There are a wide variety of ways to generate sales leads for your company. You can do everything from personal networking and gathering leads at trade shows to formulating direct mail and email blast campaigns. But all of these methods require you or your staff to proactively engage in time-consuming activity– without any guarantee that the leads will come to fruition.
Another lead-generating opportunity lies in the contact form listed on your company’s website. If you can customize a contact form that’s effective and specific to your business, you can generate a large number of solid leads that can help grow your business’s bottom line, with just a minimum of effort on your part.
Dial up a sales victory.
What Contact Form Fields Are Important?
One of the first aspects of a successful contact form is the data which it asks people to collect. You want the form to be user-friendly and brief, but collect enough data to determine how much potential the lead has. Research indicates that asking for the person’s name and email address is vital, but phone numbers, lead sources, and additional information aren’t as important. Of course, it’s essential that the form screen out “bots” that can bombard your contact form database; employing tools like Captcha can accomplish this goal.
This means that aside from basic contact information, you have to figure out which fields are necessary and which are superfluous. The answer will largely depend on your company and industry (for example, a marketing firm might ask for a user’s website). Keep in mind that the more fields a contact form as, the greater the chance that a user might feel that filling it out is too much of a burden and navigate away from the page.
Funnel the leads into customers.
Consider a Contact Form Text Box
Another field that you may wish to consider is a simple text box that prompts a unique answer from each user. It can be titled “What is your most pressing issue?” or “What information are you looking for?” in an effort to persuade the user to provide additional information. It may surprise you to learn that, according to research, contact forms with text boxes have comparable conversion rates to those that don’t; plus, the leads that are generated from forms with text boxes were of higher quality.
The Value of “Hidden” Contact Form Information
In addition to the data that is entered into the fields, it’s also crucial to equip your contact form with the capability to transmit additional information. Smartly-designed contact forms can convey the IP address of the user, the source of the lead, and which pages were visited before the contact form was submitted. This “hidden” data can be valuable in determining the quality of the lead as well as the success of marketing initiatives. However, before you incorporate hidden data into your CRM, be sure that so-called “junk” leads are manually filtered out by your sales staff.
Collect, Measure, Improve
Finally, data collection from a contact form is useless if you don’t use it to measure success. Employing analytics methods can help you find trends concerning which leads are strong and which are not. And if you engage in A/B testing of your contact form, you can gradually improve its efficacy in generating quality leads for your company.
The right info can help you seal the deal.
ContactUs.com is a company that can help maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of your contact form. Our approaches and techniques are backed by solid research, and our experts are highly-skilled in optimizing and customizing contact forms for all types of businesses. For more information on how ContactUs.com can bolster your lead generations received through your contact form, visit us today.
Is your site’s contact form helping your business, or just taking up space on the Web?
Chris Martin is a freelance writer about topics ranging from online reputation management to entrepreneurism to business solutions.