form-cro

Trigger phrases

Phrases that activate this skill when typed to Claude Code:

• form optimization
• lead form
• demo request form
• form abandonment
• too many fields

What it does

form-cro is a Claude Code skill from Corey Haines’s marketing-skills repo. It turns Claude into a form optimizer whose discipline is asking what you’d cut from the form if you were the visitor staring at it. The skill activates when you mention “form optimization”, “lead form”, “demo request form”, or “form abandonment”, and walks through field-by-field justification, friction reduction, multi-step design, and validation UX.

The output of a session is a form spec: which fields to keep / cut / move to enrichment, single-step vs multi-step decision, label and placeholder guidelines, validation timing, error message rewrites, and the conversion-vs-quality tradeoff for each cut.

When to use it

Reach for it when:

• Your demo-request form has 11 fields and a 4% completion rate
• You’re launching a contact form and don’t know how short is too short
• Sales is complaining about lead quality but won’t say which field actually predicts fit

When not to reach for it:

• It’s a signup/registration form — use signup-flow-cro, different rules
• The form is inside a popup — popup-cro covers the wrapper-specific friction

Install

The skill is distributed via Corey Haines’s marketing-skills repo. Install via the repo’s recommended path — copy the form-cro SKILL.md into your project’s .claude/skills/form-cro/ directory, or use the repo’s plugin install if you’ve set it up.

Once installed, the skill activates on the trigger phrases above. The first time it runs, it will check for .agents/product-marketing-context.md (or .claude/product-marketing-context.md) — populating that file with your product context first dramatically improves output quality across all of Haines’s marketing skills.

What a session looks like

A typical session has three phases:

1. Field justification. Every field has to earn its place: what decision does it inform, who reads it, can it be enriched from email instead? Cuts come from this list.
2. Layout + flow. Single-step vs multi-step (multi-step often wins for high-stakes forms), field order, optional vs required, mobile-first sizing.
3. Validation + errors. Inline validation, error messaging that doesn’t shame, success-state design, post-submit expectations.

The discipline that makes it work: fields are friction. The skill assumes every field reduces conversion until proven otherwise.

Receipts

Honest reporting on what form-cro produces and where it has limits:

Where it works well:

• The “what decision does this field inform” question kills 30–50% of fields on most forms
• Multi-step recommendation for demo requests is counterintuitive but reliable
• Error-message rewrites alone produce visible completion gains

Where it backfires:

• On regulated industries (finance, healthcare) some fields can’t be cut — the skill adapts but the wins shrink
• Trimming too aggressively can flood sales with unqualified demos; tune the cuts to your actual lead-quality data

Pattern that works: ship the cuts in two waves — easy cuts first (fields with no clear job), then re-evaluate after two weeks of data before cutting borderline fields.

Source and attribution

Originally written by Corey Haines. The canonical SKILL.md and any supporting files live in the form-cro folder of his marketing-skills repository.

License: MIT. You can install, adapt, and redistribute the skill, with attribution preserved.

This page documents the skill from a practitioner’s perspective. For the formal spec and any updates, defer to the source repo.