Online forms have become a mainstay for many businesses, and are put to work in a wide range of areas ranging from marketing to orders and payments. In fact if your business isn’t already taking advantage of online forms, it is safe to say that it is missing out.

The reason why online forms have become so prevalent is because they provide numerous key benefits to businesses:

More cost-effective than other methods of gathering data

Compared to any other method of gathering data, online forms are far more cost-effective. The only costs that you may incur are those associated with building the form and hosting it online, which are minimal.

In contrast to that if you were to use a printed form your costs would encompass the cost of printing the form, distributing it, and processing the data. As you can imagine that would not only cost more in terms of actual resources, but also the time spent on it.

Easier to manage and analyze data

The data that is gathered via online forms is easier to manage and analyze. The fact that it is already digitized let you use any tool that you prefer to analyze it, and it will be segmented based on the fields in your form as well.

Typically the platform that you use to build online forms may provide tools to help manage and analyze the data that is collected. For example in AidaForm you can use the helpful data visualizations in the web interface.

At the same time in some cases it may be preferable to export it as a spreadsheet and analyze it using Excel or Google Sheets.

Access to a wider audience

Conventional forms are limited to the people that you can realistically distribute them to. Needless to say online forms don’t have that same limitation, and anyone with an internet connection can gain access to the form.

The ability to access a wider audience is crucial for most businesses, and any type of form that you create. For example it can help you collect more responses and increase the accuracy of data for surveys, or make it easier and more convenient for customers to place orders for products.

Less time required to gather and process data

Overall the time required to gather and process data is far less with online forms. As soon as a response is submitted via an online form the data will be available to you.

Because the data is already digitized, there will not be any time gap required to input the data either. Effectively responses can be processed and analyzed in real time – or as close to it as required.

All in all it should be easy to see how the benefits described above could have a big impact on your business. More importantly it should provide you with more than enough reasons to start taking advantage of online forms or if you already are – maybe use them more frequently.