Is your website the lead-generation engine it’s supposed to be? Most small business owners would answer “no.” If you’re in that camp, there’s a good chance you’re missing the most important website ingredient: A clear and compelling web form.
Most marketers know what a web form is, but many still don’t implement one on their sites.
A website without a web form is like a store without a sales person. People will visit, but they’ll leave without taking action. It’s a two part equation. Post your Web Form to your homepage, and use something of value to get visitors to enter their information, like a free report, a consultation or free analysis. The more compelling, the more chance you have of not letting website visitors escape without taking action. Tyler Garns, Infusionsoft’s VP of Marketing shared 15 additional ideas for how you attract leads into your business from your website.
A web form and an irresistible offer acts as a bridge between your website and your centralized database. It literally feeds your marketing machine with valuable leads that you can sift, sort and follow up with to generate new business.
Here are Five Tips for Your Web Form Success:
- 1. Give to get. Offer value (a consult, white paper, a free guide, free class, etc.) in exchange for their contact information.
2. Display the form ‘above the fold’ (no scrolling down required).
3. Keep the form short, ideally fewer than five fields.
4. Connect the form to your database (so you aren’t losing leads or manually entering data).
5. Segment the leads in your database and follow up with them automatically.
Successful Infusionsoft users know the power of web forms that when implemented successfully set off a sequence of lead-nurturing events like emails, direct mail, phone calls, text messages and more. It’s the answer to the question, “Once you have your web form on your site and it’s connected to a contact management database where the contacts will live, then what do you do?” The answer: Follow up. Infusionsoft Community Manager, Joe Manna, offers up four useful ways to follow up this time of year.
When you have a centralized database that’s being fed every day by an effective web form, your marketing machine is in motion. You’ll be antsy to drive more and more traffic to your website (and web form) so that you can feed that marketing machine.
That’s the power of good marketing automation that begins with a web form.
Web Forms in Real Life
Most Infusionsoft users know the power of web forms well. Here are three examples:
The first is a case study called Jump Athletic, a youth basketball training academy in Phoenix, Ariz. I know this case well because it’s a local business my husband, @briansacks, launched almost two years ago. I bring it up because it serves as a classic example where once you implement that web form, you experience the magic (and you want to kick yourself for not doing it earlier). It’s pretty simple for us: We live and die by our homepage web form. We get decent traffic to the site, almost 1000 visits a month and the web form is the way we capture that traffic and start the conversation. The contacts go directly into Infusionsoft, and since launch we’ve grown our database to about 3000 names.
It’s interesting what happens once you have your web form up and leads enter your funnel. You end up with a renewed focus on finding ways to push traffic to your site. We generate traffic to our site through a few ways: SEO, participating on forums and other youth sports-related sites, word-of-mouth referrals from customers and keyword-rich PRWeb releases that I issue on a monthly basis.
When we first launched the business, we opened with the ‘first class free’ offer, but we totally missed the boat and didn’t put the form on the homepage. Dumb, dumb move. Studies have shown that a web form performs best when it’s front and center on the site. Previously, it was only accessible from a hyperlink on the homepage that took you to another page where the web form lived. (No bueno.) Ever since we added the ‘first class free’ web form to the homepage we’ve seen a 75% increase in the number of weekly signups. That’s a super meaningful impact to our business.
This offer for a free class works. Once we get parents and their kids to a training academy session, our conversions are about 80% which is an insanely great sales conversion rate. So for us, it’s key to get as many people to a free session as possible. For those who don’t show up to the free night, we have an automated follow-up email campaign reminding them that they can come check us out. Once they do show up, the reminders stop, and the new customer welcome campaign starts (more on that in a future blog post). Or when we have special new-member price, we’ll update them and that usually gets them in to check us out and ultimately become a member. Bottom line: without our web form clearly displayed on the homepage and connecting it to Infusionsoft, Jump Athletic would miss out on new member sales, and we’d end up spending on advertising in other ways to make up for that loss.
The Power of Web Forms: Palangi Kickboxing
Scott Palangi, owner of Palangi Kickboxing is a leading marketing mind in his industry. Sure there are lot of gyms out there, but not many take their marketing as seriously and as creatively as Scott does. Not only does he use a web form on his site that triggers a 10-week automated campaign of fitness tips, he also incorporates text messaging and postcards into the follow-up campaigns. Simply by capturing information upfront in the process and following up with leads, Palangi Kickboxing has increased sales by 100% in less than a year. Scott has a ton to share about his marketing strategy in his customer story with us.
In particular, notice how he has set up his homepage. In order to see the class schedule, you must fill out the web form. Once you do, you can then attend a class for $20 and get his books and some additional freebies. It’s a compelling offer, and one that works for Palangi Kickboxing. He’s tripled his contact database since implementing this offer and web form. And notice how he asks for a mobile number. That isn’t a required a field, but you’d be surprised by how many people fill that out. His Infusionsoft campaigns include text messaging as part of his automated lead-nurturing campaign. He even uses your last name in the message that feels real, “Sacks, I’ve sent you an email with some fitness tips. Go check them out.”
More Web Form Magic: All About Spelling
Here’s another company, All About Spelling, that has seen results by using a web form on their homepage tied to an offer. By capturing their website traffic and driving those captured leads through an automated follow-up campaign, it helped them increase sales by 400% in less than a year. Owners Marie and Greg Rippel go into detail here about how they’ve grown the business just by capturing all their web traffic into a database and then automating their follow-up marketing to shorten the sales cycle and increase sales conversions of their educational products they sell online.
Do you have a web capture form on your website? Do you have a lead-nurturing program behind it that automatically follows up with contacts? If you’re an Infusionsoft user, there’s no excuse. Every day that you don’t implement one, you’re missing out on building your database and increasing customer. We make it easy for you to drop the web form code on your website. If you’re wondering how to set it up, here’s an article on setting up a web form inside Infusionsoft. But make sure you come up with an offer that is compelling to your target audience and motivates them to give you their info. The key is to capture that precious web traffic giving something away of value and turn those contacts into gold.
Have a great example of web form magic at work? Tell us your story. Or tell me on Twitter at @kathysacks.
Posted In: Technology
