How to Best Use a Lead Capture Form

Home | How to Best Use a Lead Capture Form| By Schieler Mew

TLDR: Utilizing short and concise fields and intuitive wording you can both streamline information gathering and propel your marketing efforts using a lead form on your website.

Generating leads for your business is often one of the most important steps to marketing success. As a general rule, you will likely want to use a form on your website, ads, and other lead sources. But creating a solid form that collects information and links properly to your other platforms is key to having success with this particular tool.

What Is A Lead Capture Form?

Simply put, a lead capture form is an area on a site where potential customers will put their name, number, and email address to reach out to you for a service. You can use this to collect client info, build a contact list, and organize lead sources. But perhaps most importantly, it can help you track actual conversions!

How To Make A Lead Form That Gets Conversions

If we look at other examples of lead forms there is a lot of guidance to be had on the subject. If you have ever signed in to Facebook or Instagram, you have filled out a lead form. Think about what the big sites gathering customer data do and emulate it. 

Protip: Make sure to pay attention to the landing page you end up on after submitting forms! This is also an important piece to actually landing the conversion.

Here are a few tips for making a good lead form:

• Use a template – many platforms, like CHIIRP, offer premade templates that cover all the bases and are easy to work off of. Take advantage of the pre-built templates whenever possible!
• Keep the form short – it is easy for people to feel overwhelmed when filling out forms so it is important that you keep things short and sweet. People also tend to not enjoy giving out personal information so focus on the basics: name, email, and phone number. 
• Utilize the right call to action – forms always have a “submit” button on the bottom but this is a perfect chance to include a call to action. 
• Send a follow-up – so someone submits a form and then what? Contact them immediately! Sending a follow-up email in regards to their form submission is an excellent way to make contact and keep the momentum going. 
• Connect all of your platforms – storing and organizing the data you get from your forms is critical! Make sure you have a way to keep all the information organized and in the same place for later marketing efforts. 

With these tips, your form will be sleek, simple, and easily able to bring leads in mass! But what else can you do with lead forms? Well, parsing the sources and building an audience are both great ways to continue your marketing efforts. 

Using Lead Forms To Build An Audience List

Lead forms are obviously great at collecting data, but you can learn much more about your target audience than you might think! If the form includes fields for the zip code or even just a phone number, you already have a vital piece of data: location. Location is one of the best ways to organize demographics and understand a bit more about your customers’ intent. 

Another way you can build an audience list is by adding a field on your form where the person filling it out heard about your service. This gives a concrete idea of which sources are generating the most leads. 

Protip: If you are going to collect data through forms it is important to make sure you are notified when you receive a form submission and that the follow up is quick. CHIIRP offers amazing tools for both follow up and data organization! 

Cover User Security On Your Lead Forms

When you create your lead form you are also taking on the responsibility of protecting the user’s information. Things like a person’s phone number or email address are considered sensitive information and as such you should be clear about the use of that data. Include a statement on your form that informs the person filling it out that:

• Standard messaging rates apply for SMS or email messages.
• By submitting this form the customer is agreeing to be contacted by the business as well as their information is stored.
• They can view your privacy policy on your website. 

If you don’t include this information it could end up being a liability to you if something were to happen, either to the information itself or if someone feels like they did not opt into being contacted. 

If you utilize these tips your lead form can be a powerful tool for acquiring information on your targeted demographic as well as an excellent source of marketing potential.

Key Takeaways

Remember to build your lead form with function in mind, using templates if available and protecting the security of your clients. If you properly source and organize your forms you can build an effective marketing strategy and develop a concrete demographic profile.