The leads you lose before the submit button

There is a group of prospects that shows up in no report: the people who started your form, answered several questions, typed their phone number and closed the tab before pressing the button. They are neither leads nor anonymous visitors, and in most tools they simply do not exist.

How many people actually drop out?

It depends on your industry and your traffic, but the order of magnitude is consistent across published measurements: somewhere between 60 % and 80 % of started forms are never submitted. For a nearby reference point, average e-commerce cart abandonment sits around 70 % according to Baymard Institute — a different context, but it gives you the scale.

The important part is that you cannot copy the percentage from a study. Measure it in your own funnel: if you know how many people start and how many finish, you already have the number that matters.

Which step do they quit on?

• The phone number. It is the most expensive field there is — people associate it with sales calls and hesitate exactly there.
• Forms that ask for contact details before giving anything in return.
• Screens with too many fields at once, especially on a phone.
• Fields with the wrong keyboard: a phone number in a plain text field forces a keyboard switch and multiplies typos.
• Questions that are unclear or feel intrusive, with no explanation of why they are asked.
• A photo or document request with no word on why it is needed or how long it will take.

Why the contact step is the costliest one

Because it is the furthest along. Anyone who gets there has already spent time and answered questions about their property, their timeline and their budget — by a wide margin the most interested person who visited your site that day. Losing them on the last step costs far more than losing someone on the first screen.

How to lose fewer of them

• Ask for contact details last, once the visitor has answered. This is exactly why a quiz converts better than a long form.
• One question per screen plus a progress indicator: knowing that two steps remain changes the decision to continue.
• The right field type for each answer: phone, email, a date picker, a slider for square metres. Less typing, fewer errors, less abandonment.
• Justify every sensitive field in one line: «we call to confirm the address and a time slot».
• Save what the visitor already typed, even if they never submit. That is the difference between a recoverable contact and an anonymous visit.

On length there is a practical ceiling: more questions qualify better, but only up to a point. We cover it in how many questions a quiz should have.

Can you call someone who never finished?

Carefully. Storing what someone typed into your form is data processing, so the question is not technical but one of legal basis: did that person clearly see who you are and what you would use their number for before they typed it? If the privacy notice was visible on the contact screen, you have a reasonable basis for a contact about their own enquiry. If it was not, the prudent move is to use those records as analytics — to learn where people quit — and not as a call list.

The simple way to stay on the right side of it is to put the notice next to the fields, not hidden under the button. What you may ask and how to disclose it is covered in GDPR in quiz forms.

How Quizanta does it

When someone types a name or a phone number and then leaves the quiz, Quizanta stores that contact flagged as «incomplete», together with the answers they had already given. It is not sent to WhatsApp, it does not enter your CRM and it does not count as a conversion — it is an internal safety net, not a lead in disguise. If the same person comes back and finishes, the record becomes a normal lead instead of a duplicate. And because responding fast is still what matters most — see the first five minutes — having the number half an hour earlier is a real advantage.