How to generate leads from website visitors using web forms

Lead generation is almost always the first step in the sales process. And the easiest way to generate leads is from your website. The website is your visitor’s first touchpoint where they learn more about your company. So, it’s crucial that you don’t disregard your website visitors, each of whom is a potential customer for your business.

How do you capture virtual visitors? There are many ways to gather website visitor information, but a web form is the best way for you to connect with them.

With a web form on your website, you make it effortless for interested visitors browsing your site to connect with you. Web forms can be strategically placed throughout the website to help visitors get in touch with you, register for a service, access gated information, and more. Visitors can also report issues or share feedback through forms. The benefits of web forms are many, and here’s the first question you need answered—

Does your business need a web form?

The answer will always be yes. If you don’t have a web form on your website, you’re missing out on a goldmine of leads. 74% of companies use web forms for lead generation, with 49.7% stating web forms are their highest converting lead generation tools. It’s the easiest way to capture and convert your website visitors; their willingness to fill out your form indicates an intent to purchase.

Web forms and CRM- the powerful duo to boost your lead generation

Now that you know your business needs a web form, here’s the next question—how do you create one?

Creating a web form can seem like a daunting task. One, not everyone knows how to build a form, and two, where do you even begin? While web forms did involve significant effort in the past, it’s actually a lot simpler today. No coding, no developers.

Using Classic forms in Freshsales, you can create your web form and place it anywhere on your website. It’s actually as easy as it sounds. Give your form a title and description, and add the fields to go in your form. You can customize your form’s colors, fonts, and buttons.

Required fields are a necessity for your web forms. It ensures you have the necessary information you need to reach out to the lead, like their email address. So select the Required checkbox to make a field mandatory for visitors to submit the form. For instance, consider a “Create an account” form on an e-commerce webpage. You can set the “Email” field as required so that the lead enter their email address to proceed to create their account. This also makes it easier for you to collect unique values for every account.

You can also hide specific fields on your web form. These can be values that are auto-populated by the system. For instance, a lead may have clicked on your website link from a paid ad. The campaign field for the lead will be auto-populated by Freshsales as “Paid Ad,” placed as a hidden field on the web form.

Make your web form a smart form

You use a CRM to nurture your leads, so the leads who sign up on your web form must be added to your CRM. But if your web form and CRM are not integrated, you have to add them to the CRM manually. This method is not instant, and it imposes a communication delay between when visitors submit the form and when you reach out to them. The optimal solution is to capture form submissions in the CRM automatically.

You can integrate your existing web form to Freshsales with smart forms to capture website visitors as leads, automatically.

If your website form has custom fields that aren’t in the lead profile, the CRM can still map it to the lead profile. You just have to create the custom field in Freshsales. For instance, your web form has a field titled “Employee ID” for members to log into their account. Create a new field in the lead module to capture this value in the lead profile.

Connect with context to improve your productivity

Once leads are in your CRM, the next step in your sales process is to reach out to them. Leads are 100x more likely to respond if you reach out within 5 minutes of them submitting a web form. However, don’t you need to know a little about your lead’s interests before you start pitching? All you have is their name and information but no context on who they are or what they are looking for.

• Zero in on the lead’s challenge with website tracking

Wouldn’t it be great if you knew what a lead did on your website—pages viewed, links clicked, etc? For instance, if the visitor has clicked on a product category on your website, you know the right list of items that you can pitch. You can then engage with context on the products that caught their eye.

With the Event Tracking feature in Freshsales, you can track and analyze the engagement of the lead with your website and product. You can view this information in their activity timeline.

• Call, email, tweet, or DM—choose your medium

Your next move is to connect with the lead. You can segment leads based on filters and add them to an email campaign by filtering leads based on their source. For example, set the source as “Web” and Freshsales filters the leads who were added through your website.

Another potential channel to connect with your leads is through social media. However, looking up the profiles of leads is a time-consuming task that dampens your productivity. The easier way is to have Freshsales find the profiles for you. Auto-profile enrichment in Freshsales is a quick way to find your leads on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and get more information about them. The moment a lead enters the CRM, their profile is auto-enriched with their social media information, photo, and company details.

Improve sales productivity by automating lead capture

As a salesperson, your day is packed with calls, meetings, and emails. You don’t have the time to spare on manual work that kills your productivity. Lost productivity and poorly managed leads cost companies at least $1 trillion every year. Automate lead capture using web forms in Freshsales, stop worrying about website visitors leaking out of your sales funnel.

Hear the benefit of using smart forms for business from our happy customers.

Read the a&s Adria case study here.

Read the Shortlist case study here.