For marketers lead generation is our lifeblood. There's no more crucial point in generating a lead than when a visitor first encounters your form. If your download form is too long it may dissuade the visitor to leave before registering. If your form is too short your sales team may not get all of the information they need for a quality lead.
So how do we ensure our forms are optimized for lead generation without sacrificing quality?
Here are 5 ways you can use HubSpot's Smart Forms to display a the right form and increase lead generation.
1. Display a Shorter Form for Mobile Visitors
According to a report from Akamai and Forrester, 62% of smartphone users expect a mobile-friendly experience. Your mobile experience should go beyond just the content on your landing page and extend to your form as well.
At the Professional and Enterprise levels of HubSpot you can utilize Smart Forms to display a form based on your visitor. In this case, we'll show a shorter-form for mobile visitors with form-fields that are easy for smartphone users to complete.
To start, click the “Mark Smart” button shown below and choose the device type, and then mobile to create a form that will display specifically for mobile visitors.
After creating the mobile version of the registration form, you can see how the form changes for desktop visitors compared to mobile visitors.
In fact, we recently did this across all of our HubSpot marketing and saw a 5x increase in lead generation from mobile visitors over a 2-week time period. Not only can smart forms help you generate more leads, but along with a mobile optimized page you will be able to retain your mobile-traffic since Google's mobile algorithm update.
2. Localize Form Language by Country
If you are running a marketing campaign that applies to multiple countries and spans numerous languages, Smart Forms will enable you to display customized forms based on the location of the visitor.
In this case you could display a form in Spanish to visitors from Spain, and a form in French for visitors from France, and show the form in English for visitors from the United Kingdom and the United States. Customizing your form to a specific language can help the visitor receive a more personal experience that connects with the visitor and makes them more inclined to complete the action.
3. Learn More About Your Leads Through Lifecycle Stages
As a visitor turns into a lead, and a lead turns into a customer we should be learning more about that individual and organization throughout the process. All too often forms are static and request the same information whether we've seen the person before or it's the first-time we've seen them. Instead of doing this, you can use Smart Forms to adapt to your leads through each stage of the funnel.
For example, when a visitor first lands on your page you may want to ask them basic qualifying questions. For a landscaping company these qualifying questions could potentially be, what was your budget for landscaping in 2014?, do you plan on increasing or decreasing your budget in 2015?
As that landscaping lead becomes a marketing qualified lead, instead you can ask more targeted questions such as when are you next looking to have landscaping done?
By doing this you can target your marketing more and have far more relevant conversations with prospects, leads, and customers. To get started, go into any landing page and click Make Smart in the upper right corner of your form. Then on the next screen, choose lifecycle stage and the applicable stages you want to personalize this form for. You can create multiple versions of the form for each lifecycle stage if desired.
4. Tie Your Forms Into Paid Campaigns
If you are using paid search to help promote your content it's also smart to tie your form with the ad the visitor saw. Using Smart Forms you can customize any aspect of the form, but most importantly you should consider customizing the call-to-action and copy within your form for anyone seeing a paid ad.
For the Call-to-Action, consider making it the same (or very similar) to the CTA from the ad itself so the visitor is clear on the next steps. If you have specific language within the ad about what the visitor is receiving, make sure it's clear that by filling this out they will receive the resource promised in the ad.
Beyond just the CTA and the copy within the form, if you have visual cues within the ad or a specific color that stood out you can also use this within the form itself to make it familiar when the visitor lands on your page.
To get started, go into any of your landing pages, and click Make Smart in the upper right corner of the ad. To personalize a form based on paid campaigns use the Referral Source option, and choose a campaign that you want to display this form for.
5. Tie Your Forms Into Events
Whether you are running webinars, tradeshows, or just attending conferences, events can be a powerful way of discovering and generating leads. With Smart Forms you can make it far more likely that anyone you met at an event is more likely to convert on further forms as a result. Let's say you ran a webinar and have a list of everyone that attended.
Based on that list, you can create a contact list of attendees and the next time one of those attendees lands on your follow-up offer page they will see a personalized version of the form you are displaying. How would you personalize the form? There are a number of different ways, but here are just a few:
- Utilize their name within the form title, i.e. "Welcome back, Jeffrey"
- Mention something within the form that was a part of the webinar to tie back to the event
- Offer different questions within the form because you already know some information about the visitor
These ideas are just a few of the ways you can increase conversions by providing a more relevant experience for visitors. We would love to know how you're using Smart Forms, and if any of these ideas have worked for you. Let us know in the comments!
