Forms are both your best asset for enriching your database and the stage of the customer journey least appreciated by your customers… at least until today. It is a delicate and decisive step, and it is from there that your entire inbound marketing strategy will take shape. The data allows you to segment your database and build specific campaigns. To obtain information in quantity and quality, it is essential to have a thoughtful form. Webmecanik Automation offers several functionalities that will allow you to create a rich and “segmentable” database. I will decipher the different advantages of these features and explain how I set them up!
Progressive profiling
There are different uses of forms, as they are an essential part of your inbound strategy. 74% of marketers use them and nearly 50% consider them their first source of leads!* You want to get as much information about your contacts as possible, but they get discouraged when the form is too long. In fact, the longer the forms are, the lower their conversion rate. The average is 5 fields per form in 2020.* This is why it is essential to consider implementing progressive profiling when you want to optimize your lead generation strategy. The figures prove it: forms with progressive profiling have an 86% higher conversion rate, and yet they are only used by 40% of marketers!
The idea is simple: the form has different fields that will be displayed as your prospects visits and interacts with your website.
Thus, you will first get your name, surname and email address, for example, then during a second visit a few days later, a phone number and a company name (for B2B). This way, each time you submit a form, you make sure that your lead, who is increasingly qualified, only has to fill in a few fields, without having to provide information already acquired in the past.
What are the advantages of progressive profiling?
Enhanced User Experience (UX)
There are several! First of all, the customer experience is nowadays a crucial issue in a visitor’s journey on your website. Actually, 68% of Internet users leave a website because of a bad user experience and 44% share this bad experience with their circle (source youand.eu).
By implementing progressive profiling, you avoid asking a visitor the same thing several times and you reduce the number of fields in your contact and download forms. According to a study by Unbounce, where a registration form with 11 fields was replaced by one with 4 fields, you can increase the completion rate by 160% and the conversion rate by 120% only by reducing the number of fields to be filled from 11 to 4.
Increase your database
Data, as you know, is the main issue of a good marketing segmentation and the quality of your messages towards your customers and prospects. According to Emarketer, 39% of email marketers who segment their contact lists have seen their opening rates increase and 28% have seen improved deliverability and increased revenue generation. Data is therefore the essential for marketers who are attentive to the message they are sending out.
All you have to do is organize your fields by importance and degree of maturity to set up progressive profiling!
Need help setting it up? Our FAQ article is right here!
Conditional fields
Having a lot of information about your leads is good, having accurate and precise information is better!
Always keeping the idea of facilitating the filling of forms, to have a maximum of information in a minimum of fields, you can set up conditional fields.
For example, if you want to know the exact vehicle your prospect is looking for, you can start by asking for the brand, and then propose the different models using a drop-down list.
In addition to the impact on the UX, this ensures that the data is well-informed and can be segmented later on. If we continue the example but without structuring the data, some will write “Clio”, others “CLIO” or “clio 3”. A real mess for the marketer who wants to segment his data! Combining drop-down lists and conditional fields is the assurance of a high-performance segmentation.
Store your first contact source
It is possible to store the title or URL of the form submission source page. This is very useful and important in order to analyze the source of your leads and subsequently calculate the ROI of your SEO, SEA, etc. actions.
At Webmecanik, I put this in place on all the forms. Thus, I record the contact’s URL source which can contain UTMs in order to specify the contact’s origin and to distinguish between my SEO, SEA, social campaigns, etc. in my “Lead Source” contact field.
In order to keep this value intact, while a prospect often has several points of contact with us (webinars, white papers, demo request, etc.), I activate this new feature that allows not to overwrite the value of the field in case a value already exists for this contact.
Thus, my reports on the first source of acquisition of my leads remain precise and efficient!
With these features you have all the keys in hand to create forms that will make your prospects want to give you all the information you need!
*source : https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/state-of-email-lead-capture
