Now more than ever, marketing and sales teams need to generate high-quality leads. Growth is more challenging under current economic circumstances. Every sale lead counts.

As a marketing professional, you need every channel working as hard as possible. You’ve got targets to hit. In many companies, those targets include generating enough Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) to keep the sales pipeline flowing strong.

Generating enough high-quality leads means ensuring the web forms in the sales funnels convert web visitors effectively. In this article, we look at the most effective ways to use web forms to generate high-quality leads.

7 Ways to Use Web Forms for Lead Generation

1. Keep Them Short and Simple

It’s tempting to try and get as much information from sales leads as possible.

Resist the urge to do that. Shorter forms generate better results. Sales leads are more likely to hand over information if it’s not going to take ages to fill a form in. When web visitors see forms with too many input fields, they click away.

Every bounced visitor is wasted time and investment through earlier stages of the marketing funnel. Especially if advertising money has gone into generating those leads.

Keeping forms short and simple, easy-to-use is crucial for converting web visitors into leads.

2. Focus on End User Experience

Forms can be simple and short. A clear, multi-step experience is what most people expect from forms.

Or they can be simple, short, and interesting.

But what they can’t and shouldn’t be is long, boring, and visually uninspiring. Forms should be engaging, easy-to-use, and only long enough to get the basic data you need. Not so long that web visitors click away from the page they’ve landed on.

Have others, outside your immediate team, try the form out. Make sure it’s tested on a range of devices and browsers. Remember how important the mobile browsing experience is.

Consider your must-have input boxes. How essential are they? Make it clear at a glance why someone needs to give you information, sell them on the benefits in the supporting copy. For example:

“Want to learn to refresh your marketing message during a global pandemic?”

“Download this guide to refresh your tone of voice and marketing messaging.”

3. Place Forms on Every Page

Not everyone is going to do this. It may not look right on every website.

However, given the way web visitors move around websites, it’s worth giving yourself every opportunity to capture leads.

If a lead has come in partially warm, then they are going to want to know as much about your company as possible. So don’t limit forms to lead generation and product/service landing pages. Instead, place them on as many pages as possible. Including About and Case Study pages.

4. Drop Them at the End of Blog Posts

Blog posts are another lead generation tool. Now is a good time to use them even more effectively.

Drop-in a call-to-action and link in the first half of every post. And then at the end, place a web form to collect leads directly. If you are posting content that helps potential customers answer specific questions, then make it easy for them to speak to you directly.

Lead generation forms are designed to start conversations.

Conversations can happen more quickly when forms are on pages, blogs, and anywhere else online where web visitors are wanting more information.

5. Offer Unexpected Lead Generation Incentives

Companies can offer a wide range of B2B lead generation incentives.

eBooks are amongst the most common, especially when it comes to more complicated products or services. eBooks are usually well-produced, visually appealing, 3,000 to 5,000-word guides that answer a series of questions and provide useful information to customers in a particular sector.

But those aren’t the only options. Especially with this global pandemic affecting everyone, your audience might want something either more fun or more quick and actionable. Consider your customers. When they work with you, what do they find useful? Are there ways of packing-up aspects of the knowledge and skills your company offers, into something short, sweet, and downloadable?

Have a look at what you can put together, then either create it in-house or work with an external supplier to create a downloadable that attracts potential customers.

6. Use an Interesting Format

Standing out gets companies noticed. You don’t need to follow the same format as everyone else. Configure forms so they’re more engaging, user-friendly, and still short, of course. Interesting forms will be easier to follow, and more interactive, encouraging higher conversion rates.

7. Use Engaging Content

Plain, boring forms won’t get noticed. Online is colourful and full of distractions. So if you can keep the attention of web visitors, whether with engaging design features or other visuals, then invest a little extra time in making these forms more interesting.

Key Takeaways

Web visitors aren’t going to be converted when you use long, complicated, or boring forms. Equally, they aren’t going to search all over a website to ask for more information, or find an email. You need to make it really easy to encourage web visitors — potential customers — to get in contact.

Short forms, with as few input fields as possible, but just enough to get the information you need, are ideal. Keep them interesting. Place them around the website, on as many pages or blog posts as possible. Keep focused on the user experience.

Once you’ve got forms in-place, and you know traffic is flowing to those pages or blogs, you can tweak them after a few weeks to see what changes will increase conversion rates. Make the most of every click on your website, with forms that convert potential customers quickly and easily.

About the Author

Shahid Shahmiri is a digital marketer by profession. He helps online businesses to grow with smart marketing tactics to achieve better sales and leads. He is passionately focused and driven to grow businesses online and can manage the marketing and lead generation process with proven tactics and experiments. Shahid is accountable for analyzing marketing, SEO, growth and dealing with all promotional and media channels.