it going and the busy times become normal times one day.” He said he and Becky experienced this and realized they needed some time for themselves. Huw describes it as, “It’s kind of being self-aware enough to realize, okay, you need me to pause and slow down a bit. Take a breath.”Becky’s perspective on the busy times is that “There has to be peaks and there has to be troughs. Not everything can go at a million miles an hour and not everything is going to be perfect either.” Her approach and advice to others is, “you have to actually take time to top up your creative energy to, to make sure you’re reading and getting an outside perspective.”None of us can go it alone, and we all need support from others. Whether it’s specific knowledge, emotional support, a kind word, or just someone to listen to our rants, we rely on our communities to lift us up when we need it.Want to hear more about getting support as a small business owner? Listen to the full episode of Small Business, Big Lessons.