Doing business online and moving your sales and marketing to a digital platform means capturing the contact details of your ideal customers the moment they visit your website, page or social media profile in that moment, even when you’re not available to do that task manually. How do you do that? With a lead capture form. We’ll be sharing with you what a lead capture form is, why you need one and the 3 types of lead capture forms to consider. Let’s get started!
What is a lead capture form?
It is a form that specifically collects the data of your leads, usually their First Name and Email Address at an absolute minimum. However, Last Name can be important too as well as Telephone Number if you have a sales team on the phones and calling your leads to move your customers forward in your sales pipeline.
Why do you need a lead capture form?
The purpose of capturing your ideal customers contact details is to get to know them better and build a relationship with them. Continuing to communicate with them well after their initial enquiry or visit to your website or social media page. By using a lead capture form, as well as a free offer in exchange for their contact details, they can be added to your CRM system and sent regular updates from you by email, text or phone.
During their initial visit, your customer may not be quite ready for the sale. This is where the lead capture form is important because it will capture their details and you can stay in touch with them for longer with the intention of building a lasting relationship, offering value upfront and sharing offers for the moment when that they are ready to buy.
This is the first step in Lifecycle Marketing. If you’re unsure what that is then we’ve covered this type of marketing in more detail for you here.
3 types of lead capture forms
Standalone form
Usually used for manual entry by a team member, however it can also be shared with your ideal customers for them to complete too. It is just the form with the details you require before being submitted. There is no other content around it.
Embedded form on a webpage
This is the standalone form, as described above, but the code for it can be copied and pasted into a webpage where content can be placed around it. Giving more of an incentive for your ideal customer to complete the form and increasing the likelihood of that happening. In order to attract visitors to the page, usually a free offer will be promoted in exchange for their contact details. Otherwise called a lead magnet.
Are you a coach looking for ideas to share for your lead magnet? Then look at the list of 85 ideas we’ve shared here.
Landing page
This is the most common way to share a lead capture form. It’s very similar to the webpage with the form embedded into it, however this type of form can be designed in a landing page builder rather than the backend of a website. It’s specifically for lead generation and will connect to your CRM, either directly or via a third party tool, for example Zapier or IFTTT.
If you use Keap as your CRM, Marketing and Sales automation tool then you will have the landing page builder, lead capture form and CRM all in one place. Making your life much easier when it comes to creating and managing your marketing and sales activity.
Get to know how Keap can be used in your business. Book a call with Tania today. Click here to schedule yours.
Next step
Once you have your form in place and you are ready to capture your leads contact details then you’ll want to set-up an automated workflow. Most often, the initial one being an email sequence. This can be something very simple like a email series that welcomes your new contact.
Alternatively, a more complicated workflow could be used, for example a lead scoring system that segments your audience. The higher their score the more likely they are to buy. This is determined by the interaction your contact has with your marketing content. You can then create timely messages that are relevant to their position in the buyers journey.
This is where Solofusion can be of help to your business. If you’re not sure how to map out your customer journey or get stuck knowing where to start with automation then we’d love to have a chat with you. You can book a call at a time that’s convenient for you, click here to check the latest calendar availability.
What are your thoughts on lead capture forms?
Share your feedback and other ideas you might have in the comments below.