Posts Tagged ‘forms’

Should you accept personal email addresses on your sign up forms?

Friday, May 4th, 2012

In a word, yes.

In an on-demand, try before you buy world excluding an email address because it is from Gmail vs. a branded domain is a big mistake.  Why?

  1. People try products with personal email addresses be it for their company use or personal use.  The line between the two worlds continues to blur and excluding someone’s preferred method of managing engagement with you is just not smart.
  2. You can see who visits, the actions they take, and prioritize them appropriately for sales engagement with LoopFuse regardless of the type of email address.
  3. Lots of products have emerged to let you paint a true picture of someone from their email address. NimbleRapportive (now part of LinkedIn), Gist (now part of RIM), and even FullContact can give you a quick, on-demand view of someone’s true social profile.
  4. The barrier to get a branded email address is extremely low via products like GoogleApps so even if you think you are keeping out less than qualified leads, you aren’t.

What do you think?  What do you do at your company?

Since it’s Friday, let’s enjoy the Who summing this up with “Who Are You?”

Less Really Is More – Getting The Right Number of Fields on Your Form

Monday, April 2nd, 2012

Yes, we know it is tempting to continue adding all sorts of fields to the form you are creating because you want lots of information to help segment and prioritize your leads. But is that really the best way to design your landing pages for best click and response rates?  According to the folks over on the Marketing Experiments Blog, it is not.  They ran a series of tests around fields in forms and came up with some interesting data to reinforce that less really is more.  Enjoy!

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4 Landing Page Designs for Better Lead Capture

Monday, September 26th, 2011

Landing pages designed for lead capture can help you determine the level of interest a visitor has as well as gather information about who they are.  Knowing when to ask for the right information makes all the difference in how often people are willing to fill out your forms.

Keep in mind that people are only willing to part with their contact information if you are willing to part with something relevant and valuable to them.  Be careful about when and where you put a form in front of a video, slide deck, or whitepaper.  Increasingly people expect access without giving up information so be confident that your content reinforces your value and give freely but be sure to have the proper balance between open access and form-based distribution.

We categorize landing pages for lead capture in the following four ways and suggest the fields for each one:

1. Minimal – use this format for newsletter signups, coupon promotion, etc. with the goal of capturing basic information from visitors.

  • Email address text field
  • Newsletter subscription check box
  • Choose interest from a drop down menu (could include case studies, best practices, events, etc.)

2. Light – use this format for webinar or content download forms to learn more about the people interested in the products or events you are promoting. Use fields found in the “Minimal” category as well as the following:

  • Text fields for first name/last name
  • A drop down menu to select Country
  • Company text field
  • Usage checkboxes to better understand their need and buying stage (research, evaluation, trial, production, etc.)
  • Company type drop down menu to help you segment the type of opportunity (consultant, end-user, etc.)
  • Contact me checkbox to give you a signal on who to follow up with immediately
  • A drop menu to select Role including both functional (sales, IT, etc.) and authority options (recommend, approve, etc.)

3. Medium – for your premium content you can ask for much more detailed information.  Use this type of landing page format for documentation beyond basic guides, tutorials, etc.  Those who desire this type of content are signaling more specific interest in your product or service. Use fields found in the “Minimal” and “Light” categories as well as some of the following:

  • Title
  • Phone
  • Address
  • City
  • State
  • Postal Code
  • Industry from a drop down menu to help you better categorize the inquiry and align it with internal expertise
  • Company size from a drop down using ranges (i.e., less than 20, 21-50, 51-100, etc.)

4. Heavy – use this form as above but you are adding specific questions related to budget, need, authority, and timing in an attempt to get a better understanding of where the opportunity is in the buying cycle.

  • Approved budget as a checkbox
  • Approved project as a checkbox
  • Timeframe to purchase from a drop down menu (less than 30 days, 60 days, none, etc.

So, there are the four different approaches to building landing pages for lead capture and suggested fields to include. You’ll need to mix and match based on your own goals and company objectives but, at a minimum, think about what type of form needs to be used for what type of content including where not to use them.

We would love you to try out LoopFuse here.

To find out exactly what LoopFuse does, click here.

You can follow LoopFuse on Twitter here or join us on our Facebook fan page here.

The Last Mile : Required Fields for JavaScript Illiterati

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

As marketers we are always building and tweaking lead capture forms. Refining which and how much information to capture based on our percieved value of what we offer in return (whitepapers, free trials, etc.). Building lead capture forms in HTML is not particularly difficult, but unfortunatley HTML provides no standardized way to validate form fields (at least not until everyone is on HTML5 compliant browsers). Therefore, to enforce required fields on forms we must resort to JavaScript. Typically this requires the assistance of a JavaScript developer who must be re-engaged each time the form fields are tweaked. Not anymore.

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