Lead generation forms capture the email address of someone on your site, which gives you a direct line to them for marketing and other ways of reaching out. Additional information, like location, can also be captured on a lead generation form, providing you with built-in customer segmentation and cues for more precise marketing.
A good lead generation form will grow your audience and bring new customers, plain and simple. By getting essential information from them in the lead generation form, you will also know what makes them happy and how to keep them coming back.
What Are Lead Generation Forms & Why Do They Matter?
Lead generation forms can have many different faces, but the most common comes in the form of a pop-up that captures the user’s email address (sometimes with other information as well). Pop-ups can take up either a fraction of the page or most of it for the maximum attention grab.
Consider incorporating a VPN like NordVPN or ExpressVPN into your lead generation pop-ups to protect your users’ data and maintain their anonymity. This will protect their sensitive information from potential cyber threats or data breaches.
Lead generation forms can also be embedded on a page, typically either at the very top or bottom. This placement tends to be a good fit for more involved forms or newsletter signups, as perusing your site to get to them indicates potential interest.
When someone engages with a lead generation form, it gives you very important information about who’s interested in your product. This information helps you understand your audience better, leading to more strategic marketing and expansion in directions you may not have expected otherwise. All of this lays the foundation for online sales success.
Lead Generation Form Examples: 5 Ways To Use Lead Generation Forms
There are lots of incentives to utilize lead generation forms, and what you offer will depend highly on your business. Avoid combining too many of these ideas, as they may overwhelm potential customers.
Newsletters
One of the most common lead generation form offers is for a newsletter. Newsletters are a great way to keep your audience informed on new products, events, and other business-related happenings. A good newsletter can keep current customers engaged as well as bring in first-time buyers.
Typically, newsletter signups just capture your customer’s email address. From a lead generation perspective, this is great because it quickly gleans an important piece of information. However, only having an email address means you don’t have any demographic information, making it hard to know who you’re reaching.
Freebies
Freebies appeal to everyone’s sense of instant gratification, so they tend to be a great way to get new people interested in your product. Freebies can be anything from video courses to free samples or trials of your product—it all depends on your business.
Choosing to offer multiple freebies that are sent based on your customer’s demographic information can garner more insight into who’s interested in certain products. You’ll definitely want to do a cost-benefit analysis if you plan on offering multiple freebies, so try to keep offerings small.
Discounts
Discounts are another supremely popular lead generation form incentive that also plays on instant gratification. Popular examples include percentage discounts, buy one get one free, and free shipping. When people know they have a discount for your site, they will be more likely to consider your product when they’re in the market.
Discounts can have a long window for use or expire in a short window to create a sense of urgency in your audience. To maximize the effectiveness of this urgency, consider a higher discount than a typically on-sale price for your business.
Personalized Recommendations
When you ask a question alongside email capture that segments the customer accordingly (i.e., asking if they’re a personal or business account), you’re better equipped to send relevant marketing emails. You’ll also be able to strategize your content plan accordingly for better reach among your customer segments.
Personalized recommendations can appear in a lead generation form in various ways, from QR codes to a more complex registration form. Try to have 3 or 4 different recommendation results at most, as any more can become unwieldy to track.
Referral Program
This example usually combines with a discount, freebie, or another incentive, but what makes it stand out is that you capture two or more leads at once. For best results, ask for minimal information about the person being referred, as this will keep the referrer engaged in your form.
Referral programs work well with products and services that people engage with regularly, like gym memberships or subscription boxes, because you can offer an incentive on their next purchase.
How To Optimize Lead Generation Forms
There are many things to consider when reviewing the nuts and bolts of your lead generation forms. Here are some items to keep in mind when you’re building your forms:
- Limit visual distractions: Making your lead generation form easy to see is important to ensure it gets used, so consider a minimalist landing page. A landing page that isn’t too busy will make your lead generation form stand out. In addition, using color contrast in your favor will highlight your lead generation form, making it impossible to miss.
- SEO: Search engine optimization will always be a key factor when you do almost anything with your site, including striving for lead generation form success. Make sure your general site has taken SEO tips—like adding keywords—into account to maximize your potential audience reach. Also, don’t forget about the form itself regarding SEO best practices—make sure it’s authoritative and not overloaded with keywords and links.
- Remember ease of use: Potential customers want to know that you value their time. Things like breaking up a more involved registration form into smaller parts and ensuring an easy-to-use mobile device layout will boost how successful your lead generation form is. Making your form intuitive and streamlining it as much as possible will keep your audience engaged.
- Add some fun: If potential customers have fun on your site, they’ll likely find it memorable and want to return. If you’re offering discounts or freebies, something like a click- or touch-activated spinning wheel to determine what the lead will get can inject some fun into the form. If your lead generation form is a more simplistic email capture, using puns and other wordplays may earn a smile.
- Have a bold call-to-action button: The call-to-action button is the most important aspect of your lead generation form. If somebody can’t find your call to action button easily, it won’t get clicked, so keep color contrast and size in mind when designing your form. Good call-to-action buttons are easy to see and clearly labeled, leaving no question about what they’re for and what will happen when your potential customer clicks on them.
- Use a suitable lead generation form plugin: Lead generation form plugins will save you time and make managing your forms much easier. These plugins make it easy to tailor a lead generation form to your site’s needs no matter what form you use. Many plugins also offer analytics and the ability to do A/B tests, which can give you real-time information on how successful your lead generation form is.
Lead Generation Strategies: How To Capture A High-Conversion Audience
Now that you’ve secured how to approach your lead generation form, you may be wondering about other ways to capture a high-conversion audience. Here are some strategies:
- Creating quality content: Good content on your site and social media pages will always work in your business’s favor, especially regarding lead generation. Instead of rushing to the nearest drawing board, a good place to start is by optimizing content that you’ve already created, saving you time and energy for other strategies.
- Using customer personas: Creating customer personas is the first key step for impactful audience targeting—it removes abstraction. When you create a customer persona, you can zero in on specific needs and desires that you may lose when looking strictly at the big picture.
- Composing an accessible user experience (UX): Having a website that is easy and intuitive for someone to use is the first step in ensuring that they’ll spend time looking it over. UX is especially important on mobile sites and apps, as many people check their personal email inboxes on their phones. When developing site updates that carry over to mobile formatting, test each page for UX on a few different devices and take care of bugs as soon as you discover them.
- Leveraging interactivity: Interactive content has extremely good results for conversion. When you offer interactive content, you can engage with your audience directly. Interactive content tends to be memorable, as most content is passive. Active content makes the audience feel like they’re part of something. Not only that, but interactive content provides you with valuable information about what potential customers are looking for in a product. Depending on the content, it can also give you demographic information.
- Optimizing email outreach: A good email outreach strategy is essential when you’re in that grey area between capturing a lead’s email address and when they make their first purchase. People check their inboxes multiple times daily, and having your business offer relevance to them will keep your emails from the trash folder. If you superbly craft your emails, audience members may forward them to even more leads.
Conclusion
Regardless of your business, lead generation forms are a useful tool for growing your audience and driving sales on your site. Researching and figuring out which incentives will make your lead generation form the most successful will take you far in getting more customers on your email marketing list.
Leveraging user experience alongside content optimization and a strong email strategy works in tandem with lead generation forms for peak success.
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