Lead capture forms are essential when we are talking about grabbing the attention of a website visitor and growing your sales funnel.
Of course, website visits and lower bounce rates depend on a wide variety of factors, from SEO to page design, but it can be wasted effort if you can’t increase your lead generation.
Lead capture forms are designed to capture any lead, and, with a bigger goal in mind, convert them into customers.
This form is usually the first way that the lead interacts with the business. When you create a form that gathers prospective clients’ information, it helps you grow your business and can get more people to trust the brand.
One question remains: Why does my business need more leads? Simple because without new leads the business can’t grow. Then pay attention to our tips so you can avoid losing any more leads.
What is a Lead-Capture form?
Let’s begin with the basics.
The first thing any marketer must understand is how to capture leads. And the lead capture form is an essential tool to generate leads and gather important contact information, such as emails or phone numbers, from the website visitors.
Lead capture forms are placed on capture pages, such as landing pages. But they can also belong to other lead generation campaigns. You can have these forms on pop-ups or boxes along with the page content.
The ideal lead capture form gives before it asks. So usually you’ll see forms that offer something of value in exchange for the contact information.
The visitor becomes a lead when they give you that information, like their email and name. You can always ask for more information, depending on the kind of business you are dealing with and the campaign that you are building.
What you want is to gain more people that have an interest in your business. In time, these people can become paid customers. This is your goal when you build a lead generation form.
7 Top Strategies to Create a Lead Capture Form
Compelling content is the first step when you are trying to generate leads to your business. That’s a simple and logical rule. But the golden rule, according to entrepreneur Nicholas Kusmich, is that you must give before you ask. What does that mean? If you want people to fill out your form you must first give something of value to them.
Your free offer can convince people to stay in touch with your business. You can decide according to the type of business what kind of special offer is given in exchange for the lead’s email and information.
There are more ways to build a great lead capture form. Here you have seven tips to accomplish this purpose.
1. Form Placement and Design
The place you insert the form on the landing page makes all the difference when it is to capture more leads.
A form has to be easy to find.
To capture more leads you can’t make them look for the form. The ideal method is to place it in strategic places. Or, following the visitor’s behavior, like showing it when they reach half of the page.
Make sure you have the visitor’s attention. You can do this by placing the form next to other visual components, like next to the offer picture, for example, or on a sidebar. It has to be clear and very visible for the prospect.
You only have a few seconds to grab the visitor’s attention and generate leads. After a certain time, people will move to the next page. So, invest in being seen, without being disruptive.
Of course, you can choose to make the form a landing page all by itself. Since you can customize everything from the URL to page background, forms created with MightyForms can look beautiful and include all the important information and catchy CTA.
Which brings us to the other factor in eye-catching forms. Your form’s look is just as important as where it’s placed. Make sure that the form you build matches your brand. Use the same typography, color scheme, and logo.
2. Use Form Magnets
Form magnets are all the efforts you made to maintain the lead’s attention and convince them to convert into customers, or, at least, give you their email. These are the special offers, the free ebooks, the exclusive webinars, and so on.
The landing page and the form’s content are also important magnets. Concentrate on saying exactly what you are offering. Drive the lead’s attention and keep it using a compelling headline that explains the offer.
But is the free offer that can actually capture and generate leads. It has to be outstanding.
There are several items you can give in order to keep the lead. Such as:
- Ebooks
- Webinars invitation
- Toolkit
- Whitepapers
Use magnets to attract visitors, guaranteeing their engagement with your offer. The visitor is giving something of value – their email. You must give something of equal value back. That way you can accomplish the objective on lead capture.
3. Pay attention to Form length
Lead capture forms can’t be too long, nor too short. If it is long, you can lose most of the leads, but if it is too short you won’t have enough information to filter qualified leads. The main concern must be to find the right length.
With a longer form, you can gather more information and offer a more personalized follow-up, which has a better chance to convert. Not to mention that if a person is willing to fill out a lengthy form, it’s more likely that they make a purchase.
The length of the lead capture form depends on the quality of the data you need for your campaign. Sometimes collecting only the email and name is enough. Other times the campaign needs more information, like the visitor’s business name, industry, and even company size.
4. Make form fields simple
Fields that the form can have are associated with the form length. These fields must be thinking about what information you need. What kind of questions can you ask for?
The best way to find out the questions to ask is to set a goal. That way you can be sure about what you need to know about the lead. What matters is the quality, not quantity, of the information you are receiving with the form.
Questions you are asking on the fields should have a relation to what you are offering for the lead. On the lead generation form, your efforts must delight the lead and convince them to give you information. For this, the offer also has to be very interesting.
Information like name and email is basic, and these fields must be on the form. Try not to ask for too much personal information. Keep the form simple and easy to respond to. You can add questions like:
- Company name
- Company size
- Company main issue
- Job title
- Location
The questions must follow business needs and on the CTA must be what your business can offer as assistance.
One more thing. Remember to set as required all fields that must be filled. That assists the visitor to know ahead what information they must give.
5. Customize the Submit button
The best advice is: avoid using the word “submit” if you can. It is preferable to use other terms that have a correlation to the offer you are making.
You can use “download now”, “get it for free now”, “subscribe”, among others. People don’t want to keep signing up for just the sake of it. Remember the golden rule? Follow it here using a compelling call-to-action.
Nobody wants more emails from companies in their email box. But, with the right message on the button and with interesting content, you can gather and generate quality leads.
That’s why a box saying “get it for free” works better than the “sign here” button.
6. Follow the buyer’s journey
It is crucial to understand on which stage of the buyer’s journey the visitor is so you can have the best chance of lead capturing. There are three main stages that can be improved with a lead-capture form: awareness, consideration, and decision.
Awareness stage
If the visitor is still on the awareness stage, the best strategy is to offer more content that can assist the visitor in their doubt. For such a stage your offer can be an ebook with more information on the subject they are searching for. For this, you can use CTA specific for the page content.
Consideration stage
But if the buyer is still considering their options and looking for something more specific, this can be the chance to convert the visitor into a paid customer. For this reason, focus less on what your product’s features are, but what you can do for them specifically. Make your CTA user-focused and emphasize the solution you offer.
Decision stage
If the lead is on the decision stage, with their wallet in hand and ready for purchase, this is the moment to emphasize your product’s value and create a sense of urgency. So, you can include a one-time discount for the first 500 signups you get with your form.
7. Be transparent in your Privacy Policy
Now that you have built a form that has the proper headline, design, and size. All that is left to do is to create an atmosphere of trust.
For a lead generation form, you need to add information about the privacy of the lead. Leads must know that you can keep their information safe. Also that you are serious about their security.
To guarantee the visitor’s trust you need to be transparent about how you handle their information. The easiest method is to add a privacy policy to the text of the form, or above it. This action promotes the trust needed for the lead to give you their information.
If you need to be GDPR compliant, it’s important to have a separate checkbox that authorizes you to send them emails.
Lead Capture Form Optimization Recap
If you are looking for free form templates pay close attention because MightyForms has several templates you can use. You can choose to personalize any one of them, or you can build a form from scratch.
Before you start building the form let’s review the different types of form and their placements. It helps to keep track of the development and can define the best strategy for the marketing team and lead generation campaign.
- Sidebar: One of the ways you can build and place the lead generation form is as a sidebar. The form can stay right next to the page content, as a complement of it. Add a strong headline, that is also a CTA. Your form can be shown to the visitor during his time on the page.
- Pop-up: You can always set a pop-up to appear after a few seconds the visitors are on the page. That pop-up can contain a compelling CTA, which convinces the lead to leave their email and information. Remember to always make the pop-up content related to the page content.
- Landing page: MightyForms has the option for you to set your form as a landing page, with a personalized URL. Which creates a unique form. Make it with brand color and set the image you wish to represent the business.
- Multi-step form: If your form is too long, you can break it into several steps to collect the information. That can set the appearance of a form that is lighter and easier to fill.
Real-time Data Capture feature
MightyForms offers the feature you need to keep tracking on how your forms are doing. It’s called Real-time Data Capture, and it shows how people are dealing with the forms you have on the business website. You can know even if a person starts but doesn’t finish filling the form. Using this feature, you can see how well the form is performing, decide if it needs adjustment or improvement. You can also check if it is getting to the business quality leads it was aimed for.
Start building forms that capture leads right now.
