Leveraging Website Forms to Generate More Leads

Lead generation sits at the heart of many of our customers’ marketing strategies. The need for leads is what drives their sales and marketing funnel which, ultimately, is the foundation of their business growth.

In this short article I’m going to show you five examples of how you can leverage your website to generate more leads using contact forms.

1) Gated Content Form

The holy grail of B2B lead generation marketing, gated content provides you with an opportunity to learn who prospects are when they view certain content on your site, and is a great way to validate qualified leads.

Gated content can vary from whitepaper downloads to case studies or free resources. We’ve found the most effective offering is a helpful resource – such as a tips document or how-to guide – offered in PDF format. The content is gated behind a contact form and only available to the prospect if and when they provide their details via the content request form.

Content delivery takes place in a number of ways such as via a post-form redirect to the content, or as a unique private link sent by email (which is more effective at ensuring customers complete your form with the correct details).

2) Subscriber Form

This simple email-only form allows prospective customers to subscribe to your blog, news or content feed through a pop-up or one-field form on your site.

Whilst this form isn’t going to win any awards for generating hot-to-trot sales leads, it is definitely a fundamental part of your wider content and lead nurture strategy.

3) Appointment Request Form

A date/time picker can help to generate interest when the offering involves a consultation, appointment or sales meeting. By providing the prospect with the opportunity to pick a date and time slot you are giving them control and specificity during the lead-gen process. This can create a sense of urgency based on that fact that booking slots are scarce. According to psychologists, scarcity is one of the most powerful sources of urgent behaviour.

4) Promotional Offer Form

Whether you are offering a free assessment, discounted consultation hours, or a consumer commodity, promotional forms are a great way to encourage prospective customers to submit information to receive the offer.

Once the lead is in your funnel they can be added to your lead nurturing list where, with a good content strategy to support it, they may eventually become a paying customer.

5) A Marketing Automation Strategy

And here is our promotional plug…!

The most effective way to leverage all the above is to use a system to control prospect management and automate many of the complex tasks involved in collecting and nurturing leads and delivering content. We call this – wait for it… marketing automation.

Marketing automation simplifies the collection, management and tracking of leads. Here’s a snippet of what it can do:

• Automate the sending of content to prospective customers when they request it
• Simplify the collection (and qualification) of website leads by integrating into your CRM or database
• Tracks leads when they come back to your website, notifying sales teams by email on a case-by-case basis
• Keeps prospects warm through automated email delivery (often most effective over a period of weeks or months)

For more information check out our B2B digital transformation services.