These days we find ourselves living in an increasingly visual world. Across the internet in particular, graphic design, video production, and visual branding have become vital tools for marketing teams, content creators, and anyone looking to speak to their audience effectively.
Visme are a company that have positioned themselves as frontrunners when it comes to all-in-one, user-friendly visual design software. Their suite of widely praised tools and templates are engineered to help anyone create sleek, professional, attractive visual content with just a few clicks.
Today, we’re going to be taking a closer look at one of Visme’s products that’s still in the development stage. Visme Forms, soon to be available in beta-versions for select users to test, has been designed to help increase the success rate of pop-up web forms by adding moving, interactive cartoon graphics to their appearance.
Although still in its testing stages, initial reports from Visme show promising signs that this soon-to-be available feature could help businesses boost their mailing list numbers, improve frequency of customer feedback, and generally encourage users to interact via web forms.
We’ll be thinking about who might stand to benefit from this software, where its main advantages lie, and whether there are any drawbacks worth considering.
What is Visme?
Visme is a software developer offering an all-in-one solution for anyone looking to create high quality, eye-catching visual content fast.
Their impressive suite of drag-and-drop tools are designed to be intuitive for first-time users, but flexible enough for experienced designers to be able to customize and craft original work.
Another reason that Visme has received so much positive attention is its huge array of professional looking templates, ready to be applied to various types of visual content.
Whether you’re putting together graphic-led business presentations, trying to jazz up in-house reports to help your colleagues digest important information in a more enjoyable way, or you’re helping to craft a new, eye-catching menu for a restaurant, Visme has the tools and templates you need to make this possible, without you needing to have the expertise of a trained graphic designer.
The software suite has become particularly popular amongst small businesses who don’t necessarily have the budget to hire dedicated graphic design professionals, as well as students, teachers, and anyone else who might want to share information in a visually appealing way.
They even have AI-enabled tools to help you generate and craft brand-consistent material across various mediums, from social media banners to billboard posters.
What is Visme Forms?
Visme Forms is one of the company’s latest areas of development. It’s a feature that seeks to make online pop-up forms more visually appealing and engaging for users.
Static pop-up web forms – the type that may ask you to join a company mailing list, or provide user feedback on a product, or sign a petition – have notoriously low success rates when it comes to getting web users to actually interact with the form productively. Many users see such forms as simply getting in the way of their web browsing and will close them down without giving them a second thought.
Visme Forms attempts to turn that around by providing eye-catching, amusing graphics to accompany the form itself, helping to draw the viewer’s attention and encourage them to fill out the boxes rather than merely clicking the close button.
How does Visme Forms work?
The animations provided by Visme Forms are designed around 3D, human cartoon characters. There are a range of animations available, but they usually revolve around a cartoon character popping up at the side of the screen before ‘dragging’ or ‘pushing’ the web form into a more prominent position in the browser window.
These interactive graphics then ‘gesture’ towards the form itself, encouraging you to fill out the desired information. Once this is done, the 3D figure will then show their gratitude by clapping, giving you a thumbs up, or congratulating you in some other animated manner.
How could Visme Forms help you?
The Visme Forms animation may sound like a bit of a visual gimmick, but the idea is that by providing an identifiably ‘human’ animated figure performing recognisably human actions, the user’s attention is drawn and then held to the web form by the character they see on the screen. Visme’s theory behind the development of this feature is that users are more likely to actually complete the form if they feel they are being encouraged to do so by an anthropomorphic visual assistant, even if they know it’s really just a set of pixels.
So does it work? Well, early testing from Visme themselves shows some very encouraging signs. The company claim they ran split-tests using nearly 700,000 organic visitors to their own website, showing these visitors either traditional pop-up forms or interactive pop-up forms as built by Visme. These pop-up windows were asking people to sign up to the Visme newsletter, with the form area itself being designed identically.
These tests showed markedly increased conversion rates across mobile and web browsers when the interactive Visme Forms were used – between two and three times more compared to the traditional, static web form. Conversions in this case meant people completing the form by submitting their email address.
Visme also recorded between 21% and 47% fewer visitors closing the form when it was the interactive version. This version also made it more likely that users would complete an additional form containing more feedback for the company once they had filled out the initial, interactive pop-up, suggesting that once you have a viewer hooked by the interactive graphic, they’re more likely to continue providing you with information that might be useful for your company.
Overall, this suggests that the cost per acquisition (CPA) when using Visme Forms could be significantly lower than with traditional static web forms. This CPA figure is often used by web marketing professionals to measure how much each ‘sign up’ or piece of feedback received from a web user via pop-up form is likely to cost their company in monetary terms.
What are the disadvantages of Visme Forms?
There is, of course, a limited data set at this time to see just how effective Visme Forms is, and any data that has been collected has been done so by the company who designed them. It remains to be seen whether Visme Forms proves to be a game-changer for small businesses and companies looking to encourage their web users to sign up to services or provide feedback.
It’s also worth remembering that, attractive graphics or not, many web users find pop-up windows and forms a nuisance when they’re browsing, particularly if the form swallows the screen to obscure the entire page. The amusement of an interactive cartoon character ‘pushing’ the form into the middle of the browser window could prove to be short lived, particularly if this sort of animated graphic starts to become commonplace across the web.
That being said, company-led testing does seem to show that Visme Forms could be a simple, cost-effective way of boosting conversion rates and encouraging users to provide information via the public-facing web pages of your business.
How much does Visme Forms cost?
Visme Forms is still in its testing stages. Whilst it’s possible to sign up to test the service, it’s not available as part of Visme’s broader design tool subscription.
If you do wish to take advantage of some of the other visual design tools that Visme have to offer, their subscription packages for individuals stretch from a basic, free option all the way through to their Pro Package, costing $24.75 a month and billed annually.
To gain access for larger teams, contact Visme’s sales department directly to negotiate a suitable subscription.
Overall Thoughts of Visme Forms
I’ve been using Visme Forms to create email signup forms for my clients’ sites for about a month now. I’m a marketer, not a coder. So I was looking for a tool to help me easily create amazing forms that grab visitors attention and convert. And this is exactly what Visme Forms does for me. With Visme’s DIY no-code form builder, you can easily place a premade form template right inside of a presentation, document, infographic or other piece of visual content. Another feature I like is the ability to share online with a Visme-hosted link.
I’m constantly trying new software tools in an effort to minimize my work, simplify my workflow, or market more effectively. Often enough new tools disappoint. They simply overpromise and underdeliver. This is not the case with Visme Forms.