What you’ll find here:
- How to optimize form conversion
- What to do after the form submission
- Best lead capture tools for your use case
How to optimize form conversion
Ask for only what you need
When setting up your form, you'll face a major tradeoff. You want to collect as much information as possible but you don't want to ask for too much and turn people away. Shorter forms perform almost 2x better than longer forms. A simple rule of thumb is to only ask for what you need.
Keep in mind that there's a lot of information you can get about a company from their domain alone. Rather than asking someone about their company size, employee count, and region, get the data from an enrichment provider like Clearbit.
Naturally people are more hesitant to part with some information than others. It would be obvious to most that if you ask for a social security number your conversion rate would plummet. But even asking for a personal cellphone number can cause a 52% dropoff.
When possible, make form fields optional and create clear visual indicators around what's required and what's not.
Make the form prominent
Obviously you'll get more form submissions if more people find it. The jury is still out on whether your webform has to be above the fold so you'll want to test different placements for your usecase.
If you're form is targeted towards enterprise customers, place it on the pricing page. If your form is targeted towards developers, include it in your API docs.
Website visitors are often too lazy to read everything on your website. Use contrasting colors to draw people's attention.
Copy writing
A potential buyer's decision about whether to fill out your form starts long before they start filling it out. If your website conveys a clear and compelling offer, then potential buyer's will feel incentivized to give up their information. Customer testimonials are a powerful tool for improving website conversion. Check out this case study on Ramp to see how they leverage their customer's stories to drive new sales.
Prompt people before they "abandon" the cart
For ecommerce sellers, there's nothing quite as frustrating as abandoned shopping carts. Through a combination of exit intent popups & automated email follow up, ecommerce sellers see a 27% increase in conversion rates. There's no reason we can't apply the same for B2B sales! With this in mind, make sure you ask for the most important information first. If they only fill out one form field, we want to make sure it's their email.
Track & test
What works for others isn't guaranteed to work for your specific use case and target customer. Track every step of the funnel from website visitors -> form starts -> form submissions. Consider all of the tips I shared above to be levers you can pull while you test what works best for you.
As a benchmark, consider that the average form conversion rate is around 21%.
What happens after the form
If you're going to do a lot of work to make more people fill out your form, you better make good use of the submissions you get. In your form submission acknowledgement message, be transparent about what they should expect next.
Speed to lead matters. There's a 100x difference between following up in 5 minutes vs 30 minutes.
If they're looking to talk to your sales team and you've determined they are a qualified lead, give them scheduling options directly (using a tool like Calendly) or let them launch an instant video call with your team (using a tool like Cuda).
If they're expecting an ebook, set up an email automation so they get what they're looking for right away.
The Best Lead Capture Tools
Best for booking sales demos
Calendly is a free appointment scheduling tool that syncs with your calendar and lets prospects grab time that's convenient for them and you. Cuda is an instant video call platform that lets prospects launch a call with you instantly if you're online - and schedule for later when you're not.
Best for Salesforce lead capture
Pardot (aka Marketing Cloud Engagement) became Salesforce's in house marketing automation and lead capture tool when it was acquired in 2013. If you're looking for a third party solution, Marketo (which coincidentally was also part of an acquisition to Adobe in 2018), integrates with Salesforce as well.
Best for Hubspot lead capture
Hubspot has it's own free form product.
Best free lead capture tools
There are a number of free(mium) form products, from Typeform to Jotform to Google Forms.
