19 best practices for SaaS signup forms

Promote the use of social providers like Google, Microsoft or Facebook, to provide your users with an One-click signup form instead of having them fill out fields like name, email or password. Also make sure these social providers are placed above all other options, this will make it easier to find them when scrolling down on mobile devices.

When having to ask multiple questions in a sign-up form, consider splitting the form in multiple steps, with an average of 4-5 fields per step, and grouping them logically (eg. business details, profile details, etc). This will reduce the stress of having to fill out a long form and increase the completion rate by showing a progress bar.

If your main target is B2B, you should use data-enrichment providers like Clearbit, Apollo or ZoomInfo, to enrich your users’ profile, by using their email, with additional information (eg. job title, company size  industry, etc) without prompting the user. This will reduce the friction, while at the same time qualify the users.

Asking many questions in the signup flow can be a conversion killer. A good tactic is keeping the number of required fields to a minimum and prompting the user to provide extra information when they are more engaged with your company: the 2nd time they log in, when performing a specific event, before they go live with your product, etc.

Passwords can imply a big cognitive load when they need to meet specific security rules. Always validate the password as the user types it with friendly messages and showing a progress checklist. This will help the user know when the password meets the requirements.

When asking choice questions, consider transforming them to visual options with a label text. This helps to easily identify preferences and reduces the amount of time answering that question.

Showing progress is a must-have when splitting the form in multiple steps, so the user will know, at any time, how much is left to fill out and will avoid drop offs due to the  feeling of a never-ending form.

Add a skip option when adding steps that are hard to complete or are non-critical to make your app work. You can always ask, for that information, later when the user has explored your app or is more engaged with your product.

If your app can be used by different roles, has different use cases or goals. It’s always a good idea to allow the user to self segment by asking one simple question (eg. role, use case, goal, etc). This will help create actions based on that information to personalize the in-app experience or educate the user with the right email sequences.

Appcues reported that this tactic improved their users' activation by 74%.

Involving your sales team in your onboarding flows (Sales-touch) can increase your conversion rates by 3 or 4 times higher compared to a pure automated onboarding flow (No-touch). Consider inviting the most qualified leads to have an onboarding call embedding the calendar widget in the flow.

You can use free tools like Clearbit logos to fetch the company’s logo using just their domain or company name. This can help to personalize the onboarding experience and create a positive feeling to the user.

When requiring email verification in the signup flow, consider testing different strategies to find out one that better fits your goals:

• Make email verification required: only allow users to access your app if they verified their email address.
• Delay email verification after user interaction: when your users are not very motivated and they need to test your product first, it’s a good idea to delay the email verification before allowing them to access some parts of your app or before they go live with your product.

Set expectations about what happens when clicking a CTA with meaningful texts like “Create your account”, “Verify your email”, “Complete profile”, etc and avoid using generic texts like “Submit”.

There are different methods you can try to avoid spam in your signup flows:

• Google reCAPTCHA: it will use advanced risk analysis to detect bots and only add friction to users with high-risk.
• IP scoring: analyzes the IP address of the user or the domain to detect if it’s banned or has committed fraud. So based on the score, you can create an adaptive behavior to add friction to high-risk users.
• Data verification: you can add OTP verification (eg. email, SMS, WhatsApp, etc) or require credit card details verification. This adds friction but combined with IP scoring, it can help to reduce fraud in an adaptive way.

This is crucial if you want to have visibility of your flows’ performance, if there is an issue with one step or field, or if there is an error in your flow logic.

Add to your signup flows the ability to measure events: when the user continues to the next form step or when they successfully create an account. With tools like Google Analytics, these events will be linked to traffic origin, and you will know which sources are generating the majority of your signups.

Always automatically log in the user once they have successfully created an account. Asking to log in again is very annoying for users and can kill your conversion rates.

There are some security exceptions but as a general rule, avoid asking the user to repeat fields twice (eg. email or password) when creating an account. This increases the amount of time filling out the form and can be very annoying to the user.

Avoid generic or technical error messages like “Missing fields” or “Backend validation failed”.

Be clear and give directions to the user on how to fix it “Your email format is not correct. Please, review it and try it again”.

According to a Security.org study, one every five Americans use password managers.

Make sure that your signup forms have the standard autocomplete HTML attributes to allow password managers to suggest a new password when it’s a signup, or suggest an existing one when it’s a login.