Double Your Opt-Ins: The Strategic Marketer’s Guide to Lead Forms
Are you a business owner interested in automating your lead generation practices? Do you find online marketing confusing trying to decipher how to turn readers into subscribers?
If so, then you’re in the right place. We will show you exactly what lead generation is and how to implement it for your business. With optimized lead forms, you will see your sales soar and finally be able to scale your business to the level you’ve always wanted.
What Is Lead Generation?
The act of generating new leads for your business isn’t new. However, with digital marketing, you can now automate your lead generation using your website. Stop going to networking events and carrying your business card around hoping to meet someone who needs your products or services.
Instead, use your website to drive targeted prospects to your sales funnel and watch as new leads come to your website every day. Once you have their information you can send them through a nurture sequence that will move them along the customer journey. Your sales team will see their close rate skyrocket as you continue to feed the qualified leads from your website.
To utilize your website as a lead generation machine you will need to create a free incentive that will entice our potential prospect to give you their contact information. This is the essence of lead generation forms.
What Are Lead Generation Forms?
Lead generation forms are a simple call to action for visitors to your site to give their contact information. This is usually in exchange for a free offer they can’t refuse. It’s your job to do your research and figure out what incentive will entice your readers to give up their carefully guarded information.
There are several different ways to create free offers that your potential clients or customers can’t click away from. Some ideas to help you get started include:
- white papers
- case studies
- checklist
- blueprint
- discount coupon
Once you create the free offer you need a way to offer it to your readers. This is the job of your lead generation form. You determine what type of contact information you want to ask from your reader in exchange for the offer. You can ask for their name and email address only, or you can also ask for their phone number and mailing address if you feel they will give that information.
How to Optimize Lead Forms
You don’t want to lose potential leads that find your business website due to not optimizing your lead forms. This will take time and attention until you get it perfected to turn your website into a lead generating machine.
Below we’ve got some timely tips that you need to keep in mind while you create your lead capture forms:
Have a Strong Call to Action
When it comes to writing your call to action, you can’t be vague or ambiguous. You must be very clear about the action you want your reader to take and how they can do it. People are busy, they don’t want to have to think about their next step so be clear and concise.
Have your subscribe button be a bold color and change the generic “Subscribe Now” call to action to something more compelling. Be sure to give all the best benefits that your reader will get from downloading your free offer. Make it so enticing they can’t help but sign up.
Place Your Form Near the Top of the Page
When you place your lead generation form on your landing page, don’t bury it near the bottom. If your reader has to scroll to get to what they’re looking for, they’re more likely to bounce off without signing up. So, place your form near the top of your landing page.
Have a clear title that persuades your reader to want more information. Then directly below the title and subtitle, you will want to include your lead generation form to collect your readers’ information in exchange for the free offer.
Use a Double Opt-in to Ensure You’re GDPR Compliant
In 2016 the European Union officially adopted the GDPR policy to ensure their citizens have a higher level of protection for their personal information online. In 2018 countries across the world began to implement and enforce this rule. If you want to maintain the strictest of confidentiality for your customers and ensure compliance across the globe, then you too must ensure GDPR compliance with your lead forms.
With multi-step lead form compliance, once your reader enters their information on your lead form, they will receive an email from you asking for confirmation that they do indeed want the offer. Once they click on the confirmation button, the free offer is then delivered to their inbox. This extra step may seem like you will lose some subscribers, but you will only lose those that aren’t interested, and you don’t want them anyway.
Include Testimonials or Reviews From Former Customers or Clients
After your email opt-in form is on your landing page, you can include more information about your free offer to further entice those readers that need more information. In that information, you can also include testimonials from clients about your service or reviews about your products from previous customers.
Ask your previous and current clients for a review and then post these on your landing page. People love to see how your offer has helped others, offer this information to help boost your conversion rates.
Test and Tweak Until You’re Happy With Your Conversion Rates
Just because you hit publish on your landing page with your lead form doesn’t mean you’re done. Now you need to continue to make adjustments and try to improve your conversion rates. And you’ll need to track your metrics regularly to ensure that each change you make will improve your conversion rates.
Across most industries, the average conversion rate for landing pages is between 2-5%. So until you’re near the upper part of that range you need to continue to make tweaks and changes until your lead form conversions improve to at least these averages.
Some best practices with making changes include only making one change at a time so you can be sure which features affect your conversion rates. Also, give each change at least 90 days to see enough data in your conversion rates so you can make the most informed decision about keeping it or making another change.
Nurture Your Audience
Once you get their information, your job isn’t done. As mentioned earlier you need to lead your audience through an automated nurture sequence. This will move each prospect from being a casual browser on your website to an interested buyer.
Don’t let anyone tell you that email marketing is dead. Email marketing ROI remains high amongst other forms of digital marketing. These numbers alone should convince you to spend the time to create an optimized nurture sequence for every new lead who signs up for your opt-in offer.
At the end of your nurture sequence offer a link to your calendar so they can sign up for a free discovery call with one of your salespeople. Your sales team will see their conversions continually improve as they begin to work with warm leads rather than cold prospects.
As you set up your lead generation forms you might find yourself wishing for some expert help. You can find that level of expertise here at EmailOversight. We offer professional support and enterprise-level security for your lead gen forms. We are GDPR compliant and can help you with real-time verification of any email addresses left on your forms.
Don’t spend another minute wondering if your forms are compliant and secure. Instead, work with the experts so you can improve your conversion rates today.
Maximize Your Sign-Ups Today
Optimized lead forms on your website can improve your lead generation and your sales conversions. To scale and grow your business to the next level you need to set up an automated and optimized system for your lead generation. And your website can become the powerful lead generation machine you’ve always wanted it to be.
Quality leads can lead to better sales and higher conversion rates for your sales team. An optimized nurture sequence can guide your quality towards the sale and deliver warm leads to your sales team every day. When you can automate and optimize your sales funnel in this way you will see more scale and faster growth than ever before.
As you grow your business, if you’re ready to benefit from hiring experts to ensure full compliance and security for your forms, then reach out to us today. We help business owners just like you every day to improve their email deliverability and increase their bottom line. So, don’t wait, because we can’t wait to work with you and grow your business today.
